Everything you need to know to immerse yourself in and prepare for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival!
CONTENTS
I) The Basics
Your introduction to the Festival
II) Composer Context
Who’s who and who will be in town at the 2025 Festival
III) Podcast
Listen now to delve even deeper
IV) Book Recs
Read your way to understanding more about 2025
V) Suggested Films
Things to add to your watchlist before the Festival
VI) Between the Downbeats
What to do and where to go between concerts
VII) Quick Links
A few final tips to point you in the right direction
The Basics
Since 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has offered four days of innovative programming each spring, blending contemporary, classical, and experimental approaches to music-making. A new music director curates the Festival annually, bringing fresh perspectives and fostering collaboration among world-class artists. Core concerts take place at the historic Libbey Bowl, with additional free and off-site events—including intimate theatrical concerts, thoughtful symposiums, and family-friendly pop-ups—throughout Ojai.
For the 2025 Festival, June 5-8, the music director is Claire Chase: expert flutist, interdisciplinary artist, and community-focused educator. Among many other accolades, Chase is known for launching the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, and educational initiatives. Works that are part of Density 2036 punctuate the Festival’s programming in Thursday night’s opening concert with Marcos Balter’s Pan and on Friday afternoon with Liza Lim’s Sex Magic.
Under Claire Chase, this Festival’s programming centers on responses to landscape as caretakers and participants, and celebrates collaboration and dialogue across multiple generations of composers and performers. The 2025 Festival includes four World Premieres of works by Susie Ibarra, Tania León, Terry Riley, and Bahar Royaee; the US Premiere of Liza Lim’s Cardamom; eight West Coast Premieres; and seminal works by John Coltrane, Julius Eastman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and more.
Central threads of this year include:
- Connection to and conservation of ecology and nature
- Using music as a means to symbolize an idea or meaning
- Meditative and mindful contemplation
- Deep listening
What to listen for:
- Unique instrumentation, such as Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute, or the use of bamboo as a percussive element in Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands
- Extended techniques of traditional instruments, such as percussive flute playing or playing a cymbal with a double bass bow
- Music that is part of or descended from minimalism, a 20th-century compositional movement that emphasizes repetition, drones, and/or gradual shifting between notes or techniques
- Microtonal music (not necessarily atonal), which is music that utilizes pitches in between the 12 in the equal-tempered European chromatic scale
Composer Context
Here is a bit of context about each composer. Something special about this year’s Festival is that many of the featured composers will be in attendance, so be on the lookout for them at Ojai Chats, in the audience, or around town.
Marcos Balter
Works performed at Festival events: THU 8PM, SAT 10:30 AM
Marcos Balter’s Pan is a central work of Claire Chase’s epic Density 2036 project. The Brazilian-American composer’s work for solo flute, live electronics, and community participation evokes the life and death of the Greek god Pan (himself a player of flutes) in a collaborative work that has elements of theatrical ritual. Here is an evocative description of the work by the writer Lisa Hirsch.
Marcos’s Alone for solo flute and wine glasses (Thursday at 8pm) will be the first music to be heard at this year’s Festival, followed later on the same program by Pan. In addition, the JACK Quartet will play Marcos’s Chambers to open the Saturday morning 10:30am program.
Susie Ibarra
In attendance at 2025 Festival
Works performed at Festival events: SAT 8AM, SUN 10:30AM
Susie has had a wide-ranging career as both percussionist and composer in a wide vocabulary of genres, with her collaborators ranging from Wadada Leo Smith and John Zorn to Pauline Oliveros.
Here is a sampling of Susie in action in her extended album titled Talking Gong. First, Sunbird, written for Claire Chase and to be heard in a different version this year in Ojai on the Sunday early morning concert. And then, Paniwala from the same work, with Susie Ibarra joined by pianist Alex Peh, who is also a key collaborator in Sky Islands.
Leilehua Lanzilotti
In attendance at 2025 Festival
Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8PM, SAT 10:30AM, SUN 8AM, SUN 5:30PM
A Kanaka Maoli composer, violist, interdisciplinary artist, and music writer based in Hawaii, Leilehua Lanzilotti creates open spaces for deep listening and connection — with the natural environment, language, and community. Her music often emerges from a broader practice of storytelling and stewardship, centering Indigenous values to repair erasure and reimagine the concert experience. Lanzilotti’s piece koʻu inoa will begin the Friday Evening concert in Libbey Bowl.
In the Hawaiian language, koʻu inoa translates as “my name” or “is my name,” according to the composer — a simple phrase that carries the weight of identity, ancestry, and presence. Lanzilotti’s own first name, Leilehua, signifies “a garland of lehua blossoms” — “the first plant to grow back after the volcano destroys all vegetation,” she explains. “Looking beyond the direct translation, it means ‘creating beauty out of destruction.’”
Lanzilotti calls this piece, which is of flexible duration, “a homesick bariolage” — referring to the rapid alternation between strings to produce a shimmering effect – based on Hawaiʻi Aloha. With lyrics written in the 19th century by Makua Laiana, the anthem is “usually sung at the end of large concerts or gatherings, with everyone joining hands and swaying side to side as they sing,” but here, as Lanzilotti notes, it serves to invite introductions. “Hawaiʻi Aloha evokes not only a homesickness for place and sound, but this action of coming together — a homesickness that we’re all feeling right now, where music and human interaction are home.” Listen to the piece and read more about it on Lanzilotti’s website here.
Tania León
In attendance at 2025 Festival
Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8AM, SAT 8PM, SUN 10:30AM, SUN 5:30PM
Friday, June 6 begins with an early morning program featuring the JACK Quartet performing, among other treasures, Abanico, a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. This concert is one of our OJAI DAWNS, an annual intimate concert in our farthest venue from downtown: Zalk Theater (on the stunning campus of Beasant Hill School).
The sound of a solo instrument is expanded and multiplied in this piece for violin and interactive electronics. Abanico takes its name from the Spanish word for “fan” — a reference both to the decorative folding fans found throughout Spanish and Cuban culture and to the swirling motion at the heart of the piece. That sense of motion and elegance informs the music, which León describes as “a bouncing scherzo of images, using sound as a mirror of physical motion. It is built of emerging lines that sometimes mutate into rhythmical pulses. Juxtapositions of bouncing textures become echo effects; memories, associations, and images of abanico dancing in mid-air.” With a nod to her Cuban roots, León incorporates a brief quotation from a 1920s song by Eusebio Delfín.
Liza Lim
Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8AM, FRI 2:30PM, SAT 8PM
In its West Coast premiere, Australian composer Liza Lim’s Density 2036 contribution Sex Magic for solo contrabass flute and electronics centers Friday afternoon. Inspired by Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute (Bertha), Sex Magic evokes and celebrates women’s power across time and cultures, evoking the giant bass flutes of Papua New Guinea and the Australian didgeridoo in a work that ritually moves across three altars, creating a mystical, mesmerizing evocation of both the present and the timeless past. Find more about this piece on Lim’s website.
Saturday evening’s concert concludes with Liza Lim’s large-scale How Forests Think, a work inspired by the imagery of ancient forests as vibrant, symbiotic communities that, as Lim writes, “nourish the old connections and keep a song going. One might think of a forest as a choir or certainly as an ensemble. Stories, dreams, and thoughts inhabit multiple forms in a living matrix.” Find more about this piece on Liza Lim’s website.
Annea Lockwood
In attendance at 2025 Festival
Works performed at Festival events: THU 8PM, SAT & SUN 2-5PM, SAT 10:30PM
Annea Lockwood is a composer known for integrating the interplay of sound in nature into her musical creations. The 2025 Festival opens on Thursday, June 5, with Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, an affectionate tribute to a collaborator and dear friend, Pauline Oliveros. Her piece Spirit Catchers will be played in a special late-night setting at the Ojai Playhouse after the Saturday Evening concert, How Forests Think. Try to arrive with time to grab a snack or drink from the newly remodeled historical cinema!
Lockwood’s sound map of the Housatonic River, captured as a four-channel sound installation, will be installed and played from 2-5PM on both Saturday and Sunday during the Festival in the serene pilates/yoga space of Move Sanctuary. Here are Lockwood’s notes explaining the creation of the piece:
“A Sound Map of the Housatonic River is a four-channel sound installation; it is an aural tracing of the river from its sources in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, to Long Island Sound, Connecticut. Each recorded site is located on a wall map with a number. Beside the map is the corresponding number, followed by the time at which that site can be heard, the place name, and where the recording was made. The installation was commissioned by the Housatonic River Museum, a project in development in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.”
From annealockwood.com
Craig Taborn
In attendance at 2025 Festival
Works performed at Festival events: FRI 10:30AM, SAT & SUN 3:30 & 2:30PM
The Libbey Bowl concert on Friday celebrates the old made new in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions for harpsichord and ends with a summit meeting between Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe, two dazzlingly inventive composers and pianists whose worlds encompass creative music, free jazz, new music, and beyond.
The afternoon of Saturday, June 7, is punctuated by the West Coast premiere of Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics. Taborn’s critically acclaimed Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms was inspired by a dream in which plants awake, blossom, grow, and change as the dreamer walks through a garden. (A second performance of Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms will be offered on Sunday afternoon, June 8.)
Podcast
For the past three years, the Ojai Music Festival has produced a podcast, OJAICAST, which aims to prepare listeners for the Festival by contextualizing the composers, performers, and intentions behind them all. In the spring of 2025, the Ojai Community Radio station, KOJY, was founded. Their mission is to provide Ojai and the surrounding communities with a freeform platform for music, community voices, education, and emergency broadcasting, without ads or commercial influence.
For this fourth installment of our podcast, each episode will first air as a radio show on KOJY and then be available for streaming. This installment is also special in that the artists and composers of the 2025 Festival will be featured on the show in conversation with host Chris Noxon, a visual artist and writer based in Ojai. It will be produced by Will Thomas, composer and producer, also based in Ojai. Listen to it live on KOJY on Fridays starting May 9, or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts anytime after.
Book Recs
How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn
In this astonishing book, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human–and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems.
Liza Lim’s large-scale work of the same title is the finale of Saturday night’s Libbey Bowl concert. She was inspired to create this piece after reading this book.
Purchase at Barts Books or on Bookshop.org.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick
#1 New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
In Virtual Ojai Talks, Claire Chase mentioned reading this book and feeling inspired by it in her curation of this year’s concerts.
Purchase at Barts Books or on Bookshop.org.
A Year of Deep Listening, Stephanie Loveless (Editor)
365 scores for listening in celebration of the legacy of groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros.
A Year of Deep Listening is a publication of 365 scores for listening gathered by the Center for Deep Listening in celebration of the legacy of groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros.
Originally begun online, in honor of what would have been Oliveros’ 90th birthday (May 30, 2022), the project shared one score per day across social media for 365 days. The book version of A Year of Deep Listening brings these scores together into one beautiful and historic volume. An expression of the Deep Listening community, the scores were created by over 300 artists—ranging from prize winning composers to ear-minded grocery store clerks, from those who worked closely with Oliveros for decades to those who never met her.
Purchase at Barts Books or on Bookshop.org.
Books Authored by Pauline Oliveros
All available at Bart’s Books.
Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice
Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators, and anyone interested in how consciousness may be affected by profound attention to the sonic environment.
Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Sonic Meditations
Sonic Meditations is a set of exercises that aim to help the reader have a deeper understanding of the self through sound-based meditation practices.
Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Sounding the Margins
Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009 by Pauline Oliveros documents her activity over this period and her advances in electronic and telematic musical performance, improvisation, artificial intelligence, and the role of women in contemporary music. Featuring contributions by John Luther Adams, Monique Buzzarté, and Stuart Dempster.
Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Quantum Listening
Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in we act from compassion and peace. This timely new edition brings Oliveros’ vision together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.
Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Suggested Films
32 Sounds, Sam Green
An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us.
Playing at the Ojai Playhouse during the Festival. Get tickets here > >
Deep Listening, Daniel Weintraub
“Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros” tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the only females amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians, a gateway to music and sound for non-musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with severe disabilities to create beautiful music. On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Playing at the Ojai Playhouse during the Festival. Get tickets here > >
Between the Downbeats
Wondering where to go, shop, and eat in between concerts? Use the links below to read what our staff recommends, a full list of our local favorites, and even more recommendations in the mobile app.
Quick Links
Find the links below for a few final helpful places to go in preparation for the 2025