I am still not used to the traffic and noise and constant movement of this city, and I am a born and raised Southern Californian. So, finding little ways to escape and relax are as necessary as bottled water and sun block. Last night, I found a new one. The Disney Concert Hall.

Originally, I was doing my brother a favor so he didn’t have to go alone. He had received free tickets from a relative to attend last night’s concert by the Los Angeles Philhar-monics New Music group led by Thomas Ades, Green Umbrella.

Seemingly no one wanted to go, and, as I shared with the woman sitting next to me, I was warned that I may wish I hadn’t come as well. Modern Classical music, according to the handy Wikipedia, is marked by it’s “avant-garde traditions, including musical experimentalism.” In other words, I may not like the sound of it.

She explained that there was a reason for this music; it was to express the signs of our Modern times, of frustration and pain and fear through the ‘transitions’ of the music. Ah, this is where she got me. I thought, “I may be having a ‘light bulb moment”; my life is wrought with transitions right now and I feel out of rhythm and out of tune. I opened my mind, sat back, and fell away into a space of magic that this new concert hall, with its extraordinary architecture and fantastic musicians offered me, and I escaped.

So for just about the price of an evening at the movies, I found an amazing place to disappear to, in my own backyard.