When the insatiable flames licked closer and closer to the homes of so many Los Angeles musicians earlier this month, they threatened not just structural shelters and furniture, cars and clothing, kids’ toys and sentimental treasures. They threatened instruments, which for professional musicians are entire worlds. An instrument is a livelihood, a third arm, a best friend, and often a life companion that has a deeper history than many close relationships.
David Low, a busy cellist in L.A.’s recording studios (his credits include Schindler’s List among countless others), was sitting at his kitchen window in the Pacific Palisades when he first registered the orange glow. “I gave it 15 minutes” before taking action, he says. “I didn’t see any helicopter or plane water dropper. At that point, I’m like: Okay, I’m probably gonna lose my house.”

David Low with his 1820 Ventapane cello, which he has been playing since 1986. Low was able to rescue the cello and other instruments from his home as the Pacific Palisades fire approached.

David Low, an in-demand cellist at Los Angeles’ scoring studios, at a recent session at Fox to record a score by Henry Jackman, who has written music for multiple big-budget films.
After picking up his eight-year-old son from his nearby school, Low remained calm but had the two of them very quickly decide what to grab from each room in the house. But “basically, once you’re done with two cellos, three violins, some clothes, and two people—your Prius is full.”
Low saved his priceless 1820 Ventapane cello, which he has been playing since 1986, and his and his wife’s other instruments (he laments that he missed “a very fine baroque violin and some bows”) … and lost everything else. The home, located in Pacific Palisades’ idyllic “Alphabet Streets” area, where Low and his wife and three children had lived for 31 years, is completely gone.
And yet, Low knows he’s one of the lucky ones.

Cellist David Low and family at their home in Pacific Palisades before the 2024 LA wildfires. From left: Neli Nikolaeva, Low’s wife, with their children Dahlia, Asher, Jonny (in front), and Low.

David Low on his first visit back to what remains of his family’s home, which was destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fire.
In an Altadena home tucked against several rustic trailheads that lead into the San Gabriel Mountains, Christopher Still had no time to grab the many musical appendages of his very musical family. A member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s trumpet section since 2007, Still also runs a coaching business and podcast out of his home. It was also where his wife, Amanda—a clarinetist—ran her eco-beauty company, and where their two children practiced the violin and cello.
“Our home was not just a place to live,” says Still, “but a space filled with music and creativity that reflected our lives and careers.”

Christopher Still, a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s trumpet section since 2007, lost all of his trumpets when the Eaton Fire consumed his family’s home. Also lost were his wife Amanda’s clarinets, their children’s instruments, sheet music, and classical-music books.
Getting the family and their two dogs to safety, and without panic, was the chief priority when the Eaton Fire began clawing for their backyard—a priority even above saving the instruments, partly “because there were just too many of them,” says Still, “and in the moment it felt impossible to decide what to save.”
Lost forever were all of Still’s trumpets, including the one he used to win all of his orchestra jobs. Also lost were Amanda’s clarinets and the 1881 pump organ that had belonged to her great-grandmother, the kids’ instruments, several guitars, amps, a keyboard, and an electric mandolin that had just arrived at Christmas.
It all happened so quickly, and the totality was so staggering, that Still and his wife have had trouble making an exhaustive list in the aftermath. “We lost so much sheet music, including first edition music books written by our former teachers,” says Still. “I had a tiny piece of metal,” says Amanda, “that my dad had attached to a key of his clarinet because it helped him play a tricky note in a piece he played in college.” “There was a photo of my dad and me,” adds Still, “marching together with the North Patchogue Fire Department Band. And there was the hand-crank metronome that sat on my childhood piano since I was four years old. These things carried so much history and meaning for us.”

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is supporting wildfire recovery efforts through fundraising, collecting supplies, and volunteering. The orchestra partnered with the Social Justice Learning Institute and LA County Parks Care Camps to collect donations for wildfire victims at venues including, in photo, the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood.

Volunteers from the staff of the Los Angeles Philharmonic collect donations of supplies for wildfire survivors at venues including the Hollywood Bowl. The website https://www.laphil.com/campaigns/wildfires offers links to local organizations that support recovery efforts for the city’s music scene and other organizations.
Starr Parodi, a composer and pianist who lived above the Alphabet Streets in the Palisades, sat numbly at a friend’s house as both her home and studio surrendered to the blaze. Built in 1937, her two-bedroom house was “kind of like a tree house with a magical view from the city to the Santa Monica Pier and the ocean,” she says. She lived there with her composer husband and singer daughter since 1996; dug into a hill next to it was her studio, a bohemian sanctuary where she recorded music with Carole King, produced solo piano albums and her daughter’s songs, and scored tons of music for TV, films, and trailers.
In that studio was a 1928 Steinway B piano, which at one time sat on the MGM scoring stage and was reportedly featured on the Wizard of Oz soundtrack. Parodi lost that piano and her mother’s Baldwin grand, on which she’d learned to play as a child, along with an array of other instruments and gear. Handwritten sheet music, recorded scores, classical music books with her teachers’ notes … all gone.
Parodi says losing the Oz piano, which had “the most beautiful tone and inspired me beyond words,” might hurt most of all. “If you ran your hands along the wood under where the keyboard sits, you could feel several pieces of gum that were stuck there by studio musicians back in the day. When I had my piano worked on after I bought it, the restorer started to scrape the gum off and I stopped him—I wanted to keep it, kind of like a touchstone to the past and inspiration for the future. I can only imagine whose gum it might have been.”

Composer and pianist Starr Parodi in her Pacific Palisades studio, where she recorded music, produced solo piano albums and her daughter’s songs, and scored music for television, film, and trailers. Parodi lost the studio and her home in the LA wildfires.

Starr Parodi with her 1928 Steinway B, which was at one time on the MGM scoring stage and was reportedly featured on the Wizard of Oz soundtrack. The LA fires destroyed her home and studio, including that piano as well as her mother’s Baldwin grand. Photo by Kimberly Haynes.
Several composers, including Juhi Bansal, lost irreplaceable, handwritten compositions in progress. Ludovic Morlot, former music director of the Seattle Symphony, lost his entire musical archive—as did Arnold Schoenberg’s son Larry, whose Belmont Music Publishers firm burned to the ground. Belmont housed thousands of Schoenberg’s scores and parts, which it rented to ensembles around the world; the scores had been digitized, but even those were destroyed by the fire. (The only consolation is that the Schoenberg Center in Vienna, a major repository of the composer’s manuscripts, remains unscathed.) A truly sickening number of studios, equipment, instruments, and reliquaries of precious artifacts, mementos, and material memories from so many lifetimes in music are now nothing but ash.

The wildfires destroyed Belmont Music Publishers, which housed thousands of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s scores and was run by his son Larry Schoenberg. The fires also destroyed Larry Schoenberg’s Pacific Palisades home, which stood in front of the Belmont building. Photo courtesy of E. Randol Schoenberg.
No Place Like Home
The fires went after gigging session musicians and famous Hollywood composers alike, conservatory professors and high school music teachers, wealthy patrons and humble practitioners. The thousands who lost their homes include the veteran sound engineer at the Hollywood Bowl, a legendary luthier (and his phenomenal collection of ancient Italian wood), and even Julie Gigante—a former violinist with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra who every Angeleno knows from the striking mural of her likeness that overlooks the 110 Freeway.
Contrary to popular opinion, not everyone who lives in Pacific Palisades is rich; many artists inherited homes from their parents or grandparents, the legacy of an era when the chic neighborhood was within reach of the working class. Altadena, particularly, had accrued a reputation as a quirky, supportive enclave for professional musicians.
“So many of our musician friends were there, urging us to move there,” says Joel Pargman, a violin teacher, studio musician, and member of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Pasadena Symphony. “It is the greatest community of people I’ve ever lived in.”

The string section of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with (top row center and right) violinists Carrie Kennedy and Joel Pargman. Kennedy and Pargman, who are married, lost their home and recording studio to the fires.
The house he purchased in 2018 already had a sound-proofed recording studio in the garage; it had previously belonged to a composer, and before that another violinist. Pargman says the home studio was a godsend during the pandemic for him and his wife, Carrie Kennedy—also a studio violinist and member of LACO and the Pasadena Symphony—because they could safely record their individual parts for film and TV soundtracks. (They also played Zoom concerts for ICU patients at UCLA Hospital from that garage.)
Kennedy was downtown on Tuesday, Jan. 7, teaching at the Colburn School, when the power in Altadena went out for the last time. “By candlelight, in howling 70 mph winds, I began to load the car,” Pargman recalls, “when my neighbor shouted that he could see flames from the backyard.” He never received the urgent “Go” alert, but decided to leave anyway with a suitcase, their dog, and all the instruments he could cram in his car. They holed up in a hotel in Whittier, and at 4 a.m. they started getting smoke/fire alerts from their home security system, and then “window open” alerts from several rooms in the house.
“At that point,” he says, “we just held each other and wept.”
Pargman and Kennedy, and so many other L.A. musicians who earn much of their income from session work, were already worried about the proverbial smoke emanating from their industry. Media music recording has been steadily outsourced abroad (for complex reasons to do with union contracts, runaway production, and other puzzles no one has yet been able to solve), and the bad situation was made even worse by the pandemic and then the Hollywood strikes last year.
“There has been a slow fire burning in our musical community for years,” says Pargman, which has “grievously hollowed out our ability as a community to weather this firestorm and rebuild.”

Carrie Kennedy, a violinist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Pasadena Symphony, was downtown on Tuesday, Jan. 7, teaching at the Colburn School, when the power in Altadena, where she and husband Joel Pargman live, went out for the last time. Photo by A. Mahler.

Joel Pargman, a violinist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Pasadena Symphony, recalls: “By candlelight, in howling 70 mph winds, I began to load the car when my neighbor shouted that he could see flames from the backyard.” Photo by Cynthia Smalley.
Support Networks
Beyond the instruments, homes, and studios of musicians, the fires have destroyed the homes of patrons and donors of orchestras—many of whom live in the Palisades and Altadena regions.
LACO reports that most of the 28 Palisades households of people who regularly attend their galas were incinerated. Two board members in Altadena also lost homes. The same for two board members with the Pasadena Symphony, one former board member, and “countless donors,” according to the orchestra’s director of marketing and public relations, Marisa McCarthy.
“It definitely keeps me up at night,” says Maia Jasper White, executive director and co-artistic director with Kevin Kumar of the chamber group Salastina. White also plays violin in Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and is a former member of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County. “The thing I keep coming back to is that existential dread of music being at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” she says, referring to the pyramid developed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow, which places physiological and safety needs at the foundation, and self-actualization concerns at the very top. Salastina had already been struggling with procuring money from state agencies, making it ever more reliant on the benevolence of its members and donors, many of whom are also affected by the fires.

Maia Jasper White, executive director and co-artistic director with Kevin Kumar of the chamber group Salastina. White also plays violin in Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and is a former member of the Pacific Symphony. White knows some three dozen people who lost their homes. Photo by Shaun Frederickson.
The pandemic, which erupted a month after White took the executive director chair, was a grim sort of rehearsal for how musicians and orchestras can adapt to unprecedented challenges, and how communities can band together and draw even greater meaning from music.
Already the outpouring of donations on GoFundMe campaigns for musicians, the friendly offering of gear, instruments, and studio space through L.A.’s social network, the free concerts for first responders and their families, and several other relief initiatives—from the grassroots to formal programs by corporations, non-profits, and performance rights organizations—has been a beautiful and hopeful thing.

Musicians of the chamber ensemble Salastina. Executive Director Maia White, in foreground with violin, states that the home where the photo was taken belonged to longtime audience members, donors, and personal friends. The home was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Photo by by Nick Bayless.
White knows some three dozen people who lost their homes—including Salastina’s pianist, HyeJin Kim, who just got married and moved into her first house in the Palisades—and says, “there was a clear pattern in everyone that I spoke to, which was that they were like: ‘I can’t feel too sorry for myself, because the outpouring of support that I’ve received is so life-affirming and heartening.’ ” Most of her musician friends sound resolved to stay here and rebuild.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic collected donations of supplies for wildfire survivors at multiple venues, including at its home, Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The League of American Orchestras’ Disaster Relief and Preparedness site at americanorchestras.org/learn/disaster-relief-and-preparedness/ offers guidance and disaster relief resources.