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The Ojai Music Festival and Santa Paula Chamber of Commerce will present a free Street Party Jam Session following the Sunday, June 12 concert at the Libbey Bowl.

“The Festival will expand and flow into a huge street party in the adjacent town of Santa Paula, culminating in the sheer communal pleasure of the joy of improvisation, increasingly wild juxtapositions, spontaneous jam sessions, and very, very good times.” – Peter Sellars, 2016 Music Director 

SUN JUNE 12, 2016
Historic Main Street, Santa Paula
6-8:30PM

Featured artists will include:
Leila Adu
Dina El Wedidi
ICE
Aruna Sairam
Tyshawn Sorey
Youth Orchestra LA (YOLA)
Los Jornaleros del Norte
Cambalache

Plus, downtown Santa Paula restaurants will be open for the community and patrons to enjoy during the evening performances. Free parking in downtown Santa Paula.

 

    

                 

 

  

   

Longtime contributors to new music blog I Care If You Listen Larry and Arlene Dunn recently published an interview with 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars for the site’s popular “Five Questions To…” interview series. Read the interview below, reposted with permission, and explore more articles and news on the I Care website.

Opera and theater director Peter Sellars is the Music Director for the 70th annual Ojai Music Festival, coming up in June in Ojai, California. He is in great demand as a creative collaborator by composers, performers, and other artists around the globe, as exemplified by this year’s Ojai program which features works by composers Kaija Saariaho, Claude Vivier, and Tyshawn Sorey, and performances by International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), soprano Julia Bullock, and international sensations  Aruna Sairam and Dina El Wedidi.

What has been your experience of the Ojai Festival, leading up to your stint as Music Director?

I’ve been coming to Ojai as an audience member for over 30 years, since I first moved to California. The first time I worked here was with Pierre Boulez when we staged Stravinsky’s Soldier Story a week after the Los Angeles uprising. More recently I worked with Dawn Upshaw, when she was Music Director in 2011, to stage George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny. I am thrilled to now be able to assemble a multi-layered program that rests on the immense history of this place — the spiritual searchings of Krishnamurti sitting under the trees, this sacred site of the Chumash people. Contemporary music is always at the forefront here and represents the connection between music and political and social change. This is not new. Classical composers, in their own times, have a long history of foregrounding the textual materials of the movements of their day, taking their music well beyond the realm of entertainment. Mozart in the Marriage of Figaro, Schoenberg in Moses and Aaron, they directly addressed the structures of inequality through their works. This year at Ojai, most of the composers are women. Now, on the one hand, I’d rather not have to mention that. But there’s something wildly exciting about hearing from the other half of the planet. And there are so many more than just a few to choose from! It’s an amazing and deep body of work, and it would be nice if more institutions recognized that.

Your Ojai program will highlight the works of Kaija Saariaho; what is it like developing projects with her?

Kaija is just an incredible joy to work with; she has such absolute commitment. We discuss new work deeply and intensely, starting very far ahead. Eventually she goes in a room, closes the door and enters a depth of concentration that is extraordinary. She begins with a chart of harmonic colors and everything flows from there. When she has something ready, her work ethic is exemplary. She is in every rehearsal and absolutely engaged with the performers as we hone the final product.

You’ve programmed a chamber version of Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone; how will it differ from the original?

La Passion was originally written ten years ago for Dawn Upshaw, with large symphony orchestra and chorus. The story delves into the inner life of Simone Weil, the 20th century French philosopher, Christian mystic, and political activist. In this new version, we have the soloist, a chamber orchestra of 19 musicians from ICE, still reasonably large, and a vocal quartet of singers from Roomful of Teeth. In this scale, the piece becomes much more intimate. Our soloist will be the stunning young soprano Julia Bullock, one of Ms. Upshaw’s proteges. Ms. Bullock, a young woman of color, brings the Black Lives Matter movement into the room and makes this piece relevant to today’s world. This upends the abstract character of Simone Weil’s philosophy and gives the work new dimensionality. Then as now, we face the danger of civilization in collapse, confronting evil of all kinds. Kaija’s pathbreaking musical work endures and astonishes us with newfound understanding of our world, its challenges, its possibilities.

You’ll also present the world premiere of Josephine Baker: A Portrait; what more can you tell us? 

Ah, yes. Julia Bullock will also perform the lead role in Josephine Baker: A Portrait, a new oratorio of sorts by Tyshawn Sorey, percussionist, band leader, and composer beyond categorization. Josephine Baker was an African American expatriate in Paris, a contemporary of Simone Weil. And just like Weil, Baker placed her philosophy in her body, her entire lived self. She was an iconic lightning rod challenging the French establishment on issues of racial and gender equality.

Sorey’s work blurs the boundaries of so-called jazz and classical musics. He looks expectantly to the future, yet is deeply rooted in the present. The spaciousness of his sensibility and many cultural viewpoints intersect with his highly organized musical structures. Although it is important for him to show Josephine Baker as in control of her own destiny, he also takes the audience into her mysterious life behind the stage where she is haunted by deeper principles and the human struggle to survive. This work breaks Josephine Baker free from her commercial patina and probes her inner dimensions.

What other performers on the program are you particularly excited about?

First, let me say I am simply enthralled to be working with ICE. This is our first time collaborating together and it’s totally exhilarating. It seems there is nothing they can’t or won’t do in service to the music. I’m over the moon! They draw you right into their family and make you feel a part of their process. I want to adopt them, or have them adopt me. We also have two paragons of international musics who will inject the soul of their home regions into the festival. Aruna Sairam is the absolute flower of South Indian spiritual music. She is an innovative singer with a strong political voice, and a visionary collaborator with Western musicians. Dina El Wedidi, from Cairo, is the voice of Tahrir Square and the next generation of Egyptian music. Her voice is captivating and irresistible. There is a fierce political thread through her music that opens a space for a future otherwise unable to be born.

Upcoming:
Friday, May 13, 2016: Q2 Ojai Festival Preview with Peter Sellars at the Greene Space in New York City
Monday, May 16, 2016: Ojai Festival Preview with Peter Sellars and Alex Ross at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, CAJune 9-12, 2016: 70th Ojai Music Festival, Ojai, CA
June 16-18, 2016: Ojai at Berkeley, at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, CA

 

India’s legendary classical vocalist Padma Shri Aruna Sairam, makes her Ojai Music Festival debut on June 11, 2016, at 8pm, during the milestone 70^th edition of the world-renowned music festival in Ojai, California.

Regarded as the Music Ambassador of India for successfully taking Indian music to the global arena, Aruna Sairam will present a “pure south Indian classical” vocal concert. Joining her will be M Rajeev, violin; Sai Giridhar, mridanjam; Ravi Balasubramaniam, ghatam; and Aamani Mynampati, tempura.

“We are thrilled to welcome to Ojai one of the most revered, beloved, surprising, and progressive stars of South Indian music. Aruna Sairam traces her artistic and spiritual lineages from some of the great gurus of the female vocal tradition, both within her own family and across multiple strands of Indian music. This is a woman who lives and moves in many worlds and holds them all magically on the breath. South Indian music is itself a spiritual quest, a philosophical journey, and an evolving state of ecstasy, rapture, and atonement. Aruna Sairam is one of the masters whose long, sinuous vocal line delineates a past that rises spontaneously in her breath as the future,” said 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars.

 Purchase single tickets to Sat June 11 concert with Aruna Sairam
Aruna Sairam was born in Mumbai into a family with a deep love of music. Her mother, the singer Smt. Rajalakshmi Sethuraman, was her first teacher in the art of Carnatic music of South India. Her father, a music connoisseur, received the greatest musicians and dancers from northern and southern India in their home. It was in this propitious atmosphere, which was fundamental to the development of her art, that Aruna met Sangita Kalanidhi Smt. T. Brinda, who trained Aruna in the style of her own mentor, the great Veena Dhanammal, one of the most outstanding figures in Carnatic music.

The many national and international honors that have come her way include one of India’s coveted Civilian Honors the Padma Shri, and the prestigious US Congress Proclamation of Excellence, wherein the U.S. national flag was flown atop the Capitol building and handed over to Aruna Sairam with a special Congressional proclamation recognizing her musical contribution. She was appointed by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu as advisor to the Department of Culture, Tamil Nadu, on Musical Education. She is currently Vice Chairperson of India’s National Center for the Performing Arts, The Sangeet Natak Akademi. She has also performed across the length and breadth of the country, bringing the richness of South Indian classical music to people from all walks of life.

CARNATIC MUSIC OF SOUTH INDIA

The musical map of the Indian subcontinent could be viewed as a vast single cultural area with a rich and fascinating range of musical dialects. Among a huge number of regional traditions, several have attained high artistic status, through strong patronage and through the concentration of gifted musicians in particular places. Among these traditions, larger ‘canonical’ groupings have come to be recognized over the centuries, in which different local practices have taken their places within overarching musical cultures.

The two most commonly acknowledged ‘classical’ cultures are the Hindustani music of the North and the Carnatic (or Karnatak) of the South. ‘Classical’ in the Indian context means, among other things, a music that at the highest level is practiced by rigorously trained specialists, is associated with a long and respected tradition of musical theory and is supported by powerful patronage – whether this be historically that of the temple or kingly court or, as more recently in India, a public following in concerts, broadcasts and a recording industry. Though there are musicians who are trained in both Hindustani and Carnatic music – and there have been experiments in melding the two – true musical ‘biculturalism’ is rare and an upbringing in one tradition does not automatically entail an understanding of the other. But underlying the music there are some fundamental concepts of melody, rhythm and composition common to both.

Carnatic music is the dominant classical tradition in the southern states – those parts of India where the major Dravidian languages are spoken: Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil. With the help of a few guiding principles, a first encounter with this fascinating world of South Indian sound and meaning can prove highly rewarding.

Carnatic music, as we now understand it, can be traced as far back as the 17th century, with some surviving from earlier times. The Hindu religious poet Purandara Dasa (died 1564) composed his Kannada-language poems to be sung and he is popularly regarded as the ‘father’ or ‘grandfather’ of Carnatic music. Though we cannot know much about the style in which his poems were first performed, they are still studied and sung in more recent musical settings. There was a rich musical culture in the 18th century at the Maratha court of Tanjore (Thanjavur, in present-day Tamil Nadu). Here were born, all around the same time in the town of Thiruvarur, the three towering figures commonly referred to as the Carnatic ‘Trinity’. Thyagaraja (1767-1847) , Shyama Shastri (1762-1827) and Muttusvami Dikshitar (1775-1835).The works of these composers have formed the major part of the concert repertoire and it would not be uncommon in even a full-length public performance to hear renderings of works of these ‘composers’ alone.( The similarity, the time period, the proximity of locations and the impact on the legacy are all very close to the Western Music Trinity, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven ) . All three are inseparably associated with the South Indian Music and most Carnatic concert music is strongly derived from their works.. The association of the temple is as strong as that of the concert hall.

The Thanjavur musicians became famous and exerted wide influence. Through the traditional Indian system of ‘teacher-pupil succession’ (guru-shishya parampara), repertoires of songs and associated musical lore were kept alive and flourished through the 19th century and beyond. Thanjavur musicians were employed in many other kingly courts, most notably those of Travancore in present-day Kerala and Mysore in Karnataka. In Travancore the young ruler Raja Swati Tirunal (1813-46) was himself a gifted composer and musical connoisseur, and many hundreds of song compositions still sung today are attributed to him. At his court instrumental music also flourished, especially in the hands of a group of players known as the Thanjavur Quartet. At Mysore under the ruling Wadiyar dynasty there grew up an especially distinguished tradition of veena playing. More recently it was particularly in Madras (now Chennai) that public patronage of Carnatic music dominated. The Music Academy founded in that city in 1928 became chief among numerous institutions teaching and promoting the practice and theory of classical music and dance.

WHAT IS CARNATIC VOCAL MUSIC

The repertoire heard in Carnatic concerts is overwhelmingly based on songs – all musicians are brought up to regard the voice as primary and instrumental music as the offspring of the vocal. So it is that instrumentalists can – indeed should – be fundamentally influenced by knowledge of a vocal repertoire and its intricacies, and even of the voice culture that goes with it. A typical program, whether the main soloist is a singer or an instrumentalist, is a mixture of predetermined and improvised material. The same ‘pieces,’ which serve as a basis for extended performance in rigorously structured improvisation, may be sung or played. Instrumentalists – the solo instrument may be a violin or a veena or some other kind of plucked lute will of course omit the words, but many players and teachers insist nevertheless that constant mental reference to the original song, its text and meaning must be made while playing.

A concert will typically start with a song form called a varnam, a structure in three sections preceded by a brief alapana – an improvised introduction to the raga (the underlying melodic and modal structure of the piece). This will be followed by a number of kritis – many being originally composed by members of the Trinity; the melodies of the songs are often also ascribed to these composers and each is in a prescribed metrical cycle (tala). One kriti is likely to be longer and more developed than the others in its execution and elaboration, but each one will be preceded by at least a brief alapana and each will be extended by some apparently open-ended improvisation which reflects the soloist’s inventiveness and a studied body of relevant melodic and rhythmic patterns. A particularly large-scale form is the ragam-tanam-pallavi, in which the opening alapana is long and highly ‘exploratory’.

Like much of Indian music, and especially that of the ‘classical’ traditions, Carnatic melody is based on a system of modal substructures (ragas), each of them defined not only by its name and by ascending and descending scalar patterns, but also by characteristic ‘inflection’ of notes – shakes, oscillations, tremolos and so on – and it is perhaps this style of melodic embellishment above all else that gives South Indian music its particular beauty and its characteristic flavor. There is no fixed pitch; the unshifting tonic of the raga (played throughout the performance by one or more drone instruments – called the tanpura) may be set to suit the natural pitch of the main performing voice or instrument.

By Western standards, audiences of Indian music tend to show their appreciation of performances rather uninhibitedly, and in Carnatic concerts ‘participation’ is expressed most visibly by the marking and punctuating, through hand and finger gestures, of the metrical schemes (talas) to which the songs are set – rhythms and patterns which are played out on the drums and other accompanying percussion instruments. You may like to try it out – just take the lead of a South Indian sitting nearby!

—–Introduction on Carnatic and Vocal Music © Jonathan Katz

Jonathan Katz teaches at St Anne’s and Brasenose Colleges, Oxford. He is a linguist and musician with interests in European as well as South Asian language, literature and musicology.

 

The New York Times has just named the “50 Essential Summer Music Festivals” of 2016, and we are thrilled to have made the list! Here’s what they had to say:

“Peter Sellars, who directs the festival this summer, was inspired by the spiritual traditions of the Ojai Valley when creating this rich 70th anniversary lineup, which is also a tribute to female artists. The superb young soprano Julia Bullock sings the title role in a new chamber version of Kaija Saariaho‘s La Passion de Simone an oratorio about the life of the French feminist philosopher Simone Weil. Ms. Bullock also offers a homage to Josephine Baker with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Other highlights include the South Indian vocalist Aruna Sairam and the Cairo-based singer Dina El Wedidi and her band. The imaginative a cappella vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth offers Caroline Shaw’s remarkable Partita for Eight Voices, alongside a new work by Ms. Shaw. (A week later, La Passion de Simone, the Josephine Baker portrait and the concert by Ms. El Wedidi will be repeated during Ojai at Berkeley.)”

Explore the full list >>

2016 Music Director Peter Sellars joined host Helga Davis in The Greene Space at WQXR on Friday, May 13 for an evening of conversation and performances by select musicians from the 2016 Ojai Music Festival. Performers included New Zealand-born singer-songerwriter Leila Adu, who has composed for So Percussion and Gamelan Padhang; International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) guitarist Dan Lippel; and the rising soprano and recent Juilliard graduate Julia Bullock.

 

We’re thrilled to share the  2016 Festival Preview with 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars, Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris, and KUSC‘s Gail Eichenthal, produced as part of their Arts Alive series. Use the media player above to listen online or tune in to Arts Alive on Saturdays at 8am.

Special thanks to our friends at KUSC, Gail Eichenthal, and Brian Lauritzen.
View the 2016 Festival schedule >>

Use the player above and join us for Ojai Live 2016 to watch live streamed Festival concerts, interviews, and Talks online on your computer, phone, or tablet. Hosts for this year join us from Classical KUSC and include Executive Producer Gail Eichenthal, host Alan Chapman, and correspondents Craig Curtis and Thomas Kotcheff. Tune in at concert time to view live or use the live stream schedule to catch pre-recorded Festival events.

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Schedule – All events live unless otherwise noted
View complete 2016 Festival Schedule 

Thank you to the following 2016 Ojai Live Partners:

Marilyn Bremer Foundation
Little Dog Live