On November 16, 2024, the LA Phil presents Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings, a 12-hour festival of new music featuring live performances and art installations activating every corner of the Walt Disney Concert Hall campus. This edition of the LA Phil’s beloved new-music marathon explores the intersections of art, technology, and nature through the theme of field recordings. Curated by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid, Noon to Midnight features the work of visionary composers performed by a host of Los Angeles-based ensembles and solo artists. The festival showcases how recordings and reflections of natural and built environments are being utilized in composed music for healing and meditative purposes, as a tool to resist climate change, as political statements, and for pure listening pleasure.

Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings is an invitation to experience how sound changes us by participating in deeper forms of listening. Audiences can engage directly with the festival’s theme through intimate performances, a listening room, interactive installations, and conversations led by LA Phil’s Insight program. At the center of the program is the world premiere of Doug Aitken’s Lightscape. This innovative, multimedia artwork created by the artist Doug Aitken in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale is a modern mythology propelled by music that asks the questions, “where are we now?” and “where are we going?” The concert iteration, premiering at Noon to Midnight, features Grant Gershon leading the LA Phil New Music Group and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a hypnotic series of original soundscapes and minimalist compositions to accompany Doug Aitken’s vivid moving images. Lightscape is a shapeshifting act of contemporary storytelling that unfolds in various stages. Following the premiere of the concert version at Noon to Midnight, Lightscape migrates to the Marciano Art Foundation.