Author: Olivia Consterdine

SEASON 2

Welcome to OJAICAST, where we pull back the curtain to take a sneak-peek at the upcoming Ojai Music Festival, June 9 to 12, in beautiful Ojai Valley, California. All are welcome here, from newcomers to long-time music fans. In-depth insights and special guests will help introduce this year’s programming and whet your musical appetites for what’s to come with host Emily Praetorius.

Episode 1

Our first episode introduces us to our 2022 Music Director AMOC, the multidisciplinary collective which incorporates music, dance, poetry, theatre in all their work and their ambitious programming that begins on Thu June 9. Guests: Ara Guzelimian, Zack Winokur, and Keir Gogwilt

Emily Praetorius, producer and host
Louis Ng, sound engineer (lensonproductions.com)

OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks

Music Excerpts in Episode 1:
Craigie Hill, by Keir GoGwilt and Celeste Oram
Performed by Keir GoGwilt

Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, by Julius Eastman
Performed by Julius Eastman

Rebonds B, by Iannis Xenakis
Performed by Steven Schick

Gretchen am spinnrade, by Eric Wubbels
Performed by Eric Wubbels and Mariel Roberts

Episode 2

From early morning sunrise to evening sunset, AMOC dives into the music of icons George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell, the life and music of Julius Eastman alongside world premieres of works by Anthony Cheung and new staging of Messian’s Harawi. Guests: AMOC member and flutist Emi Ferguson and composer Anthony Cheung.

Emily Praetorius, producer and host
Louis Ng, sound engineer (lensonproductions.com)

OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks

Music Excerpts in Episode 2:
Gay Guerilla, by Julius Eastman
Performed by Julius Eastman

Stay on It, by Julius Eastman
Performed by Julius Eastman, Doug Gaston, Amrom Chodos, Dennis Kahle, Benjamin Hudson, Joseph Ford, George Mitkoff, Jan Williams, Peter Kotik

Harawi, mvts. 2, 6, 10, by Olivier Messiaen
Performed by Hetna Regitze Bruun and Kristoffer Hyldig

Episode 3

Let Festival weekend begin! In this episode we look at the Saturday program which is quintessential Ojai Music Festival — music of Bach and Bach re-imagined and three premieres of some of today’s most exciting composers Matthew Aucoin, Carolyn Chen, and Andrew McIntosh. Guests: AMOC co-founder/composer Matthew Aucoin and AMOC member and violinist Miranda Cuckson.

Emily Praetorius, producer and host
Louis Ng, sound engineer (lensonproductions.com)

OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks

Music Excerpts in Episode 3:
cross/collapse, by Catherine Lamb

About Bach, by Cassandra Miller
Performed by Quatuor Bozzini

Tanz Tanz, by Reiko Füting
Performed by Olivia de Prato

Prelude in G Minor, by Bach
Performed by Emi Ferguson and Ruckus

Little Jimmy, by Andrew McIntosh
Performed by Yarn/Wire

Episode 4

More music, meditation, and dance plus community events end the four-day Festival starting with Meditation with the music of Julius Eastman, followed by Hans Otte’s The Book of Sounds, and two world premieres Dance in the Park and Rome is Falling. To end this jam-packed Fesrival, the Sunday Finale will display the virtuosity of all 17 AMOC members as a collective. Guests: Ara Guzelimian, Julia Eichten, and Doug Balliett.

Emily Praetorius, producer and host
Louis Ng, sound engineer (lensonproductions.com)

OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks

Music Excerpts in Episode 4:
The Book of Sounds, mvts. 1, 10, by Hans Otte
Performed by Ralph van Raat

Also available on SPOTIFY and APPLE PODCASTS
OJAICAST SEASON 1

ABOUT OUR OJAICAST HOST 
Emily Praetorius, former Ojai Music Festival intern and Rothenberg Intern Fellow, is a current Composition DMA candidate at Columbia University. She previously studied composition and clarinet performance at the University of Redlands (BM) and composition at Manhattan School of Music (MM). She has studied with Kathryn Nevin (clarinet), Susan Botti, Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, and Anthony Suter. Emily is from Ojai, CA and lives in New York City where she is a proud co-owner of Kuro Kirin Espresso & Coffee.

The 2022 Festival Music Director AMOC, a collective of today’s most adventurous musicians, singers, composers, choreographers, and dancers, is as eclectic and open minded with their musical interests as one would expect. To begin the new year and expand our own musical horizons, we asked each member of AMOC to share their personal listening of the moment — a selection which is characteristically wide-ranging and very individualistic.

Listen on Spotify and Apple Music
(Preview the AMOC playlist and log on to your account to listen to the full songs)

Jonny Allen:
Jazz Crimes by Joshua Redman
This is a track that I just keep coming back to.  The groove is subtle but persistent.  Joshua Redman is such an incredible artist and Brian Blade’s drumming has always been an inspiration to me.

Paul Appleby:
My “what I’m listening to” pick is Kate Soper’s set of three songs for soprano and string quartets, Nadja.  I am a huge fan of Kate’s music because she has a language and voice that is entirely her own.  Her intellectual and literary interested are deeply personalized in her compositions and performances and her somewhat esoteric tests become vivid and immediate in her music.  This score is a great example of Kate’s incredible level of technical accomplishment as well as her imaginative and unique approach to her art.

More info

Matthew Aucoin:
Stranger Love, Act 3 (excerpt), by Dylan Mattingly, performed by Contemporaneous
Dylan Mattingly writes music of limitless jubilance and joy. This excerpt from his opera Stranger Love is a kind of dance party for the angels, built upon an unlikely echo from a Springsteen-esque “promised land.”

Doug Balliett:
I cannot stop listening to Ok ok pt 2 from Kanye’s latest album “Donda”. It’s got a heavy dark groove and guest Shenseea’s verse is jaw-dropping.

Julia Bullock:
Up From The Skies by Jimi Hendrix, from the album Bold As Love (1967)
It’s like some prophetic, post-apocalyptic love song… (honestly hope to find a way to sing it one day)

Jay Campbell:
I’m currently listening my way through Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers, a gigantic sprawling 4.5 hour collection of 19 pieces written over the course of 30+ years, each one titled after various moments, ideas, people, or places related to the Civil Rights Movement. It’s music that is very much alive in a literal sense. As in, it really feels like it is deeply meditating on the lived experience of human life itself. It’s extremely moving, exciting, surprising, and sometimes baffling. But when I listen to this highly abstract music, my ears somehow feel closer to hearing a full spectrum of complex human experience in all of its contradictions of tragedy, playfulness, rage, and joy. And maybe things that I haven’t even felt yet. And — when you consider the context of the composer himself, a Black man born and raised in segregated Mississippi — things that many of us are privileged to never have to personally feel or experience.

Anthony Roth Costanzo:
Lately I’ve become obsessed with Betty Carter and how wildly inventive and abstract she is, both in how she deploys the extremes of her voice, and how she charts the trajectory of a song. From her piercing head tones, to her forthright parlato, to her childlike upper chest register, to her impossibly rich baritone notes, I find her a total revelation. You can hear those colors set forth in this track:

Miranda Cuckson:
Wadada Leo Smith America’s National Parks
I adore this work (which I first heard a few years ago) for many reasons, including its bracing beauty, its grouping of very satisfyingly distinct utterances and instrumental presences, its continually thrilling sensations of space and texture, and the composer’s deep vision of the psychological tension in our shared natural landscapes.

Julia Eichten:
While it was an extreme challenge to choose only one song from Xenia Rubinos’ latest album, Una Rosa, Cógelo Suave has been one of many that I have on repeat.  This swirl of a song will make any day brighter, break you open and have you singing!

Emi Ferguson:

Keir GoGwilt:

Conor Hanick:
The last thing played on my music app was the first disc of Beach House’s upcoming album, Once Twice Melody, which is lush, sweeping, synthy, and grandiose.

I’ve also been enjoying Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack to the film The Power of the Dog, especially the Messiaen-esque finale Psalm 22.

Lastly, folks are rightly excited about the recent Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders collaboration, but I’ve found myself revisiting Floating Points’ 2015 album of experimental synth-jazz, Elaenia, with a particular habit of rewinding “Silhouettes (I, II, III)”

Coleman Itzkoff:
Pick: Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice
I’ll admit to a certain degree of bias for my playlist pick, Matt being a close friend and current roommate here in New York City, but I truly felt compelled to list this new opera of his, which recently held it’s Met premiere to much acclaim. I was able to attend two live performances, as well as listen to the BBC broadcast on a recent long car trip and found so much of the music staying with me, swirling around in the back of my consciousness like the really great music tends to do. The score is dazzling, deeply moving, complex, tectonic (superlatives abound!), and the performance by Erin Morley, Joshua Hopkins, Barry Banks, and more, all backed by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra, is totally and utterly ravishing. For those already dedicated fans of Matt’s work, Eurydice is the latest and greatest contribution to his oeuvre (not to mention the latest in a 400-year Orphic opera tradition). And for those less familiar with the music of Matthew Aucoin, I can think of no better place to start!

More info

Or Schraiber:
Formidable by Stromae always makes me dance.

Bobbi Jene Smith:
La Solitude always makes me feel the dance inside of me. It has been a song that has been a starting point for many dances I have made. Thank you, Barbara, for haunting and dancing with me. I hope this song will make you feel the dance in you too.

Davónes Tines:
six thirty by Ariana Grande
Towards the end of the year I’m feeling cozy and romantic.  This song from one of my favorite artists, on her latest album, continues to evolve her special combination of crisp vocals wrapped in string-infused r&b redux.

Zack Winokur:
We Do Not Belong Together performed by Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin. I’ve been listening pretty nonstop to Stephen Sondheim since his death. It’s hard to choose just one, but this song is the devastating apotheosis of a genuinely real relationship at the core of Sunday in the Park with George, a show I was going to direct last spring until covid struck it down.

Thank you for joining us at our 75th Festival, September 16-19, 2021. Read review excerpts below. Relive concerts anytime by watching our archived live streaming concerts. View our photo gallery of some of our favorite Festival moments.

Download PDF of reviews here

“a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future” New York Times

“Against unsettlingly uncertain odds, Ojai’s 75th anniversary festival happened as hoped and promised, and it was special” Los Angeles Times

“In Ojai, circa 2021, themes of “homecoming” and pandemic-related dynamics struck emotional chords beyond the provocative and consoling musical goods.” San Francisco Classical Voice

“Throughout its illustrious history, the Ojai Music Festival has been known for a series of unpredictable, serendipitous musical experiences that become known as quintessential Ojai moments. One such moment stood out as a highlight of this year’s festival – an “Ojai Dawns” concert… [with a program of] all Mexican composers, music by [Gabriela] Ortiz, Javier Álvarez, and Georgina Derbez.” San Francisco Classical Voice

“Pandemic-waylaid, the Ojai Music Festival finally erected its contemporary-music-geared Big Top with one of its strongest programs of late.” Santa Barbara Independent

“Rhiannon Giddens was an inspired choice to anchor the festival with… a rousing concert of her original/traditional material on Saturday night… The concert… resonated with all of the pain and struggle we have experienced over the last two years in a way that was at once healing and grounding.” Santa Barbara Independent

“arguably the most exciting music event in this country” Berkshire Fine Arts

“Music sounds fresh and very much of the moment. It both delights and moves in its Ojai setting.” Berkshire Fine Arts

“thoughtfully programmed and precisely performed” Sequenza 21

“The Ojai spirit of adventure was alive in the programming hands of music director du jour John Adams… and the new artistic and executive director Ara Guzelimian” Classical Voice North America 

The Festival continues to thrive because of the enthusiastic support of its friends and patrons. Enjoy a few snapshots of a memorable Festival moment!

Images courtesy of Frank Gruber.