Business
A treasure house of composer Arnold Schoenberg's music destroyed in Palisades fire
On the morning of Jan. 7, Larry Schoenberg was about to prepare the tax filings for Belmont Music Publishers, the august house dedicated to preserving and promoting the works of his late father, Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, when his daughter Camille called and told him to look outside.
“Oh my God,” he said. Thick plumes of smoke were whipping up all around his Pacific Palisades home. Without thinking he jumped into his car, his wife in the other, and they drove to their daughter’s house elsewhere in the Palisades.
The plan was to wait it out. However, before the day was over, Schoenberg’s house was gone. Eventually, the flames reached his daughter’s house, and they fled to Venice to stay with another daughter.
The inferno also blasted to ash Belmont Music Publishers, which was housed in a building behind his home on Bienveneda Avenue. For 60 years, Belmont served as a bridge between Schoenberg — often referred to as the man who invented “modern music” — and performers and scholars, providing access to his music.
The wildfires destroyed Larry Schoenberg’s Pacific Palisades house and Belmont Music Publishers, which stood in a building behind it.
(E. Randol Schoenberg)
While the majority of the composer’s original works remain housed at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, Belmont’s entire physical inventory, upwards of 100,000 items including manuscripts and original scores, along with correspondence, books, photographs and artworks, had all perished.
For Larry Schoenberg, it wasn’t merely the physical loss, but “a profound cultural blow” — yet another example of how the wildfires have destroyed a trove of L.A.’s cultural heritage.
Schoenberg revolutionized Western compositional techniques and helped shape modern music worldwide, but he also had a profound and still-present influence on the cultural life of Los Angeles.
“The scale of this fire makes it hard to handle how big the losses are,” said Joy H. Calico, chair of the Department of Musicology at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. “It’s not as if his entire legacy was lost but certainly in terms of the practical reality of performing his music, this is a serious blow.”
***
Schoenberg’s wife, Gertrud, a librettist, and son Larry established Belmont Music Publishers in 1965. Belmont was a play on the family’s surname — “beautiful mountain” — in German.
Following the composer’s death in 1951, numerous people wrote to Gertrud requesting his music. There was so much back-and-forthing with the publisher in Germany that his heirs decided to create Belmont, as Gertrud owned the rights to her husband’s catalog. They initially set up the business in a converted garage behind their Brentwood home, selling and renting curated editions of Schoenberg’s sheet music for performances.
“We’re not very business savvy people,” Larry Schoenberg recalled. “We were spending more than we were collecting.”
They also had to overcome the negative connotation business had in their home. “We grew up where business was kind of a dirty word,” he said. His father used the derisive German term “der Gauner,” which means crook or swindler.
But Belmont, which later moved to the building behind Larry Schoenberg’s Pacific Palisades house, became a business successful in preserving Schoenberg’s legacy, making his works accessible to the world.
Last September marked the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth. A flurry of performances took place in Europe and the United States, including by the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Many of these performances got their scores from Belmont.
A copy of one of Arnold Schoenberg’s musical scores published by Belmont, still in his grandson E. Randol Schoenberg’s possession.
(Stacy Perman / Los Angeles Times)
At 83, Larry Schoenberg, a former math teacher at Palisades High School, has been Belmont’s steadfast guardian.
He maintained a whiteboard with all of the upcoming performances of his father’s music and what needed to be shipped. Everything was well labeled and organized, but nothing was digitized.
“This is just my stupidity,” he said. “Everything was backed up, except it was backed up locally. I had hard drives and thumb drives. I didn’t use the cloud, I was a little bit worried about using the cloud. Well, of course, now I wish I had everything in the cloud. What that means is essentially we have nothing.”
The fire claimed the full range of Schoenberg’s groundbreaking compositions held there, from early Romantic pieces to his revolutionary 12-tone works and transformative masterpieces like “Pierrot Lunaire.” Also lost were performance posters, a bust of Schoenberg and ephemera such as the fanciful playing card sets the composer designed.
Also gone was the irreplaceable library filled with 50 years worth of manuscripts and correspondence from conductors, such as Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado, who performed Schoenberg.
“When the conductors return the scores, they put a lot of information in there. That’s really crucial for performances,” said Larry Schoenberg. “And that’s all gone. The correspondence goes back to the ’70s. In fact, every once in a while I look at some of this correspondence.”
Last December, Larry shipped a box of 16 books to his nephew E. Randol Schoenberg. They are all that remains from Belmont’s library.
Reflecting on all that was lost, he said, “The memories are still there. I didn’t lose those yet.”
Larry Schoenberg sent his nephew a set of 16 books from Belmont in December. Now they are all that remains from its library.
(Stacy Perman / Los Angeles Times)
***
Arnold Schoenberg was already a towering intellectual and cultural figure when he landed in Los Angeles in 1934.
Born in Vienna in 1874, the composer also was a writer, teacher, inventor and painter.
Uncompromising and innovative, he devised the 12-tone method, a musical structure that broke with the traditional rules of tonality and composition. Although it prompted (and still does) enormous debate, it was also considered by many the future of music. The Nazis, however, labeled his music “degenerate.”
Arnold Schoenberg designed a set of whimsical playing cards.
(Stacy Perman / Los Angeles Times)
In 1933, after receiving a telegram from his brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, saying “a change of air is recommended,” the composer, then 60, and his family fled Berlin on the midnight train to Paris, leaving everything behind, according to his grandson E. Randol Schoenberg, known as Randy.
Schoenberg spent a brief time in Boston and New York, before fleeing the harsh East Coast winters for Los Angeles. “It is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna Woods, the desert, Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy — everything in one place. And along with that scarcely a day, apparently even in winter, without sun,” he wrote Anton Webern, the Austrian composer and conductor.
His arrival was part of the exodus of German-speaking Jews who emigrated from Nazi-occupied Europe that helped usher in a golden age of classical music in Los Angeles, with many writing film scores.
Arnold Schoenberg’s Brentwood house was a hub for European exiles in Los Angeles.
(Belmont Music Publishers)
In 1936 Schoenberg bought a Spanish Colonial in Brentwood, and the house became a center of cultural life for European exiles, entertaining the likes of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel.
There, Schoenberg befriended Hollywood luminaries. Shirley Temple was a neighbor, and Harpo Marx was a friend, as was George Gershwin, who was also his tennis partner. According to Randy, his grandfather was playing a match with Gershwin when his wife gave birth to Randy’s father, Ronald, in 1937.
Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA, had a reputation as a gifted teacher whose tutelage held cachet. When the German conductor Otto Klemperer came to the city to perform at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he studied with Schoenberg.
With finances tight, he took on private students, a great deal of them composers who had come to California to work for the movie studios. “They wanted to learn what sort of tricks and techniques, you know, how do I make my music sound like this?” Randy said. “They would come for a couple lessons and then put it on their resume, ‘studies with Arnold Schoenberg,’ and never come back.
“He got wise to this and decided to charge a lot for the initial lessons. And if the person turned into a real student, he would reduce the rates.”
The Los Angeles Philharmonic performs Arnold Schoenberg’s gargantuan “Gurrelieder” at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Dec. 13.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Several of Schoenberg’s “real” students, such as John Cage, Alfred Newman and David Raksin, became hugely successful, and their relationships helped to perpetuate the composer’s lasting influence in Hollywood and beyond.
Posthumously, Schoenberg’s impact is undeniable.
Film composers have long used his pioneering 12-tone technique to produce dissonance and unpredictable melodies, such as Jerry Goldsmith, in his benchmark score in the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes.”
While Schoenberg’s music continues to be played all over the world, his notes are all over Los Angeles.
The music building and main concert venue at UCLA are named after Schoenberg. In May the opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood” will be performed at UCLA. It presents three imagined vignettes from the composer’s life.
His heirs who have diligently tended his legacy have also been important civic and cultural figures in the life of this city. In addition to his son Larry, Ronald is a retired judge. He lives with his wife, Barbara, the daughter of the composer Eric Zeisl, in Schoenberg’s original Brentwood home. Their son Randy, a lawyer, won a significant case before the Supreme Court in 2004, leading to the government of Austria returning five Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis to the family of Maria Altman.
The Schoenberg family, four members of which have lost homes in the fires, say they hope to create digitized scores from the manuscripts kept in Vienna as well to recreate other documents and correspondence that exists in the hands of others around the world. Larry Schoenberg said they’ve received a wellspring of support and encouragement from all over the world.
“It’s astounding to think about how that legacy was moved out of central Europe because of the peril there — only to find it facing a different crisis here,” Calico said.
The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it has awarded satellite contracts with a combined value of about $1.6 billion to Rocket Lab in Long Beach and to the Redondo Beach Space Park campus of Northrop Grumman.
The contracts by the Space Development Agency will fund the construction by each company of 18 satellites for a network in development that will provide warning of advanced threats such as hypersonic missiles.
Northrop Grumman has been awarded contracts for prior phases of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a planned network of missile defense and communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
The contract announced Friday is valued at $764 million, and the company is now set to deliver a total of 150 satellites for the network.
The $805-million contract awarded to Rocket Lab is its largest to date. It had previously been awarded a $515 million contract to deliver 18 communications satellites for the network.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers with its Electron rocket. It moved to Long Beach in 2020 from Huntington Beach and is developing a larger rocket.
“This is more than just a contract. It’s a resounding affirmation of our evolution from simply a trusted launch provider to a leading vertically integrated space prime contractor,” said Rocket Labs founder and chief executive Peter Beck in online remarks.
The company said it could eventually earn up to $1 billion due to the contract by supplying components to other builders of the satellite network.
Also awarded contracts announced Friday were a Lockheed Martin group in Sunnyvalle, Calif., and L3Harris Technologies of Fort Wayne, Ind. Those contracts for 36 satellites were valued at nearly $2 billion.
Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency, said the contracts awarded “will achieve near-continuous global coverage for missile warning and tracking” in addition to other capabilities.
Northrop Grumman said the missiles are being built to respond to the rise of hypersonic missiles, which maneuver in flight and require infrared tracking and speedy data transmission to protect U.S. troops.
Beck said that the contracts reflects Rocket Labs growth into an “industry disruptor” and growing space prime contractor.
Business
California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’
A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”
The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.
None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.
Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.
“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”
The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.
The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:
- Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
- Ventura Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
- Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.
Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.
Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”
The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.
“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.
The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.
It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.
In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.
Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.
“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”
To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.
Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.
Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.
Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”
After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.
Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.
“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”
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