Ojai Music Festival

Contemporary Classical Music Festival in Ojai, CA

Davóne Tines, bass-baritone

Jay Campbell, cellist

Coleman Itzkoff, cellist

Zack Winokur, co-founder and artistic director

Bobbi Jene Smith, dancer, choreographer

Or Schraiber, dancer, choreographer

Conor Hanick, pianist

Keir GoGwilt, violinist, writer

Julia Eichten, dancer, choreographer

Miranda Cuckson, violinist, violist

Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor

Jennifer Chen, managing director

Julia Bullock, soprano

Matthew Aucoin, co-founder

Paul Appleby, tenor

Jonny Allen, percussionist

2021 Live Stream Archive

Press Releases

 Posted on March 14, 2022 by

 2022 Artists & Composers, Past Festival Artists

Davóne Tines, bass-baritone

Jay Campbell, cellist

Coleman Itzkoff, cellist

Zack Winokur, co-founder and artistic director

Bobbi Jene Smith, dancer, choreographer

Or Schraiber, dancer, choreographer

Conor Hanick, pianist

Keir GoGwilt, violinist, writer

Julia Eichten, dancer, choreographer

Miranda Cuckson, violinist, violist

Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor

Jennifer Chen, managing director

Julia Bullock, soprano

Matthew Aucoin, co-founder

Paul Appleby, tenor

Jonny Allen, percussionist

2021 Live Stream Archive

Press Releases

 Posted on February 3, 2022 by

 Festival Blog

Press Images

 

Additional Images and Archive:

 Posted on February 3, 2022 by

 Festival Blog

Creative Collisions with AMOC

 

Audiences expect to get a glimpse of the musical future at Ojai. Not as a sci-fi fantasy of escape but through encounters with visionary artists who are actively transforming the real-world landscape: precisely the kinds of artists attracted to AMOC, a collective of 17 musical thinkers and performers. As the Festival’s Music Director for 2022, AMOC (the acronym for American Modern Opera Company) practices a model of curation grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration.

AMOC gathers like-minded singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and composers who are each at the cutting-edge of their respective fields. It’s the rock super-group of contemporary classical music. “What has been essential for us as a company is that every project is in some way interdisciplinary,” explains composer, pianist, conductor, and writer Matthew Aucoin, who co-founded AMOC with choreographer/director and dancer Zack Winokur in 2017. “We’re excited to bring the theatricality that is inherent in every AMOC project to Ojai.” ‘Collision’ is a favorite image to illustrate how their multifaceted, discipline-crossing approach works. “There’s always a collision, whether that’s between music and dance or music and text and dance,” Aucoin adds. Or, as the Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian puts it: “When you have all of these incredibly vibrant artistic atoms colliding with each other, what results is often the very surprising and very unexpected.”

“As a collective, there are many tentacles to AMOC. Its artists have many diverse gifts, and the whole company has been involved in the programming,” says Aucoin. For example, Family Dinner, his own cycle of mini-concertos, will each feature a different member of the company and include spoken “toasts.” This is among the exciting world premieres that will grace the 2022 Festival to be held June 9 to 12. AMOC choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith will create a new, collaborative dance piece adapting and extending parts of her recent film Broken Theater and showcasing the AMOC family. Smith will choreograph music by Schubert, Bach, Connie Converse, and Pete Seeger, developing a scenario in which the rehearsal process is deconstructed.

Indeed, dance will play an especially prominent role in this edition of Ojai Festival. Smith is joined by Or Schraiber, Yiannis Logothetis, and Coleman Itzkoff in creating Waiting, a new dance-music piece about the bonds of friendship and its attendant moral quandaries that is tinged with 1960s-style French theater of the absurd.

A significant number of AMOC’s members have developed careers in opera — an interdisciplinary pursuit by definition — including soprano Julia Bullock, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, tenor Paul Appleby, and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. It’s characteristic of the company that they strive to expand our expectations of what opera can encompass. Aucoin, a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, took on opera’s foundational myth with Eurydice, his setting of a play by Sarah Ruhl that reconsiders the myth of Orpheus and his descent into the Underworld from his wife’s point of view. Eurydice was premiered in 2020 by Los Angeles Opera, where Aucoin is artist-in-residence, and the Metropolitan Opera presented a new production earlier this season that was broadcast internationally in HD.

Among the highlights of Ojai 2022 will be the world premiere staging by Zack Winokur, with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, of Olivier Messiaen’s 1945 song cycle Harawi. The Andean musical tradition illuminates the legend of Tristan and Isolde in this hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano. Julia Bullock has long envisioned a performance that explores the cycle’s dichotomies of “spirituality and sensuality, love and death, men and women.” Drawing together five AMOC members (pianist Conor Hanick, along with the aforementioned artists), this version will layer theatrical and choreographic interpretations with multicultural reflection and musical performance. “With every composer who wants to celebrate other cultures that they’ve experienced or been deeply inspired by, there’s always this danger of appropriation that I wanted to be conscious of,” says Bullock. She has therefore invited the voices of artists of indigenous Andean traditions to share their musical or dance traditions as a counterpart.

Another song cycle on the program highlights the extraordinary music of composer, pianist, and scholar Anthony Cheung: echoing of tenses, commissioned by AMOC, sets the words of Asian-American poets who reflect on issues of family, identity, migration, and loss. Paul Appleby will be joined by Conor Hanick and violinist Miranda Cuckson to perform Cheung’s blend of live performance and pre-recorded sound design.

Interpretation-as-collaboration: this is AMOC’s signature, Winokur observes. “Part of the reason we started the company is that the members are not being asked to interpret something already there but form these ideas collaboratively — and often leading out of their own passions, experiences and desires. We’re good at shape-shifting to support different members in the company’s projects and ideas. Ojai is a perfect place to do this because of its rich history of birthing so many important projects that still live in the world.”

“They are ahead of their time,” says Guzelimian. “The fact that they make the creation and the performance of work integral is also a critical statement about how a new generation of artists works.” Many of AMOC’s members have friendships and working relationships that go back to their student days at Juilliard — bonds that have intensified their collaborative process. Their extraordinary range of interests widens their expressive palette as well. New music meets early music in several of their programs, and the period instrument group/continuo band Ruckus regularly includes musicians who overlap with AMOC, such as composer and bassoonist Doug Balliett and composer and flutist Emi Ferguson. Ruckus will join in some events to expand AMOC’s ensemble. And since several of the AMOCers are avid hikers and lovers of the outdoors, audiences can expect to encounter music in unusual natural settings.

These collaborations allow AMOC to present performances in novel contexts, such as a program devoted to the works of Julius Eastman, for which special guest collaborator Seth Parker Woods shares his inspiring engagement with Eastman’s legacy. Another discovery awaits in a rare solo performance by pianist Conor Hanick of Hans Otte’s The Book of Sounds. A polymath artist who combined music, poetry, drawings, and art videos, Otte wrote in a Minimalist style that incorporates impulses from Eastern mysticism. The result, says Guzelimian, is “revelatory.”

Even a composer as familiar as J.S. Bach will emerge in a new light in a Libbey Bowl event offering contemporary reflections on his instrumental music, including pieces by Cassandra Miller and Reiko Fueting.

Some of the AMOC musicians are already familiar to Ojai audiences. Davóne Tines made his Festival debut in 2016 with Music Director Peter Sellars.  Emi Ferguson was featured in the recent 2021 edition. So did the venturesome violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson. “I loved the experience of playing for the Ojai audience,” she recalls. “Their receptiveness to all kinds of experiences was very palpable.” Julia Bullock made her first-ever appearance at a music festival when Dawn Upshaw invited her to appear at Ojai. For the soprano, “Ojai is a place of comfort, of real communion making, of openness and generosity — a place where community seems to be built.”

Similarly, the Ojai experience of intensive, contemplative music-making seems to be in AMOC’s DNA. “We try to create a festival atmosphere every summer at our residency/creative retreat in Vermont,” Aucoin says. That is the context for which he began creating the concertos in Family Dinner, as showcases to bring the company together after months of being separated during the regular year. “We want to bring that family spirit to Ojai,” Aucoin says. Winokur adds: “When we started the company, we had the thought that festivals were the best way to experience AMOC and for us to experience each other. We hope that will be the experience for the Ojai audience as well. Performing post-COVID, this is a time where we have to get back to the basics of why we do this.”

—Thomas May

 

 Posted on January 11, 2022 by

 Latest News

2021 Festival Video Look-Back

As we welcome in a new year – full of anticipation for the 75th Festival, June 9-12, 2022 with Music Director AMOC – we’re looking back at our 75th Festival held in September with conductor and composer John Adams as music director. 

Adams’ festival was focused on the work of a new generation of composers and performers to make a decidedly forward-facing festival.

Thanks to our artists, composers, staff and team, volunteers, patrons, and the Ojai community for being a part of our musical journey! Re-visit the 75th Festival by enjoying our live stream concert archives here > 

 Posted on January 3, 2022 by

 Latest News

AMOC’s Music Playlist

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)

SPOTIFY


APPLE MUSIC

Click HERE to listen on Apple Music

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.



 Posted on December 27, 2021 by

 Festival Blog, Latest News

2022 Virtual Ojai Talks

May 25 Ojai Talks


Welcome back to the Festival’s continuing series of Virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music, ideas, and the creative process with 2022 Festival artists, composers, innovators, and thinkers.

 

 

MAY 25, 5:30PM PT: AMOC* DANCES: COLLABORATIVE DANCE/MUSIC WORKS featuring Bobbi Jene Smith, Julia Eichten, Keir GoGwilt, Coleman Itzkoff, and Or Schraiber with guest host WYNC/New Sounds John Schaefer. 

*

A new song cycle, the echoing of tenses, commissioned by the Ojai Festival (with a gift in honor of Nancy Sanders) from Anthony Cheung, sets poetry by Asian-American writers interconnected by the larger theme of memory, made complicated by the circumstances of cultural and personal identity. Join us for this illuminating conversation with composer Anthony Cheung and two members of AMOC* – violinist Miranda Cuckson and composer/co-founder Matthew Aucoin.

*

Messiaen’s HARAWI
WED April 6, 2022 | 5:30-6:30pm
Julia Bullock, Conor Hanick, and Zack Winokur, AMOC members
The Festival will present the world premiere of AMOC’s staging of Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi for soprano and piano. In addition to Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick’s performance, this production breaks open Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death into a newly theatrical dimension through the choreography of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, directed by Zack Winokur.

*

The Music of Julius Eastman 
Davóne Tines and Doug Balliett, AMOC members
Seth Parker Woods, cello
Episode 3: The legacy of Julius Eastman will come to the 2022 Ojai Music Festival in a multi-dimensional performance piece, reflecting Eastman’s art and the larger context of his life, creativity, and humanity. Showcased in this concert will be AMOC members Davóne Tines and Doug Balliett, along with cellist and frequent AMOC colleague Seth Parker Woods. Join us for another illuminating conversation on the creative process and Eastman’s impact on each of them.

*

Episode 2: Pianist and AMOC member Conor Hanick joins us for a lively conversation with Ara Guzelimian to talk about his advocacy for performing new works and his recent discovery of pioneering German composer Hans Otte’s The Book of Sounds, which Conor will perform in an epic recital at Ojai in June.  

Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old. A fierce advocate for the music of today, he has premiered over 200 works and collaborated with composers both emerging and iconic. Among them, he has worked with Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, in addition to championing music by leading composers of his own generation, including Caroline Shaw, Matthew Aucoin, Nina Young, Nico Muhly, and Samuel Adams.  Conor appears regularly as a recitalist and chamber musician and in recent seasons has been presented by the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Caramoor Festival, Park Avenue Armory, and Gilmore Festival. Since 2014 he has been a faculty artist at the Music Academy of the West and in 2018 became the director of its Solo Piano Program. 

* 

Episode 1: Co-founders Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur of AMOC, 2022 Music Director, talk with Ara Guzelimian on the origin story of this exciting collective of artists

Founded in 2017 by Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, the mission of AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) is to build and share a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways.

Current and past projects include The No One’s Rose, a devised music-theater-dance piece featuring new music by Matthew Aucoin, directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith; EASTMAN, a multi-dimensional performance piece contending with the life and work of Julius Eastman; Winokur’s production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón, which has been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Repertory Theater; a new arrangement of John Adams’s El Niño, premiered at The Met Cloisters as part of Julia Bullock’s season-long residency at the Met Museum; Davóne Tines’s and Winokur’s Were You There, a meditation on black lives lost in recent years to police violence; and Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt’s dance/music works With Care and A Study on Effort, which have been produced at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and elsewhere. Conor Hanick’s performance of CAGE, Zack Winokur’s production of John Cage’s music for prepared piano, was cited as the best recital of the year by The New York Times in 2018 and The Boston Globe in 2019. Additionally, AMOC will serve as the Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director, only the second ensemble, and first explicitly interdisciplinary company, to hold the position in the Festival’s 75-year history.

 Posted on December 21, 2021 by

 Latest News

Learn about AMOC in 5 Minutes

The Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) develops and produces a body of discipline-colliding work, to combine traditional and experimental artistic processes, and to maintain enduring creative relationships between its members. Founded by Artistic Directors Zack Winokur and Matthew Aucoin, AMOC is made up of some of the most adventurous singers, dancers, and instrumentalists at work today in the fields of contemporary and classical music and dance. Get a glimpse of this boundary-breaking ensemble and understand why they are a perfect fit for Ojai’s longstanding legacy of innovation and adventure. 

 

 Posted on December 14, 2021 by

 Latest News

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