The road leading to the Night Temple was dark and steep enough to catch your breath. But a few days before Christmas, a quartet dragged its instruments down the steep stone driveway and into a Franklin Hills living room for a monthly house show series. Inside the house, which sits atop a hill overlooking Los Feliz, it looked sinister bohemian, as black-clad guests milled around a keg of bitter tea or ate homemade pasta next to the grotto’s outdoor altar.
In the living room, a string quartet was tuned and brought to life as hosts Carissa Bianca Mellado and Andrew Dalzell set tonight’s program: four Los Angeles film composers conducting new combinations of piano and string pieces. As the 30 or so guests got into the action — haunting choral performances, simple chamber suites and sacred music melodies — you could hear the resolve and intimacy of the players as they discovered their scores right in front of you.
“One of the amazing things is how brilliant film composers, who have music for big movies and big shows, say there’s something really vulnerable about writing for this,” Dalziel said. “There’s a little danger to him. Maybe we’ll get a few minutes to practice. You could write something hard, and it’d be great if they nailed it, but what if, you know?”
Cellist Andrew Dalziel performs as a quartet in Night Temple.
(Carlene Steele/For The Times)
This small-scale, high-wire performance has become especially meaningful to Los Angeles’ close-knit and evolving community of film composers. As fine arts funding declines across sectors and Hollywood budgets shrink while studios pull back on local productions, workers are still recovering from long strikes and the emerging threat from artificial intelligence. Night Temple is a small answer to all that, as local artists are no longer waiting desperately for the tides to turn.
“We’ve been so beaten down by this industry, we can feel kind of hopeless,” Mellado said. “We just want to perform. It is our greatest passion. We need each other, we need to feel connected, and the meaning of success is to share it.
Melado, a singer, and Dazile, a cellist, are both Australian expats who work in a charming gothic apartment in Los Feliz. They have a Darkwave band, Night Tongue, on the side but make their living primarily in film scoring, sync licensing and string arranging – a “part of everything” approach that many musicians have discovered as recording and touring become less sustainable.
They were both growing increasingly frustrated with how digitally isolated their work has become post-pandemic, and how rare it is to perform live in the studio or on stage. “I think there is a social shock because of the pandemic, so the reason for doing it at home is to go clubbing these days, which is a bit stressful,” Dalziel said.
“The audience is used to seeing the strings from a very far away, like in opera,” Mellado said. “It’s a nice experience, but there’s never an intimacy with them.”
Kaitlyn Wolfberg, left, Eric Clark, Heather Luckey, and Andrew Dalziel, perform at Night Temple.
(Carlene Steele/For The Times)
In the summer of 2024, they invited some friends—violinists Kaitlin Wolfberg and Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark and violinist Heather Luckey—to read new works to their friends at their apartment in Los Feliz. They packed about a dozen people into their living room, and while it was clearly a setup in progress, they were impressed by the response.
By the end of the year, the free series with RSVP resonated through the Los Angeles film music and classical music world – sometimes attracting over a hundred guests once they moved to a larger venue in Franklin Hills and secured funding from APRA AMCOS (Australia’s major performing rights organisation).
“You hear that some people feel weary and bitter about the isolation, the constant rejection that is part of the party but can be demoralizing to your relationship with music. How do you continue to find joy, community, and fulfillment? “I’m sorry,” said Katherine Joy, a composer who performed at a recent event at the Temple. The night.
Joy’s company, Joy Music House, has produced scores for popular shows like Apple TV+’s “Presumed Innocent” and the horror film “Speak No Evil,” but she relished the opportunity to try out some new ideas in a friendly room.
“Sitting on the floor or on the couch puts you back in touch with a really important aspect of what our relationship with music should be,” Joy said. “When you see the instruments up close, you hear the bow on the string, you hear the sound of the gravel. I’ve worked with filmmakers who are surprised to hear what real live music sounds like, because a lot of people have never had that experience. It’s a big part of preserving real music.” Lively.
Sandro Morales Santoro, the composer and Night Temple performer who worked on Netflix’s hit “Outer Banks” and Hulu’s “Good Trouble,” acknowledged how difficult it has been for many Los Angeles film composers who have been caught in the grip of multiple crises. Continuous industry.
“A lot of composers are still recovering from everything, financially and emotionally,” he said. “It’s hard work. It’s beautiful, but you’re an artist in the service of another form, waiting for someone else to hear you and say it’s good or bad. To be able to share this work with friends and the community, it’s a dream come true to see the faces and how it affects them. It’s a comeback.” To the origins of music, performing it in front of your community and finding value and beauty in it.
Carissa Bianca Mellado sings in Night Temple.
(Carlene Steele/For The Times)
Night Temple isn’t the first Los Angeles music community to turn to house shows for sustenance right now. The well-funded Candlelight Concert Series, which presents dimly lit classical performances in intimate settings, has spread across the country. But it’s an idea that resonates as musicians stuck between Los Angeles’ music, film and arts industries scramble to make a living, sustain community and reinvent models of self-sufficiency.
“The idea of communal music is thousands of years old. The salons of European nobility would invite composers into their homes to write and perform music. But in Right now, house shows are very important, especially in L.A. because we work together but not as often physically anymore.” Music is by young and underrepresented composers.
Levy delivers his own series of home performances, Audio Convention, without amplification. Cultivating a local scene for new, experimental and intimate acts is crucial to keeping Los Angeles at the forefront of the globalized music and film industry, he said.
“We need an identity here to market the L.A. music scene in the world of film and television,” Levy said. “Right now is a very difficult time, and I worry that it will never be the same as it was before the pandemic. Many productions move to London, Vienna or Budapest, and young players and composers here may never get that experience. We have to convince composers and studios that we Not only are we open for business, we are the best in the world.”
Whatever industry shocks are still to come for the Los Angeles film and music scene, the experience of being around like minds in a comfortable home to play with each other is a lifeline. Mellado and Dalziel said studio executives and producers have already hired acts based on chance encounters at the Night Temple, and they hope to present awards season performances to local composers for awards. On January 18, they had a benefit for local fire relief efforts (a notable thing, given that the Palisades Fire claimed two lives). Huge archive of work From the famous composer Arnold Schoenberg.)
But more importantly, in a brutal cultural economy that lives behind screens, it’s an opportunity to be in the room together as the work comes to life.
“We just want everyone to succeed. We want people to have jobs and feel safe and feel cared for,” Mellado said. “There are a lot of people doing really meaningful work who I think deserve a loving space for that work.”
“Music is not supposed to be efficient and cheap,” Dalzell said. “If everything is falling apart from top to bottom, let’s build new things.”
