You may have seen her at our season opener this past weekend, the newest addition to the LACO team, production intern Christina Wu. Please join us in welcoming her to the family!

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever I travel to foreign countries, I prefer to do so without a map of the local region. I have a propensity to drift and experience foreign surroundings on my own, slowly adjusting to unfamiliar customs and language barriers. It was last summer, at the Fontainebleau Music Festival, that I found myself crossing the border and immersing myself into a different country of the art world: architecture. At this festival, musicians, composers and architects from all around the world come together to work, study and collaborate on their creative visions. At first, the idea was as exotic as consuming ikizukuri (sashimi “prepared alive”). Sure, architects and musicians might converse in the same artistic language, but we don’t share the same dialect, right? I quickly realized that was not at all the case. I discovered that architecture is the music of space and music is the architect of sound. They both are grounded in similar concepts – design, rhythm, tonality, harmony, dimension and innovation. Both art forms speak the same dialect, perhaps just with varying accents.

For me, LACO’s concerts offer an experience commensurate to the one I had abroad. The Orchestra not only explores the different realms of the musical world, but also venture into various dimensions of the artistic universe. It is with great excitement that I start my internship at LACO, knowing that, through this, I will begin to discover a more synergistic approach to music, pushing myself to break out of the classical tradition and explore unfamiliar territories. Perhaps, I’ll even go as far as finally sating my morbid fascination with ikizukuri and trying it – just once.