Join us for a special occasion featuring former Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris and now published author. “Always the Music” is the fascinating story of Tom Morris’ personal metamorphosis through the highest levels of the world of classical music, his learning and insights into how storied musical institutions function, great artists create, and audiences engage. The final chapter synthesizes Morris’ career lessons into an unequivocal but thoughtful prescription for the American orchestra. Mostly, though, this is the entertaining story of one man’s lifelong love affair with great music and the people who make it.
THU December 5.2025 | 5:30-7PM | Ojai Music Festival Lounge (201 S. Signal Street)
5:30PM: Enjoy a complimentary wine bar
6:00PM: Book reading and interview with Tom Morris and host Jeremy Turner, followed by a book signing.
We look forward to sharing this special evening with you!
This event is free to Ojai Music Festival friends. Limited seating. RSVP by clicking the link below.
Thomas W. Morris had a distinguished career in the music business, having long service as chief executive of the Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, as well as artistic director of California’s Ojai Music Festival. His work in Ojai was highly recognized for the span and creativity of programming, as well as the breadth of artists with whom he collaborated.. He was one of the three founding partners of Spring for Music, an innovative orchestra festival held at Carnegie Hall from 2011 to 2014, and he has consulted nationally and internationally with over 75 orchestras and performing organizations. With a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Princeton University, as well as an MBA from the Wharton School, Morris is well versed in music, finance, marketing, fundraising, management and leadership. He is frequently sought out by major media as an expert to comment on music business issues of the day and has been featured in The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The New Yorker, and more. A percussionist, he has performed extensively in Boston Symphony, Boston Pops and the Blossom Festival Band. Thomas W. Morris | About
About Jeremy Turner
Composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Turner is known for creating innovative and diverse music for the moving image and the stage. He is a two time EMMY® nominee, has won the Music + Sound Award, an ASCAP Screen Music Award, an International Documentary Association Award, the AICP Award, and has been listed in NPR Music’s Favorite Songs of the Year. Jeremy regularly writes film and television scores for Disney+, HBO, Netflix, MAX, and Hulu; simultaneously creating concert music and composing for collaborative installations. Recent works include the score for the upcoming MRC film Let’s Have Kids!, directed by Adam Sztykiel; Shorebirds, a piece for solo violin premiered by Simone Porter at Lotusland in Montecito, California; and The Coast of Industry (2024), an art installation that recently opened at MASS MoCA.Performing throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, Jeremy has participated in the music festivals of Aspen, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Seattle, La Jolla, Moab, Sarasota, Interlochen, and Music at Plush. He has conducted twice at the LACMA Art + Film gala, has performed collaborations for Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana, and conducted in New York’s Central Park for Ralph Lauren’s 50th Anniversary.
As a composer, his music has been heard around the world, from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. Noted works include The Inland Seas, composed for violinist James Ehnes and mandolinist Chris Thile and commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society; Suite of Unreason, a commission from the Music Academy of the West for their 70th Anniversary season; and a choral work for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Wave Hill in New York. He has written music for The Jack Quartet, yMusic Ensemble, Brooklyn Rider, and Flux Quartet, as well as five installation pieces with the artist Chris Doyle. Jeremy Turner Studio
The 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape, as caretakers and participants, and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers, as well as multimedia artists whose works defy categorization.
The 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape, as caretakers and participants, and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers, as well as multimedia artists whose works defy categorization.
West Coast Premieres of Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique, Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, and Terry Riley’s Pulsefield
The Festival celebrates multiple generations of composers, including residencies by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Liza Lim, and Marcos Balter; composer-performers include Craig Taborn (piano), Leilehua Lanzilotti (viola), and Susie Ibarra (percussion)
An all-star “meta-ensemble” of Festival musicians including Seth Parker Woods, cello; Wu Wei, sheng; Steven Schick, conductor and percussion; the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell); Katinka Kleijn, cello; Cory Smythe and Alex Peh, piano and keyboards; Ross Karre, percussion; Joshua Rubin, clarinet; M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone and electronic hurdy-gurdy; and members of Australia’s ELISION Ensemble
Festival programming will include the West Coast Premieres of Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique, Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, and Terry Riley’s Pulsefield
Festival celebrates multiple generations of composers, including works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Liza Lim, and Marcos Balter; composer-performers include Craig Taborn (piano), Leilehua Lanzilotti (viola), and Susie Ibarra (percussion)
An all-star “meta-ensemble” of Festival musicians including Seth Parker Woods, cello; Wu Wei, sheng; Steven Schick, conductor and percussion; the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell); Katinka Kleijn, cello; Cory Smythe and Alex Peh, piano and keyboards; Ross Karre, percussion; Joshua Rubin, clarinet; M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone and electronic hurdy-gurdy; and members of Australia’s ELISION Ensemble
“There’s no place in the world like Ojai, and there is no gathering of musicians and ideas like the Ojai Festival. From the time I was a kid growing up in Southern California, the Festival has taken on mythical dimensions for me.” – Claire Chase, 2025 Music Director
(OJAI CA – October 15, 2024) — The 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists, flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, the 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape as caretakers and participants and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers.
Described by Chase as a kind of “meta ensemble,” Ojai’s 2025 Festival collaborators include returning artists Steven Schick, who previously served as 2015 Music Director; cellist Seth Parker Woods; the JACK Quartet comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell; clarinetist Joshua Rubin; percussionist Ross Karre; and composerTania León. Ojai welcomes several artists in their first Festival appearances including Annea Lockwood, composer; Wu Wei, sheng; Marcos Balter, composer; Susie Ibarra, composer, sound artist and percussion; Katinka Kleijn, cello; Leilehua Lanzilotti, composer and viola; Liza Lim, composer; Cory Smythe and Alex Peh, keyboards; Craig Taborn, piano, electronic musician and composer/improviser; M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone and electronic hurdy-gurdy; and members of ELISION Ensemble.
“In the spirit of collectivism and collaboration, I’m excited to invite these artists to play together in new and sometimes surprising ensemble configurations. We’ll all show up as both headliners and side acts in each other’s explorations,” commented Claire Chase.
“While shaping these programs,” writes Chase, “I was inspired by the author Donna Haraway’s invitation to encounter one another in “unexpected combinations and collaborations,” in what she calls “oddkin”—a term for our deep and unruly interdependence. What a beautiful description of the messy and miraculous experience of making music in the 21st century! The four days of the Festival will be anchored by four generations of brilliant composers whose projects—though wonderfully divergent stylistically—explore common themes of rebirth, re-imagination, reclamation, and re-wilding. Our programs will be brought to life by an exhilarating lineup of performers whose manifold musical backgrounds will meet in unpredictable and electrifying new ways. From Thursday to Sunday, we will conjure thinking forests, liberated rivers, endangered charms, ancient mythologies, holy presences, magical spells, and reimagined communities. And we will embrace multispecies collaboration in performance experiences that extend from the newly rewilded landscapes of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy to the feathered night choruses fluttering around Libbey Bowl. My hope is that these programs will illuminate and celebrate the fragilities as well as the exuberant possibilities of music made in oddkin. I look forward to welcoming you to the adventure!”
Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian said, “Claire Chase is one of the most vibrant generators of ideas in today’s musical life, something she does with boundless imagination and generosity of spirit. It’s been so rewarding to imagine all of Ojai’s possibilities with her. I’m particularly excited by the musical community she’s creating with the resident performers and composers, weaving them throughout in collaborations and cross-current inspirations. And being a native Californian, Claire responds deeply to the particular beauty and complexity of Ojai’s natural setting, something represented in many works that explore many distinct environments.”
The 2025 Festival opens on Thursday, June 5 with Annea Lockwood’s bayou-borne, an affectionate tribute to Pauline Oliveros, and culminates with Marcos Balter’s Pan from Chase’s epic Density 2036 project. Balter’s already iconic Pan (2017-18) is an evening-length musical drama for solo flute, live electronics, and an ensemble of community musicians. The all-ages, all-abilities Pan ensemble—a kind of 21st-century Greek chorus that serves as the conscience of the community in this telling of the Greek myth—is assembled newly in each city to which the work travels.
Friday (June 6) begins with an early morning program featuring the JACK Quartet with works by Tania León, Leilehua Lanziliotti, and two exciting emerging composers, Vicente Atria and Eduardo Aguilar. 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.
In its West Coast premiere, Australian composer Liza Lim’s Sex Magic for solo contrabass flute and electronics centers Friday afternoon. Inspired by Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute (Bertha), Sex Magic celebrates the sacred erotic in women’s history, evoking the giant bass flutes of Papua New Guinea and the Australian Didjeridoo in a work that ritually moves across three altars, creating a mystical, mesmerizing evocation of both the present and the timeless past.
Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff will be featured on the Friday evening Libbey Bowl concert. Performed by Claire Chase and the JACK Quartet, The Holy Liftoff was conceived as a series of musical sketches and brilliantly colored drawings. Of Riley’s recent work Chase said, “At 90 years young, Terry is on fire with ideas. He’s creating new ideas and inciting collaborations and connections with urgency and vitality. For Ojai, we are imagining the limitless variations, realizations and possible interpretations of his ‘liftoff’ to include both performers and audiences.” Music for a “chorus of cellos” by Sofia Gubaidulina and Julius Eastman precede The Holy Liftoff.
On Saturday, June 7, following a free “morning meditation” in the Ojai Meadow Preserves, a collaboration with the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, the first Libbey Bowl concert of the day centers on the West Coast premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique for flute, two cellos, piano and electronics. Thorvaldsdottir describes the work as “inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance – throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite.”
Saturday afternoon continues with the West Coast premiere of composer-pianist 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.) At the Libbey Bowl that evening is a program of music by Bach, Sofia Gubaidulina (inspired by Bach) and Tania León, preceding Liza Lim’s large-scale How Forests Think. A work inspired by the imagery of ancient forests as vibrant, symbiotic communities that, as the 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.”
Sunday morning begins with another free “morning meditation” program. The JACK Quartet then explores their ongoing “Modern/Medieval” project mid-morning at Libbey Bowl, with music from the 14th to 17th centuries renewed for contemporary performance by composers/JACK violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman. The program includes the west coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, a musical tribute to rich and fragile ecosystems inspired by the distinct rainforest habitats of Luzon, Philippines. The work features the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Philippine Northern-style bamboo, gong, and flute music, performed on new sound sculptures of gong metals. Sky Islands is described as “a musical call to action, drawing awareness to dwindling biodiversity, changing climate and global community practices.”
An exuberant all-company 2025 Festival finale includes music by Leilehua Lanzilotti, Pauline Oliveros’ The Witness and the West Coast premiere of Terry Riley’s Pulsefield as the joyous ending in celebration of his 90th birthday.
A complete 2025 Ojai Music Festival schedule will be announced in January 2025. Programs and artists are subject to change. For 2025 artist and composer biographies and for Festival updates, visit OjaiFestival.org.
EXPERIENCE THE 79th OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL, JUNE 5 TO 8, 2025 2025 Libbey Bowl series passes are available and may be purchased online at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. Passes start at $215 for reserved seating. Lawn Area passes start at $90. Single tickets and day passes will go on sale in spring 2025. Follow Festival updates at OjaiFestival.org.
CLAIRE CHASE, MUSIC DIRECTOR Claire Chase, described by The New York Times recently as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season and serves as the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival. Previously, Chase performed at the Ojai Music Festival with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2015 with that year’s Music Director Steven Schick, in 2016 with Music Director Peter Sellars, and in 2017 with Music Director Vijay Iyer.
Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia. Upcoming concerto projects include the world premiere of a new duo concerto by Dai Fujikura for Chase and the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, which the pair will premiere with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, with subsequent performances with Ensemble Resonanz at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and on tour in Switzerland, Belgium, Turkey, and Greece. In the 2022-23 season, Chase premiered a new duo concerto by Felipe Lara with the vocalist and bassist esperanza spalding and the conductor Susanna Mälkki, which was named one of the Best Classical Music Performances of the Year by The New York Times.
In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, described by The New Yorker as “a quarter-century journey with little precedent.” Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, educational initiatives, and a community-focused approach to cultural production. In 2023, Chase performed all ten Density programs to date in a weeklong series of events co-produced by Carnegie Hall and The Kitchen. Central to the Density project is a commitment to supporting an international, multigenerational community of flutists who will take the Density repertoire in bold new interpretive directions. The Density Fellows program, launched in 2023 in celebration of the 10th anniversary, provides an international cohort of emerging flutists with the resources to make the Density repertoire their own. Chase is the artistic director of Density Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute in the 21st century.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017 and as an ensemble member on performance and educational projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that resulted in the premieres of over 1,000 new works and earned the group multiple Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and the Ensemble of the Year Award from Musical America Worldwide.
A deeply committed educator, Chase is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural advocacy. Chase is also Creative Associate at The Juilliard School, where she mentors young artists and engages students in a range of interdisciplinary projects. With her longtime colleague Steven Schick, she cofounded Ensemble Evolution at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, a three-week intensive for the next generation of interdisciplinary artists, curators, and teachers. Chase’s Debs Creative Chair residency at Carnegie Hall encompassed programming for all ages, including a “Day of Listening” for children and families inspired by the listening philosophies of Pauline Oliveros. Chase will partner with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to expand her Pauline Oliveros project as part of the PST ART x Science Collide festival in 2024-25.
Claire Chase’s extensive discography includes eight solo albums of world premiere recordings and dozens of collaborative recordings with ensembles, composers, and sound artists from a wide range of musical genres. Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She lives in Brooklyn.
ARA GUZELIMIAN, ARTISTIC AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Ara Guzelimian is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival, having begun in that position in July 2020. The appointment culminates many years of association with the Festival including tenures as director of the Ojai Talks and as Artistic Director from 1992–97. Guzelimian stepped down as Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School in New York City in June 2020, having served in that position since 2007. He continues at Juilliard as Special Advisor.
Prior to the Juilliard appointment, he was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. Guzelimian serves as artistic consultant for the Marlboro Music Festival and School in Vermont. He is a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Music Awards, the artistic committee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in London, and a board member of the Amphion and Pacific Harmony Foundations. He is also a member of the music visiting committee of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.
Previously, Guzelimian held the position of Artistic Administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, and he was long associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, first as producer for the orchestra’s national radio broadcasts and, subsequently, as Artistic Administrator. Guzelimian is editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, he was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL The Ojai Music Festival represents an ideal of adventurous, open-minded, and openhearted programming in the most beautiful and welcoming of settings, with audiences and artists to match its aspirations. Now in its 78th year, the Festival remains a creative laboratory for thought-provoking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic outdoor setting. Each Festival’s narrative is guided by a different Music Director, whose distinctive perspectives shape programming — ensuring energized festivals year after year.
Throughout each year, the Ojai Music Festival contributes to Southern California’s cultural landscape with in-person and online programming as well as robust educational offerings that serve thousands of public-school students and seniors. The organization’s apex is the world-renowned Festival, which takes place over four days in Ojai, a breathtaking valley 75 miles from Los Angeles, which is a perennial platform for the fresh and unexpected. During the immersive experience, a mingling of the most curious take part in concerts, symposia, free community events, and social gatherings. The intimate Festival weekend, considered a highlight of the international music summer season, welcomes up to 5,000 patrons and reaches exponentially more audiences worldwide through streaming and broadcasts of concerts and discussions throughout the year.
Since its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has presented expansive programming in unusual ways with an eclectic mix of new and rarely performed music, as well as refreshing juxtapositions of musical styles. Through its signature structure of the Artistic Director appointing a different Music Director each year, Ojai has presented a “who’s who” of music including Mitsuko Uchida, Rhiannon Giddens, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Vijay Iyer, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Barbara Hannigan in recent years; throughout its history, featured artists have included Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, David Robertson, Eighth Blackbird, George Benjamin, Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, Jeremy Denk, Steven Schick, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Sellars.
The Ojai Music Festival welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists, Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, the 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape as caretakers and participants and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers. Read 2025 highlights and join us for another music adventure.
Types of Libbey Bowl Series Passes
NUMBER OF DAYS
What’s Included
4-Day Libbey Bowl Pass
Libbey Bowl Concerts on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (7 in total), plus Ojai Talks
3-Day Libbey Bowl Pass
Libbey Bowl Concerts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (6 in total)
2-Day Libbey Bowl Pass
Libbey Bowl Concerts on Saturday and Sunday (4 in total)
This symbol indicates that this is a Beyond the Bowl event, not located at Libbey Bowl. Due to the intimate setting of these events, they are not automatically included in Libbey Bowl Passes and may require the purchase of an additional ticket.
Automatically included in 4-Day Libbey Bowl Passes, available for purchase as an add-on.
PAN 8:00PM | Libbey Bowl
A festive opening night with Annea Lockwood’s bayou-borne, an affectionate tribute to Pauline Oliveros, then culminating in Marcos Balter’s Pan, an already iconic work from Claire Chase’s epic Density 2036 project. Pan is a deeply affecting work that explores the life and death of the mythical Greek goat-god Pan, written for flute, electronics, and a community of musicians, telling the tale of this weaver of melodies and a guardian of the wilderness – true to the Ojai spirit!
FRI 06|06
OJAI DAWNS 8:00AM | Zalk Theater, Beasant Hill School
Early morning program featuring JACK Quartet with works by Tania León, Liza Lim, and two exciting emerging composers, Vicente Atria and Eduardo Aguilar.
A program of works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Cory Smythe and Craig Taborn that celebrates the old made new in Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions for harpsichord as well as a summit meeting between two dazzlingly inventive composer/pianists whose worlds encompass jazz, new music and beyond.
SEX MAGIC 3:30PM | Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
A program devoted to Sex Magic by the Australian composer Liza Lim for solo contrabass flute and electronics, celebrating the sacred erotic in women’s history. Inspired by Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute (Bertha), Sex Magic evokes the giant bass flutes of Papua New Guinea and the Australian Didjeridoo in a work that ritually moves across three altars, creating a mystical, mesmerizing evocation of both the present and the timeless past.
Music for a “chorus of cellos” by Julius Eastman precede The Holy Liftoff, the most recent work by pioneering American composer Terry Riley, played in Ojai by Claire Chase and the JACK Quartet. Written as a series of musical sketches and brilliantly colored drawings, an exuberant and energized work represents a culmination for Riley, who says “I feel like this piece sums up a lot of things I’ve worked for.”
SAT 06|07
MORNING MEDITATION 8:00 AM | Ojai Meadows Preserve
Program TBA.
Free and open to the public
CHAMBERS 10:30AM | Libbey Bowl
A program centered on the West Coast premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique for flute, two cellos, piano and electronics, a work of enigmatic lyricism by a composer who is inspired by the “musical qualities of nature.”
ENDANGERED CHARMS 3:30PM | Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
A concert centered on the West Coast premiere of Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano and electronics by the endlessly inventive composer-pianist Craig Taborn. The work is inspired by a dream in which plants awake, blossom, grow and change as the dreamer walks through a garden.
Subscribers have first access to ticket sales. Purchase this event as an add-on when you subscribe.
HOW FORESTS THINK 8:00PM | Libbey Bowl
Music by Bach, Sofia Gubaidulina (inspired by Bach) and Tania León, precede the West Coast premiere of the large-scale How Forests Think by Liza Lim, a work inspired by the imagery of ancient forests as vibrant, symbiotic communities that, as the composer writes, “that 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.”
SUN 06|08
MORNING MEDITATION 8:00AM
Program TBA.
Free and open to the public
RITUALS 10:30AM | Libbey Bowl
The JACK Quartet explores Modern/Medieval with music from the 14th to 17th centuries, renewed for contemporary performance by composers/JACK violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman. The program is followed by the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, evoking a unique environment of the elevated rain forests in the Philippines with the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Philippine Northern-style bamboo, gong, and flute music, performed on new sound sculptures of gong metals.
ENDANGERED CHARMS (repeat performance) 2:30PM | Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
A concert centered on the West Coast premiere of Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano and electronics by the endlessly inventive composer-pianist Craig Taborn. The work is inspired by a dream in which plants awake, blossom, grow and change as the dreamer walks through a garden.
Subscribers have first access to ticket sales. Purchase this event as an add-on when you subscribe.
PULSEFIELDS 5:30PM | Libbey Bowl
An exuberant all-company finale with music by Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti, Pauline Oliveros’ The Witness and the West Coast premiere of Terry Riley’s Pulsefield as the joyous ending.
Programs and artists are subject to change. Schedule as of October 8, 2024.
Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for flutist Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time (2023) for gestural performer, film and ensemble. She is interested in the plural creativities of collaborating with the ‘more-than-human’ and in speculative questions around the sentiency of things including time, notation and of music itself. Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to more-than-human realms.
Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orkest, BBC, BBC Scottish, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and the JACK Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Berliner Festspiele, Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals. She was named ‘Composer of the Year’ in the 2024 OPUS KLASSIK (Germany) and awarded the 13th Roche Commission to compose for the 2026 Lucerne Festival (Switzerland). Prizes recognising her wide-ranging career and vitality of compositional practice include the Australia Council’s Don Banks Award (2018), the ‘Happy New Ears Prize’ of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation (2021) and the 2022 APRA AMCOS National Luminary Award. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 King’s Birthday honours for her contribution to Australian music. She was DAAD Artist-in-Berlin in 2007-08 and Composer-in-Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2021-22. A founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-2016), she was also elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2022.
Liza Lim is Professor of Composition and holds the Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She is the first musician to be awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2025-29) to lead a five-year program designed to encourage engagement with urgent climate and social issues through music. Her initiatives with the Sydney Con’s ‘Composing Women’ gender equity program have had far-reaching impact on commissioning, performance, and next generation leadership in Australian music. The program and her leadership were recognised with the 2020 ClassicalNEXT Award, Rotterdam. She is visiting Endowed Guest Professor at the Frankfurt HfMDK for 3 periods in 2024-25. She has led composition masterclasses and summer courses all over the world, eg: Darmstadt, Royaumont, Shanghai, Boston, Viitasaari, Dublin, Banff, and given conference keynotes and distinguished guest lectures at Kunstuniversität Graz, Oxford, Harvard, UCSD and the University of Sydney amongst others. She established the HCR CD label (now part of NMC Records), Divergence Press and CeReNeM Journal at the University of Huddersfield where she was Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (2008-2017). She has continually reinvented her compositional language and practice across a substantial output that spans intimate and collaborative instrumental solos, to chamber and orchestral works, to five strikingly different operas. Her catalogue of compositions has been published by Casa Ricordi (Milan, London, Berlin) since 1992. British writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s comprehensive book The Music of Liza Lim was published in 2022 by Wildbird Music, Sydney. Her discography extends to 40 CDs including 10 portrait albums released on KAIROS, WERGO, New Focus Recordings, HCR/NMC and HartArt. Album releases and premieres of her work have consistently appeared on The New Yorker’s annual Notable Performances and Recordings of the Year lists 2013-2021 & 2023.
Liza Lim studied at the Victorian College of the Arts (BA, music), University of Melbourne (MMus) and the University of Queensland (PhD). She undertook postgraduate composition studies with Ton de Leeuw at the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam in 1987. Other composition teachers and academic mentors include Dr Rosalind McMillan AM, Dr Richard David Hames, Riccardo Formosa, Prof. Philip Bračanin, Prof. Brian Ferneyhough, Prof. Malcolm Gilles AM, and Prof. Eric Clarke amongst others.
The artistry of internationally, renowned Sheng virtuoso Wu Wei reaches far beyond the traditional boundaries of his more than 3000-year-old Chinese instrument and brings it well into the 21st century.
The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.
Wu Wei’s radiant and transparent tone as well as the infinite possibilities offered by his instrument in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, polyphony have led him to collaborating with many artists and ensembles in traditional, chamber or orchestral settings, improvising in solo concerts or with jazz big Bands, playing electronic music as well as taking part to minimal, baroque music performances.
Wu Wei’s desire to experiment with new sound and types of musical expression and his extraordinary capacity to create an individual world out of each performance are reflected in his collaborations with distinguished composers writing concertos for Sheng and orchestra especially for him: Huang Ruo (The color of yellow – 2007), Guus Janssen (Four Songs – 2008), Unsuk Chin (Su – 2009), Jukka Tiensuu (Teoton – 2015), Bernd Richard Deutsch (Phaenomena – 2019), Ondrej Adamek (Lost Prayer Book – 2019), Donghong Shin (Anecdote – 2019), Enjott Schneider (change – 2003 and several other concerti).
In the last decade, Wu Wei has performed with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic under Kent Nagano, the Seoul Philharmonic under Myung Whun Chung, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, BBC Symphony under Ilan Volkov, the Cabrillo Festival and Sao Paulo Symphony under Marin Alsop, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden and Edo de Waart, Helsinki Philharmonic under Matthias Pintscher, ensembles such as the Holland Baroque, the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Atlas Ensemble and the NDR Big Band, and soloists like Guus Jansen (organ), Wang Li (Jew’s harp) or Pascal Contet (accordion).
He is regularly invited by international festivals such as the BBC Prom’s in London, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Edinburgh International Festival, Suntory Hall Summer Festival Tokyo, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Festival Achtbrücken Cologne, Grafenegg Festival, Lincoln Center Festival New York.
Upcoming events include Wu Wei’s debuts with the New York Philharmonic and Sao Paulo Symphony orchestra in 2019, the Chinese premiere in Beijing of Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Sheng concerto Phaenomena with the China NCPA Orchestra under Jia Lü, the world premiere of a new Sheng concerto by Enjott Schneider with the Taipei Chinese Orchestra and a tour to America and Canada with the Chinese NCPA Orchestra in 2020.
As a composer, Wu Wei has received commissions from the Fondation Royaumont, Musica Viva in Munich, the Hanse Culture Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and several other institutions.
With Martin Stegner (viola) und Matthew McDonald (double bass), both members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he founded the Wu Wei Trio which appears each season in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. As a founder of the Berlin based Ensemble Asianart, he likes to share transcultural programs with instrumentalists from all around the world. He is an ideal partner for interdisciplinary projects involving literature, dance, theatre, architecture.
Wu Wei has recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, Pentatone and several of his CDs and DVDs have been distinguished by international Awards: International Classical Music Award 2015 and BBC Music Magazine Award 2015 for the Unsuk Chin concertos CD with Deutsche Gramophon, the German Critic Award in 2012 for the “AsianArt Ensemble” CD to note a few.
He also received the Best Sheng Soloist Award China in 2017, the Herald Angels Award 2011 at the International Festival Edinburgh, the Global Root German World Music Prize 2004 in Rudolstadt (Germany).
Wu Wei was born in 1970 in Gaoyou (China). He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and started his career in 1993 as a Sheng soloist in China where he performed among others with the Chinese Music Orchestra Shanghaï. In 1995, he was selected by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and FNS (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) to take part in a four-year scholarship which brought him to Berlin, where he is still currently living. Since 2013, Wu Wei has been a Professor teaching the Sheng at the Shanghaï Conservatory of Music.
M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains.
As a composer, visual artist, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga merges these creative identities by embracing the potential of expanded notation systems as an inquisition into new sonic possibilities. Their lifelong passion for collage, maps, puzzles, and asemic languages fuels an enchantment with encoding and decoding musical territories, allowing lexical approaches to transform into palpable expressions. Within their artistic vision, Tiesenga seeks to convey inner worlds where protocols and rules converge with intuition and mystique.
Tiesenga approaches sound-making as a collaborative exchange – central to Tiesenga’s artistic inspiration is the creation of works that cultivate connection and reciprocity in contemporary music. Their understanding of the musical score as both an art object and a notated intention for performance/action facilitates the construction of modular, living landscapes that reflect the people and spaces present. Graphic scores, for Tiesenga, serve as intermediaries bridging Karreideas and actions, visual and aural experiences, and the externalization of internal processes. As an ardent experimentalist, they find inspiration and excitement in exploring improvisation and indeterminacy, elevating and weaving performers’ agency by inviting personal interpretation into the fabric of a composition. Informed by their own extensive performance practice, Tiesenga is committed to crafting works that engage both performers and audiences alike to see their environment a little differently.
Tiesenga’s compositional collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
M.A. Tiesenga holds an MFA in Composition – Experimental Sound Practices and an MFA in Experimental Animation with a Concentration in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Dr. Chien-Kwan Lin.
Joshua Nathan Rubin served as the Program Director and then Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble from 2011-2018, where he oversaw the creative direction of more than one hundred concerts per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.”
Joshua has worked closely with many of the prominent composers and performers of our time, including George Crumb, Matana Roberts, Alvin Lucier, David Lang, Chaya Czernowin, Du Yun, Christian Wolff, Cory Smythe, George Lewis, Steven Schick, Kaija Saariaho, Craig Taborn, Pauline Oliveros, Okkyung Lee, Nathan Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, John Zorn, and Mario Davidovsky. Joshua can be heard on recordings from the Nonesuch, Kairos, New Focus, Mode, Cedille, Naxos, Bridge, New Amsterdam, and Tzadik labels. His album There Never is No Light, available on the Tundra label, highlights music that uses technology to capture the human engagement of the performer and the listener.
This season he will perform on modern and historical clarinets in New York with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Teatro Nuovo, the American Composers Orchestra, at Harvard University, in Los Angeles with Wild Up, Monday Evening Concerts, Tesserae Baroque, at the Ojai Music Festival with Rhiannon Giddens, and in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Berlin, Miami, Boston, Houston, Kansas City, San Diego, and Chicago.
His clarinet studies were mentored by Lawrence McDonald, Mark Nuccio, and Steven Cohen. He served on the faculty of the Banff Music Centre’s Ensemble Evolution summer program from 2016-2019. Rubin is on the faculty of soundSCAPE Festival and Ensemble Evolution. He serves on the faculty of the College of the Performing Arts at The New School and is Artist-in-Residence at University of California Santa Cruz in 2024.
Joshua holds degrees in Biology and Clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master’s degree from the Mannes School of Music.
His passion for technology in arts led Joshua to develop LUIGI, management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management, as well as his ongoing work to make electronic music technologies easier to use for performers and composers. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.
Ross Karre (he/him b. 1983 in Michigan) is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, OH and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Ross formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival (Netherlands), Ojai Festival (CA), LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears (TN), MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Diskotek (Greenland), and Music Today Biennial (Brazil). 10.67 Cycles, Karre’s solo album featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the National Gallery of Art. Karre’s archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Vijay Iyer, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICEensemble, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group.
Two-time GRAMMY®-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres, prompting The New York Times to write, “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California since 2022 and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.
Among the highlights of his 2024-2025 season, Woods performs in the world premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s new cello concerto, Had to Be, at Spoleto Festival USA, later performing its New York premiere in his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in the world premiere of a new cello concerto by Julia Adolphe. A core member of the music collective Wild Up, Woods is featured as soloist in the group’s Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence, released June 2024 on New Amsterdam Records, and was nominated alongside the group for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award.
During the 2023-2024 season, Woods brought his GRAMMY®-nominated, autobiographical tour-de-force Difficult Grace to San Diego and Philadelphia, following the world premiere at 92NY and performances at UCLA and Chicago’s Harris Theater. Difficult Grace was released as an album on Cedille Records in 2023 and nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Highlights of last season include performances with Hilary Hahn at Konzerthaus Dortmund in Germany and touring a new version of John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC).
In addition to his post at The University of Southern California, Woods serves on the artist faculty of the Music Academy of the West each summer. He holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, as well as a PhD from the University of Huddersfield.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over 25 years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise and avant-garde contexts.
Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Manhathappa.
Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics. Taborn lives in Brooklyn.
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for nearly 50 years, and in 2014 was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
Steven Schick is music director emeritus of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, serving as its music director from 2006–22, and the artistic director of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He has guest conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. He was artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2010–18) and directed programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from 2009–19, the last three as co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Classical Music program. He was the music director of the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.
In 2020, Schick won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University for commitment to the performance of American music. Schick’s publications include a book, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams; and numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis and its companion The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). The latter received Germany’s award for the best new music release of 2015.
Steven Schick is distinguished professor of music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.
Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Darmstadt festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with composer-improvisors Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe’s recent critically acclaimed albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of The Shifting Foundation. He has received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.
Aotearoa New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.
In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.
Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room.
Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.
Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator. Lanzilotti’s practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue.
Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.”
Recently a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts awardee, Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, Bogliasco Foundation, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.
As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works are characterized by expansive explorations of timbre. These works have been premiered at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Thailand International Composition Festival, and Dots+Loops—Australia’s post-genre music and arts series. Lanzilotti has written new works for ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, ETHEL (with guest Allison Logins-Hull), and Sō Percussion. Additionally, Lanzilotti is part of the network of musicians / artists in the Wandelweiser collective.
Lanzilotti’s new multimedia work, the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky, is currently on tour through 2026, having premiered at The Noguchi Museum in Spring 2024. The tour continues to the Cranbrook Art Museum (October 9, 2024–January 12, 2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2–May 18, 2025), the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026).
As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk’s Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne’s Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti has premiered many new works including Wayfinder—a viola concerto by Dai Fujikura inspired by Polynesian wayfinding. in manus tuas—Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut—was featured in Steve Smith’s Log Journal Playlist (Live life out Loud), Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019, and The Boston Globe’s Top 10 classical albums of 2019, and was called “an entrancing new album” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross.
As a performer, projects include: performing Dai Fujikura’s Wayfinder Concerto as a soloist with the Nagoya Philharmonic, a project that uplifts native knowledge and indigenous intuition while encouraging courageous and active listening; performing with object instruments created by Adam Morford (metal), Toshiko Takaezu (ceramic), and others; and improvising as a member of The Yes &. Lanzilotti’s curatorial work extends from museum collaborations such as the currently touring Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, to institutional commissioning at EMPAC as the Curator of Music.
As an educator, Lanzilotti has been on the faculty at New York University, University of Northern Colorado (Director and founder of the experimental UNCOmmon Ensemble and Asst. Professor of Viola), and University of Hawaiʻi—Mānoa in both composition and viola. Additionally, Lanzilotti createdShaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings.
Written publications include contributions to a new monograph honoring the life and work of Toshiko Takaezu published by Yale University Press, and to Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris (Calder Foundation and Athénée Press)—the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling. Other contributions to books include featured works: the work beyond the accident of time (2019)—honoring Noguchi’s never-fully-realized Bell Tower for Hiroshima(1951)—is included in Walking From Scores, a bilingual anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health)
Dr. Lanzilotti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Yale School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music. In addition, Lanzilotti was an orchestral fellow in the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and New World Symphony, participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under Pierre Boulez, and was the original violist in the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. Mentors include Hiroko Primrose, Peter Slowik, Jesse Levine, Martin Bresnick, Wilfried Strehle, Karen Ritscher, and Reiko Füting.
Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s next Composer-in-Residence—a post she will hold for two seasons, beginning in September 2023. She will also hold Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for its 2023-2024 season.
Recent premieres include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Modern Ensemble, Jennifer Koh’s project Alone Together, and The Curtis Institute. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others. Upcoming commissions feature a work for the League of American Orchestras, and a work for Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.
A founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers. Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by New York City Mayor, and theMadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).
León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and The Curtis Institute of Music, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Tania’s León’s archive.
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.
Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate relationships between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a short experimental film for Cello and Trash, pairs Kleijn’s cello with large amounts of mylar, plastic bottles and soda cans. An ongoing collaboration with Aliya Ultan, the film received its premiere at NYC’s Roulette Intermedium April 2023. Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”
Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, calling upon them to collectively negotiate a way forward. Inspired by Civil War–era drum commands, her composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), performed by Ensemble Dal Niente at Big Ears Festival, tasks two spatially separated ensembles with reacting to one another based on each other’s rhythms. Alternately, Kleijn’s silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) explores touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.
An active musician in classical and contemporary classical spheres, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented her solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. As an improviser, she has collaborated with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Macie Stewart, Joe McPhee, Claire Rousay, Caroline Davis, Damon Locks, and Du Yun.
Kleijn is a Drag City recording artist, releasing STIR with Bill MacKay (2019), Momentum 5: Stammer (triptych) with Ken Vandermark (2021), An Ayler Xmas with Mars Williams (2017), and SINE NOMINE with Mark Feldman (2022).
Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” the GRAMMY®-nominated JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025, embarking on their third decade as a pioneering string quartet synchronized in their mission to create an international community through transformative, mind-broadening experiences and close listening. Founded in 2005, the ensemble operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music, delving deeply into challenging new compositions and musical practices outside the classical mainstream. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for three GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.
Among the highlights of the 2024-2025 season, JACK Quartet officially marks their 20th anniversary with a celebratory concert at 92NY in New York City, featuring the world premiere of a new JACK-commissioned work by Anthony Cheung; the U.S. premiere of JACK commission Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons at Lincoln Center; and the world premiere of Ellen Fullman’s Energy Archive at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 in Pittsburgh. In addition, JACK Quartet celebrates their long association with composer John Zorn with the release of Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, as well as an album release concert at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium.
International engagements include JACK Quartet’s annual marathon of performances at Wigmore Hall in the UK and appearances at Pierre Boulez Saal and Konzerthaus Berlin in Germany, along with appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland. The season also brings the European premiere of Natacha Diels’ Beautiful Trouble at Konzerthaus Berlin.
The JACK Quartet embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform with, yielding a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. Through their successful nonprofit model, JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. The world’s top composers choose JACK because of their singular dedication to innovation and experimentation.
According to Musical America, “many of their recordings are must-haves, for anyone interested in new music.” They have been nominated for multiple GRAMMY® Awards, the most recent being their albums of music by John Luther Adams—both were nominated in the 2022 and 2023 Best Ensemble Performance category. Other albums feature music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Nick Dunston, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and upcoming releases of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.
Having long observed how the social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional access disproportionately and unfairly exclude many people, JACK Studio offers composers paid opportunities to develop new work, hear their music performed by JACK Quartet, consult with mentors in the field, and receive recorded documentation. JACK Studio receives hundreds of applications each season and selects up to 15 composers or artists for two distinct opportunities: Two-Year Residencies, offering a longer-term relationship with JACK Quartet, and Reading Sessions, in which recipients have existing works for string quartet read by JACK Quartet.
More than 40 composers have worked with JACK Quartet through JACK Studio thus far, hailing from Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa, Syria, and the United States. Their projects have been performed by JACK Quartet at venues including TIME:SPANS, Central Park, the Lucerne Festival, MoMA PS1, and Mannes School of Music, in addition to being recorded for professional releases. Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.
JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), The Louvre (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina). Among their honors, they have earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize, been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year, and received Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.
JACK Quartet makes their home in New York City, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School and provides mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring.
Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such musika katatubo from the North and South Philippine islands; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.
She is a recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Award in Music/ Sound (2022), a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and a TED Senior Fellowship (2014).
Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.
Her album, Talking Gong ( New Focus Recordings 2021), features soloists and ensemble members Claire Chase ( bass, alto , flute and piccolo) and Alex Peh ( piano) , with its title piece commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and by birdsongs of the region.
Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021) and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).
Ibarra’s piece Fragility Etudes, was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. These compositions are rhythmic studies for solos and ensemble which reflects humanity’s interdependence. Ibarra explores conduction, polyrhythms and concepts from the physics of glass. Fragility Etudes was filmed in residency and premiered at MASSMoCA in live performance 2021. The film is directed by collaborating multimedia artist Yuka C. Honda. September 2022 Ibarra conducted multi-ensemble Fragility Etudes in Zamane Festival Morocco. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion Susie Ibarra, for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video which premiered in June 2021.
As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.
He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
THU November 7.2024 | 5-7PM | Museum of Ventura County (100 East Main St, Ventura)
It was a mesmerizing evening with flutist Emi Ferguson, a favorite of Ojai Music Festival audiences, on November 7 at the Museum of Ventura County.
After enjoying the company of others and exploring the museum’s latest exhibits, Emi led attendees through a beautiful journey of the flute through time and place. Special thanks to Emi for creating a playlist of the program and other fun resources to come back to time and time again when we need the beauty of music to give us comfort and joy.
Become a docent and guide tours at the Holiday Home Tour, or sign up to help at the Holiday Marketplace on November 15 & 16, 2025.
Serving as a Docent at one of our four homes is a FUN way to volunteer! As a docent, you have an opportunity to view a beautiful home, meet new people, and get to know members of the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee.
Volunteering at the marketplace involves helping with load-in and load-out, and assisting staff and vendors with any other needs. Note that some marketplace shifts may require heavy lifting.
Each shift is a 3.5-hour commitment, and you can sign up for more than one. We encourage you to sign up with a spouse or a friend!
Sign Up Today!
In an effort to use less paper, you can sign up online via the button below.
Top: Jolly Boy Threads, The Whole 9, Sunrise Via Lola Bottom: Pixie Candle Studio, Rosehip Ramble, Surf Gems
Meet the vendors! All of the following small businesses, artists, and artisans will be participating in this year’s Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace. The Marketplace is free and open to the public at Libbey Park, November 16 & 17, 2024, from 10am – 4:30 pm. Join us for gift shopping and holiday fun!
NEW! Convenient, no-hassle check-out directly at vendor booths!
Zero-waste & sustainable global goods vendor: up-cycled & plastic free alternatives to everyday items using natural materials including bowls, utensils, hammoks, and more
Sound healing tools such as singing bowls, therapy drums, and crystal bowls, as well as bracelets, smudge sticks, incense, dream catchers, and eco-friendly ethnic accessories.
Original, one-of-a-kind Kinetic Sculptures (also called, “mobiles”) hand crafted from Semi-Precious Gemstones and Crystals. There is a singular comment when people see these in person: “I have never seen anything like this before”!
Organic soaps, soy candles, wax melts, botanical bath salts and room mists with unique designs and quality scents inspired by nature and many beautiful aspects of Ojai
Locally sourced personal care and home goods capturing the quality of heritage heirloom botanicals (including Ventura County citrus and lavender) farmed in California and fresh local beeswax
Artist in Residence, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, making Chumash music with students
In 2023, the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO Education and Community Program was honored to accept a grant from The Ojai Women’s Fund for our Artist in Residence Program during our 2023 school year. The Ojai Women’s Fund is a volunteer collective Giving Circle dedicated to making substantial grants on an annual basis. The recipient organizations target critical needs in the Ojai Valley (focus areas include the arts, education, the environment, health services, and social services).
The following article was shared in the Ojai Women’s Fund August 2024 Newsletter.
Ojai Festivals, LTD. Artists in Residence Program, $15,000
The Ojai Music Festival Artists-in-Residence program has brought the joy of live music into the classrooms of Ojai’s children. Our grant enabled about 450 OUSD students from Topa Topa and Mira Monte Elementary Schools in Ojai and Sunset Elementary School in Oak View to have a personal experience with musicians right in their own classrooms.
The artists, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie with Chumash music, Rosanne Forgette with drums, and Ruben Salinas on saxophone, shared their music and instruments to build a relationship with music that deepens the love of music. At each interactive Artists-in-Residence presentation, the musicians talk with the students about the instruments they play, the history and cultural background of the music they perform, and their paths to becoming professional artists. Other artists who participate in the program include Kathleen Robertson (violin), Dave Cipriani (Indian slide guitar), and Shelley Burgon (harp).
“They get exposure whether they want to play an instrument or be an audience member,” said Laura Walter, education coordinator for the Ojai Music Festival, so it becomes an “intentional part of their experience of beauty.” It also opens the door to a pathway for music in their future.
“Thank you for coming to Mira Monte School. I really enjoyed the song you played from Star Wars. Next year, I’m going to try playing the flute. I want to play an instrument for my career too,” wrote student Selena after Salinas’ performance.
“Thank you for letting us play your instruments, telling your stories, and showing us dance,” said Jasper after Tumamait-Stenslie shared her Chumash music and culture.
“Thank you for letting us play all those cool instruments! I liked it when we got to go inside the circle, and we made all the instruments really loud or quiet or medium,” said Eve when the entire class played percussion instruments.
“This is why I love working with children,” said Walter, “being together and caring about each other is what is important.”
Members of AMOC* Bobbi Jene Smith, Julia Bullock, and Or Schraiber.
Julia Bullock,soprano Conor Hanick,piano Bobbi Jene Smith,dancer/choreographer Or Schraiber,dancer/choreographer
The 2022 Ojai Music Festival Music Director, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), returns to Southern California to present Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting song cycle for voice and piano in a newly physicalized and dramatized version. Over the course of a dozen interconnected love songs – the first installment in a series of song cycles known as the composer’s Tristan trilogy – dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber bring Messiaen’s romantic surrealism to life through their original choreography. All four artists – Smith and Schraiber, plus pianist Conor Hanick and soprano Julia Bullock – are contributing members of AMOC*, an adventurous, enterprising collective of artists that has been called “blindingly impressive” and “preternaturally talented” by The New York Times. By incorporating dance, this unique production of Harawi opens up Messiaen’s song cycle, adding a new dimension and greater intensity to its portrayal of love and loss.
Harawi was meant to be premiered at the 2022 Ojai Festival by the artists of AMOC* but was waylaid when soprano Julia Bullock became ill with COVID-19 and was unable to travel to California. Now, this moving song cycle will come to life in performances in Los Angeles on October 1, presented in association with the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills and in Santa Barbara on October 4, produced with our friends at UCSB Arts and Lectures. For UCSB tickets: use promo code OJAI24 and get a 20% discount. Deadline is October 3.
