BANGING THE DRUM

Monday Evening Concerts has celebrated new music for eight decades.

- BY ALEX ROSS

Chaya Czernowin's pieces conjure the beauty and terror of natural processes.

The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on Micheltorena Street, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The hosts were Peter Yates, a functionary at the California Department of Employment, and his wife, the pianist Frances Mullen. The couple had commissioned the modernist architect R. M. Schindler to build an enclosed, cantilevered performance space atop their bungalow home. Nineteen people showed up for the first concert, at which Mullen played works by Béla Bartók.

Two months later, Evenings on the Roof, as the series was initially called, presented a tribute to Charles Ives. Word had spread sufficiently that the mighty émigré conductor Otto Klemperer turned up, raving about Ives’s originality. Soon, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, modernist giants in exile, were attending programs of their own music. The teen-age Susan Sontag, avid for novelty, became a regular. The series eventually moved to larger venues and changed its name to Monday Evening Concerts. Hundreds of scores were featured—most very new, some very old. On one occasion, Aldous Huxley lectured on the lurid life of the Renaissance visionary Carlo Gesualdo. The history of M.E.C. is rich enough that it inspired a book, Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s “Evenings On and Off the Roof,” published in 1995.