Dear friends,
The raging fires in Los Angeles have devastated several beloved members of our community, from our artistic collaborators to longtime patrons to personal friends. Even those lucky enough to emerge unscathed struggle to comprehend the magnitude of this catastrophe, whose full scope and aftereffects will only be felt—and healed—with time.
During the COVID pandemic, homes became havens. In this latest crisis, the earth swallowed many of them whole. Nature's brutal indifference to our fate can be hard to take. But as our colleague Joel Pargman, who also lost his home this week, put it so beautifully: "Some people say the neighborhood is destroyed... Only the houses are. My wonderful, strong, incredible neighbors ARE the neighborhood."
Thank you to those who've reached out to check in and with generous offers of help. Please scroll down to support several, but sadly not all, of those in our community—like Joel and HyeJin—who lost their homes to the fires. I share their stories and requests for help with their permission. Thank you in advance for any support you can provide.
Salastina's Resident Pianist, HyeJin Kim, and her husband, Bryan, are newlyweds. They purchased their first home together in the Pacific Palisades several months ago, but the Palisades fire destroyed it. Thankfully, her piano was not on the property. UPDATE: HyeJin and Bryan have found an apartment, and no longer require leads. Thank you to those who’ve provided them!
Sadly, HyeJin was not the only Colburn faculty member and Salastina artist affected by the fires. Violinists Carrie Kennedy and Joel Pargman are frequent and generous Vital Sounds performers and longtime friends and colleagues of Kevin and me. They, too, lost their home to the Eaton Fire.
Mercedes Curran is the sunny, inventive, supportive experience designer behind the decor at all of our Sounds Delicious events and many of our other concerts as well. Their home was one of many lost to the Eaton fire in Altadena. They were able to evacuate with their passports and a change of clothes, but little else. Everything they owned was destroyed along with their home.
They are looking for a place to stay for the next six months to a year, either in the east side of Los Angeles or in Orange County.
Read about their experience and find out how you can help through the button below.
Salastina audience members know Marie Kasprzack and Arnaud Pelé as warm and welcoming faces from check-in and concessions. You may not know they are brilliant engineers at Caltech's LIGO facility. I know them because they enrolled in my chamber music course at Caltech. Over the years, they've become close personal friends. I'm heartbroken to share that they, too, lost their home to the Eaton Fire.
They're expecting their first child in April. As a mother, I know that all their baby needs is their loving arms. I also know that expecting one's first child is an incredibly tender chapter of life. The urge to "nest" is real, and for good reason. It breaks my heart that they are going through this at such an exquisitely vulnerable moment of anticipation in their lives.
Please consider supporting Marie and Arnaud by donating below.
Salastina’s dear friend and maker of our instruments, Mario Miralles, lost his home in Altadena to the Eaton fire.
He shared that the house that burned “was also a place for my business and so I lost my lifetime supply of the most select tone woods that I had collected over the past 40 years - including many dozen spectacular 100-year-old pieces, instruments I made, instruments that Brenda made, most of my notes, all of my instrument forms, valuable instrument books and much of my life’s work, among many other irreplaceable personal belongings.”
For now, he has a safe place to stay, and thanks to Margaret Batjer and the Colburn School, he will be able to use a room at Colburn to create a temporary space to work.
Over the past five days, my husband lost track of how often he heard me audibly gasp after glancing at my cell phone as colleague after colleague and friend after friend lost their home to the Eaton and Palisades fires. Colleagues who were especially hard hit were those working in the recording studios.
The recent writers' and actors' strikes and the significant contraction of content on streaming platforms have slowed studio work to a near halt. It is so hard to imagine the devastating loss of a home and all one's belongings amid such uncertainty and instability in the field of studio recording.
MusiCares offers immediate assistance to anyone who has worked in the music business for five years or longer. This includes $1500 in financial aid and $500 in food vouchers.
With over $11.5 million raised to date, this emergency initiative, created by a coalition of major arts organizations and philanthropists in Los Angeles, led by the J. Paul Getty Trust, includes the Mohn Art Collective (MOCA, Hammer, and LACMA) in partnership with East West Bank, as well as numerous individuals and foundations including Maria Seferian, Karyn Kohl (with Terri and Jerry Kohl), the Mellon Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Teiger Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, serving as a lifeline for those who have lost homes, studios, archives, and livelihoods.