DISNEY’S $50-MILLION GIFT: TWO VIEWS : Hard Realities--and Challenges--of a Music Center Expansion

The announced gift to the Music Center of $50 million from Mrs. Lillian Disney, Walt’s widow, is munificent by any standards.

On the face of it, the windfall grant makes possible (and forces an early resolution to the nature of) an expansion of the Music Center complex that has always been part of the hopes for the center, and some specifics of which were first proposed more than half a dozen years ago.

But, as Dan Sullivan points out in the adjoining article, the gift precipitates some sharp specific questions and at least one mournful overall observation.

The general observation is that it has always been easier for public institutions to attract big money for buildings than for day-to-day and year-to-year operations. There is and always has been what is fancifully called the Edifice Complex, the erection of what could also be called occupied monuments--formidable assertions of public and private pride.

The United States does not have a monopoly on the building of more stately mansions in celebration of art and culture, as anyone knows who has wandered Europe, guidebook in hand. I recently chaired a panel on funding the arts, and the representatives of philanthropic foundations were quick to agree with the complaints of arts organizations that grants for operating expenses don’t make sexy reading. Specific projects get quicker approval.

Philanthropists do not invariably insist on leaving their names on the marble temples, but it has clearly been pleasing to them down the centuries to think that they have created what Andre Malraux once rather sourly called “a scar on the earth” and have not simply paid some rent and salaries for an indeterminate period of time.

Endowments are far harder to build than structures that can be seen and, possibly, named (although an earlier Disney munificence, CalArts, does not carry the family name). As a series of articles in Calendar May 10 made clear, the Music Center is at the moment struggling mightily with the endowments and the operating budgets of all its resident companies, including the semi-resident Joffrey Ballet.

While the new concert hall contemplated by the Music Center and the Disney gift does not involve new operating entities, it will surely require operating monies and possibly even supplementary capital funds that do not presently exist.

It is tantalizing to think of the $50 million being used to enable the present ongoing operations at the Music Center to breathe easier or, as Sullivan also does, to imagine it as a one-shot endowment for a permanent repertory theater company. Tantalizing but almost certainly unrealistic.

It is central to the spirit of philanthropy to make possible something that would otherwise not have been possible, but that is, so to speak, waiting in the wings and ready to be made possible, as the expansion has been.

Not least among the realities of the situation is that there may well be a now-or-never aspect to an ideal expansion of the Music Center complex. The pressures toward commercial development of the Bunker Hill parcels are great and will continue to grow. The Disney gift appears to assure that the Music Center can make what its leaders believe is the optimum choice of site and building structure.

It is true that two of the existing stages at the Music Center, the Pavilion and the Ahmanson, will be dark for several days this summer. The inevitable question, raised by Sullivan, is whether the need for a new performance space really exists.

Yet part of the problem has been the competition for playing time in the two houses. A little time has not been enough and has forced alternate arrangements. The Civic Light Opera is leaving the complex in part because it could not book long-enough runs to amortize the costs of production.

If, as contemplated, the new building becomes the permanent home for the Philharmonic, the Music Center Opera and the Joffrey will presumably have and be able to use expanded schedules in the Pavilion.

But whether Southern California is overbuilt, culturally speaking, as Sullivan worries, is far from proved. Much the same worry was expressed when the Music Center itself opened for business. Yet the expanding numbers of music, stage and dance events over the 20-plus years of the Music Center’s life would indicate that it has enhanced rather than depleted the rest of the arts scene. The present dark nights appear to be temporary conditions rather than grave symptoms.

The irony of Mrs. Disney’s offering is that it really is a challenge. It is a blessing, but it carries undisguised worries and philosophical questions along with its promise for the cultural life of Southern California.