At Night Temple, weary L.A. film composers find refuge in house shows

The road up to Night Temple was dark and steep enough to take your breath away. But a few days before Christmas, a string quartet hauled its instruments up the hairpin stone pathway, into a Franklin Hills living room for a monthly house-show series. Inside the home, perched over a hill looking out on Los Feliz, it felt evil-bohemian, with guests in all black milling around a keg of bracingly bitter tea or eating homemade pasta by the outdoor grotto altar.

In the living room, the string quartet tuned and sawed to life as hosts Carisa Bianca Mellado and Andrew Dalziell laid out the night’s program: four L.A. film composers leading sets of new piano and string pieces. As the 30 or so guests took in the work — haunting choral runs, minimalist chamber suites and sacred-music melodies — you could hear the grit and intimacy of players figuring out their scores right in front of you.

“One surprising thing is how these really accomplished film composers, who have music on big movies and big shows, say there’s something really vulnerable about writing for this,” Dalziell said. “There’s a bit of danger to it. We maybe get a few minutes to rehearse. You can write something that’s tricky, and it’s gonna be cool if they pull it off, but what if, you know?”

Cellist Andrew Dalziell performs in a quartet at Night Temple.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

This small-scale, high-wire act of performance has become especially meaningful to the tight-knit, on-edge community of L.A. film composers. As fine arts funding withers across sectors and Hollywood budgets shrink while studios retreat from local productions, workers are still recovering from lengthy strikes and the incipient threat of artificial intelligence. Night Temple is one small riposte to all that, from local artists no longer miserably waiting for the tides to turn.

“We were so beaten down by the industry, you can become kind of hopeless,” Mellado said. “We just want to perform; it’s our biggest passion. We need each other, and we need to feel connected, and the meaning of having success is sharing it.“

Mellado, a singer, and Daziell, a cellist, are both Australian expats who work out of a charmingly goth apartment in Los Feliz. They have a darkwave band, Night Tongue, on the side but primarily make their living in film scoring, sync licensing and arranging strings — the bit-of-everything approach so many musicians figured out as recording and touring turned less sustainable.

Both were growing frustrated by how digitally isolated their work had become post pandemic, and how rarely they got to perform live in studio or on a stage. “I think there was social trauma from the pandemic, and so the reason of doing it in a home was just it’s a little hectic going to clubs these days,” Dalziell said.

“Audiences are used to seeing strings really far away, like at the opera,” Mellado said. “That’s a beautiful experience, but there’s never an intimacy with them.”

Kaitlin Wolfberg, left, Eric Clark, Heather Lockie and Andrew Dalziell perform at Night Temple.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

In the summer of 2024, they called on some friends — violinists Kaitlin Wolfberg and Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark and violist Heather Lockie — to more or less sight read through new work from friends in their Los Feliz apartment. They packed about a dozen people into their living room, and while the setup was clearly a work in progress, they were moved by the response.

By the end of the year, the free-with-RSVP series had resonated through the L.A. film score and classical music world — sometimes drawing more than a hundred guests once they moved to the bigger place in Franklin Hills and scored funding from APRA AMCOS (Australia’s main performing rights organization).

“You hear that some people are just jaded and bitter from the isolation, the constant rejection that’s part of the gig but can be demoralizing for your relationship to music. How do you continue to find joy and community and fulfillment?” said Catherine Joy, a composer who performed at a recent Night temple event.

Joy’s firm, Joy Music House, has score-produced for acclaimed shows such as Apple TV+’s “Presumed Innocent” and the horror film “Speak No Evil,” but she relished the chance to try out some new ideas in a friendly room.

“Sitting on a floor or on a couch gets you back in touch with a really important aspect of what our relationship to music should be,” Joy said. “When you see instruments up close, you hear the bow on a string, you hear the grit. I’ve worked with filmmakers surprised to hear what real live music sounds like, because so many people have never had that experience. It’s a huge part of keeping real music alive.“

Sandro Morales-Santoro, a composer and Night Temple performer who worked on the Netflix hit “Outer Banks” and Hulu’s “Good Trouble,” acknowledged how rough it’s been for many L.A. film composers in the grip of several ongoing industry crises.

“A lot of composers are still recovering from everything, financially and emotionally,” he said. “ It’s tricky work. It’s beautiful, but you’re an artist in service of another form, waiting for another person to listen and say it’s good or bad. To be able to share that work with friends and community, it’s a dream come true to see faces and how it impacts them. It’s going back to the origins of music, performing it in front of your community and finding value and beauty in that.”

Carisa Bianca Mellado sings at Night Temple.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

Night Temple is far from the first L.A. music community to turn to house shows for sustenance right now. The well-funded series Candlelight Concerts, which throws dimly lighted classical shows in intimate spaces, has spread nationwide. But it’s an idea that’s resonating as musicians pinned between L.A.’s music, film and arts industries scramble to make a living, keep a community and reinvent models for self-sufficiency.

“The idea of community music is thousands of years old. European salons were nobility inviting composers into their homes to write and play music. But right now, house shows are so important, especially in L.A. since we’re working together but not often physically anymore,” said Jules Levy, an L.A.-native double bassist who has performed at the Oscars and founded the composing and production firm Savage Music for young and underrepresented composers.

Levy throws his own house-show series, Agreement of Sound, with no amplification. He said that cultivating a local scene of intimate, experimental new work is crucial for keeping L.A. at the forefront of a globalized music and film business.

“We need to have an identity here to market the L.A. music scene in the film and TV world,” Levy said. “Right now is a very difficult time, and I worry that it’ll never be what it was prepandemic. So many productions are moving to London or Vienna or Budapest, and younger players and composers here might never get that experience. We have to convince composers and studios that we’re not just open for business, but we’re the best in the world.”

Whatever industry shocks are still to come for the composing and film music scene in L.A., the experience of being around like minds in a cozy home to play for each other is a lifeline. Mellado and Dalziell said that studio executives and producers have already hired work based on chance encounters at Night Temple, and they hope to throw awards-season shows for local composers up for prizes. On Jan. 18, they held a benefit for local fire relief efforts (salient, given the Palisades fire claimed a vast archive of work from famed composer Arnold Schoenberg.)

But most important, in a brutal cultural economy lived behind screens, it’s a chance to be in the room together as the work comes to life.

“We just want everyone to succeed. We want people to get jobs and get work and feel safe and feel cared for,” Mellado said. “There are so many people that are doing really meaningful work who I think deserve a loving space for that work.”

“Music’s not supposed to be efficient and cheap,” Dalziell said. “If everything is collapsing from the top down, then let’s build new stuff.”