February 15, 2001

February 1, 2001. Los Angeles. Angels Flight was the scene of a mishap that claimed the life of Holocaust survivor Leon Praport. Leon's wife, Lola, remains hospitalized and guarded.

Angels Flight is an historic icon that has over the past century captured LA's imagination, providing a bridge to the gap between those blessed with material comfort and recent immigrants struggling to achieve the dream, the promise of the City of Angels. As Patt Morrison wrote in the Los Angeles Times after the tragedy,

[Angels Flight] has not wholly breached the moat, but it has gone some way to mend the rupture between the city's center and the people who forsook it, as well as those who never believed it existed in the first place.

Our outreach organization, Bridging the Gap, is helping to create an event with the City of Los Angeles to bring us all together, united in pain and determination, to mourn the passing of Leon Praport and rebuild Angels Flight. How? On March 15, at Angels Flight, at noon, symphonic and folk musicians, reflecting varying faiths and ethnicities, will perform David Woodard's composition An Elegy for Two Angels. Members of the African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Anglo-American and Jewish communities will release, at the same time, helium-filled balloons printed with colors reflecting their own backgrounds, floating up to the sky, together.

Bridging the Gap's goal is to restore faith in Angels Flight and, by extension, this incredible experiment in diversity known as Los Angeles.

Keep the Faith,

Cherryl Wilson
Vice President
Historic Core Business Improvement District

 

 

March 16, 2001

I had hoped to salve, through this composition, the cruel Balkanization that characterizes life for most residents in the City of Angels. By drawing diverse musical cultures together in a single elegiac work—at first gently, then in bold argument, then in dialogue, and ultimately in tutti, and centering its performance at accommodating locations that surround the richly metaphorical, unfairly beleaguered Angels Flight funicular—I proposed to tie the ropes together between the people struggling on the flatlands, in the vivid Broadway shops and pungeant food markets, who through the years have only grown browner and poorer, and the people on the hilltop, who are only becoming whiter and richer. At least in the imaginations of some of our hybrid listenership, the task at hand was accomplished.

A basic characteristic of my music finds its origin here: pomp co-mingled with a doleful awareness of the vanity of Earthly things. From California Plaza to the grassy knoll to the trolley landing to Grand Central Market, Angels Flight attendees, on the Ides of March, 2001, found ostentation, deceit, misery and the transitoriness of the world—disharmonies bathed and ideally resolved in the crucible of modest love. An Elegy for Two Angels was as much intended for Mr. and Mrs. Praport, the octogenarian Old Bridge, New Jersey couple whose spirited vacation to the City of Angels yielded the ultimate angel's flight, as it was for Sinai and Olivet, the quaintly named cars traversing the world's shortest railway, which, in the words of Patt Morrison,

bridge the city's history.

The elegy lives on in the grassy knoll of the heart, fingering class division as the vilest crime against human dignity, a defeated, deformed, defanged monster awaiting deportation to the distant dark smoking trains of angel history.

With Sincerity of Heart,

David Woodard
Conductor and Music Director
Los Angeles Chamber Group