Hollywood Bowl Museum

Got time before a concert at the Hollywood Bowl? Spend it at the Hollywood Bowl Museum. Visitors to the Hollywood Bowl may park temporarily for free until 4:30 p.m. to purchase tickets, shop at the Hollywood Bowl Store, and explore the grounds. And they can also explore the Edmund D. Edelman Hollywood Bowl Museum until show time.

The museum has a number of surprisingly informative exhibits, especially if you have a kid or two in tow. Want to  “see” a sound wave? Or learn why it is when you’re sitting in the middle or the top of the Bowl, there is a delay between the sight of the conductor’s baton waving and the measures that come from that action. How did people hear the music before microphones and speakers were invented?

The hands-on exhibits at the museum come through a partnership with the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and include the chance to talk or sing into the Sound Spectrogram to see a moving picture of your voice. You can talk into an Echo Tube swooping around the museum, play the Oscylinder Scope that translates the vibration pattern of musical strings into visible waves, or manipulate sound waves with Visible Effects of the Invisible -- a speaker causes fluid in a tube to vibrate, creating geysers of resonating frequencies.

The Museum Resource Center offers access to the history of the Bowl through hundreds of photographs, audio and video samples. There were early adventures in opera starting with the unamplified coloratura soprano of Amelita Galli-Curci, the modern dance works of such choreographers as Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Norma Gould, Adolph Bolm, Agnes de Mille, and Lester Horton.

Jazz was introduced to the Bowl in the 1930s by Benny Goodman, followed a decade later by Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Lena Horne and others, with a breakthrough concert in 1956 featuring Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Chubby Checker, Duane Eddy and Frankie Avalon rocked the Bowl in the late '50s. Folk and world music concerts began as early as the 1920s with a Native American festival and are now a staple at the Bowl. 

An exhibit on the main floor of the museum is organized into sections on dance: pop, rock, jazz and world music; symphonic music and opera; architecture and history of the Bowl; and the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Video screens with extensive film footage and hundreds of still photos provide a rare window into the music of the 20th century.

Admission is always free. 

HelloMetro Tip: If you really want to dig into old Hollywood and have a good hour to give it, let a curator take you through the museum, piece by piece.

- by Lark Ellen Gould, Los Angeles Reporter for HelloMetro  (Click to leave a message)

Lark Ellen Gould

Lark Ellen Gould has penned seven books on Las Vegas and Los Angeles as a veteran news and travel writer. Her work appears in the L.A. Times, Elite Traveler, Travel Agent Magazine and other national forums. She lived in Boston for many years, earning her masters degree and then traveling the globe for stories. Today she lives in LA and still travels the world on assignment while filling the pages of her travel site: www.wheredaily.com, along the way.