A soundtrack with (virtually) no narration: L.A. gathers to remember Frank Gehry

Appearing in this dispatch: Thom Mayne, Blythe Alison-Mayne, Herbie Hancock, Michael Maltzan, Alan Cumming, Cecily Brown, Cathleen McGuigan, Deborah Borda, Alex Ross, Dana Cuff, Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin, Peter Sellars, Yuval Sharon, Joseph Giovannini

I sometimes use Frank Gehry in my courses on architecture and writing as a sort of reverse example: He was the architect who didn’t write. In fact there was more (which is to say less) to it than that. Gehry made a career-long point of refusing to lean on theory to justify his more outré adventures in form-making or material experiment, concentrating instead on letting his buildings speak, or argue, for themselves. (“He distrusts words,” as Herbert Muschamp wrote.) To a certain extent this was an act, at least the self-deprecating part of it, the who-me, aw-shucks disavowal of strategic intent. Gehry was the canniest architect I’ve ever met by a wide margin, and probably the most astute packager of his own legend. But he was also not a great talker, at least in public settings, and his lectures could be downright terrible.

And so it made a poetic kind of sense that “Music for Frank,” a moving sonic memorial that Gehry’s office and the Los Angeles Philharmonic organized Tuesday evening at Walt Disney Concert Hall, was for nearly all of its two-hour running time a soundtrack without narration. The conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel offered quick remembrances of their friendships with Gehry between musical selections—with Dudamel using his pet name for the architect, “Pancho,” the Spanish nickname for Francisco—as did Herbie Hancock. But this invitation-only affair, which nearly filled Disney Hall’s 2,265 seats, contained no formal speeches, and almost no mention of the architecture profession or Gehry’s place in it.