KCRW will host a unique Compose LA that combines conversation and performance with Street Symphony. Street Symphony was founded by musician and MacArthur Genius Fellow Vijay Gupta as a place to create powerful engagements between professional and emerging artists and communities disenfranchised by homelessness and incarceration in Los Angeles County. Hosted by KCRW's Madeleine Brand, the conversation/performance will feature powerful works of four diverse composers, and most notably Benjamin Shirley, who spent two years on skid row and was Street Symphony’s first composer-in-residence, and Reena Esmail, the current composer-in-residence. Each work has a unique relationship to the Street Symphony and addresses the human condition. Also joining the panel, Catherine Gudis, the Associate Professor of History and Director of UC Riverside’s Public History Program. She has worked for over twenty years with art and history museums, in historic preservation, and on multi-platform, place-based projects that focus on Southern California and explore how public space is privatized, landscapes racialized, and inequalities of access amplified.

7p I Doors
7:30p I Program begins

Please note RSVP does not guarantee entry, which is a first come, first served basis.