Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles manufactures the world's dreams, and a surprising share of its serious music. The film industry that settled in Hollywood after 1910 built the largest entertainment complex on earth — and its studios' need for scores, together with California sunshine, drew a genius refugee generation: Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived and taught here for decades, Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills, and Heifetz, Rubinstein and Klemperer made the city a wartime capital of European music. Their inheritance thrives: the Los Angeles Philharmonic, playing in Frank Gehry's steel-sailed Walt Disney Concert Hall since 2003 and at the Hollywood Bowl each summer, became under Gustavo Dudamel perhaps the most influential orchestra in America, while Central Avenue's jazz age, the Laurel Canyon songwriters and the studios of every genre since keep the city the largest music workplace anywhere.

The archive's documented addresses are more intimate: the Music Hall on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles — the eastside university whose halls serve their own dense city of audiences — and the Festival Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble listed in the source records as a venue (a note for the registry). From Griffith Observatory the whole improbable basin spreads to the Pacific: pueblo, boomtown, dream factory and, quietly, one of the great musical cities of the world.