Program Notes

Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 8:00pm
LIQUID BORDERS – Program Notes

Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Steven Schick percussion/director | red fish blue fish percussion | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello

No Boundaries

Liquid Borders: Both the title and the premise of the percussion quartet by Gabriela Ortiz that opens this edition of the Ojai Music Festival could not be better suited to Rhiannon Giddens’s curatorial vision. The Mexico City–based Ortiz has created a body of boundlessly imaginative work animated by adventurous border crossings between strikingly different realms: folk and avant-garde, Latin American and European, acoustic and electronic.

Ortiz comes from an influential musical family. Her parents were among the earliest members of the still-active group Los Folkloristas, founded in 1966, which transformed the understanding of Latin American folk music. A composer who asserts that “sounds have souls,” she has developed a special connection to California ensembles, producing works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet.

Explorations of folklore and folk music, pre- and post-colonial, play a prominent role in Ortiz’s music. She combines these sources with contemporary techniques to generate unprecedented yet somehow inevitable sounding and extraordinarily evocative musical spaces.

Liquid Borders originated as a commission from Steven Schick for his University of California at San Diego–based percussion ensemble red fish blue fish and was premiered at the Banff Centre in Canada in August 2014. The title refers not only to dissolving aesthetic barriers but to Ortiz’s utopian reflection on what it might be like to overcome the artificial divisions she believes are put in place for political and economic reasons.

But because those divisions are in place, they exacerbate injustices caused by changes in the economy, society, and climate, which Ortiz illustrates in the varied soundscapes corresponding to each of the work’s three movements. The metallic and glass percussion of “Liquid City” conjures an urban landscape that, according to the composer, refers to the problem of impoverished immigrants from Mexico’s countryside facing desperate conditions when they seek economic improvement in the cities. In “Liquid Desert,” the soundscape changes dramatically to ghostly, dry, dark, rattling sounds. The social context here involves the problem in the north of Mexico caused by cheap maquila factories that exploit impoverished women. The players are instructed to whisper the word maquila to represent “these lost voices of women who have disappeared or been killed.” “Liquid Jungle” uses the timbres of marimbas, bongos, and woodblocks to evoke the scene at Mexico’s southern border, with driving rhythms derived from Caribbean and African music. The life force itself pulses with irresistible energy and cannot be contained.

Liquefying the borders between genres and disciplines is a signature of the Attacca Quartet. The playlist they’ve put together to launch their Ojai residency presents a self-portrait of the ensemble and their voracious appetite for trying new things. But rather than a straightforward, realist style, it’s a portrait painted in wildly abstract colors, “where our past and our future are simultaneously reflected in some form,” as cellist Andrew Yee puts it. “Asking what our artistic vision adds to this already rich art form has freed us up to experiment with the framework of our programming.”

The “Haydn 68” project — a cycle of all of the composer’s quartets, which Attacca performed from 2010 to 2016 — left a lasting mark on the quartet’s sound. They play the Andante from Haydn’s last completed work in the medium, composed in 1799 and deemed by the composer himself as his “most beautiful string quartet.” Beginning with an almost folklike duet for just violin and cello, Haydn varies the main idea in profoundly surprising ways.

Zakir Hussain composed Pallavi in 2017 as part of Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future project to create repertory for a new generation of music lovers; Reena Esmail prepared this arrangement. The composer has provided this commentary: “Pallavi is the ancient Carnatic word for ‘composition.’ Each raga would have at least 100 traditional compositions of this type. The piece as written follows the prescribed format of the ancient Pallavi in which there is first Pallavi, then Anu Pallavi followed by Charnam…..Unlike the traditional Pallavi based in one raga, I have used four different ragas and tried to find a way to give each instrument its own personality with a raga assigned just for it. By doing so I hoped to address the Western system, which employs counterpoint and harmony, through the multi-tonal play of the four ragas working in tandem in certain passages. There is also interplay between different rhythm cycles (Tala) using 4, 6, 9, and 16 beats, each assigned to an instrument in the quartet.”

As with the Haydn piece, economy of means is at the fore in Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3. It derives from his score for Paul Schrader’s biographical film about the Japanese writer Mishima (1985). The Attaccas recorded the work on their 2021 album Of All Joys, which juxtaposes music of the Renaissance with the Minimalist aesthetic. Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged began as a collaboration between Kayhan Kalhor and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. Working on a production with the Silkroad Ensemble, the violinist Colin Jacobsen had become fascinated by Layla and Majnun, the story of star-crossed lovers immensely popular in the Middle East (whose Western counterpart is often said to be Romeo and Juliet). Knowledge of the rich tradition of Persian music is no prerequisite to being swept away by Kalhor’s depiction of the state of love-madness central to the telling of the story, with its anticipation of medieval European troubadours.

To embark on their collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival, the musicians have chosen two especially characteristic songs: Last Kind Words, which Giddens covers on her debut solo album from 2015 (Tomorrow Is My Turn), was written and recorded by Geeshie Wiley in 1930 and condenses an evocative drama into the country blues idiom. Giddens’s Lullaby, from her 2017 album Folk Songs with the Kronos Quartet, only hints at the underlying situation, endured by countless enslaved women, that makes it so heartbreaking: “such a shame now, little baby, that you are not my own.”

In memory of the late David Crosby, who died at his ranch in nearby Santa Ynez in January, the Attacca Quartet performs a piece that violist Nathan Schram wrote with the legendary songwriter called Where We Are Not. Schram transformed the song I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here from Crosby’s debut solo album of 1970 (If I Could Only Remember My Name) into a haunting new composition on his solo record Nearsided, which he arranged for Attacca. “It’s about people we had both lost in the past but now has taken on a new meaning,” says Schram.

The Attaccas also pay tribute to their close collaboration with composer Caroline Shaw, offering selections from their most recent recording, which won a Grammy Award this year. Shaw’s quartet writing is often inspired by gardens and trees — as is the case with The Evergreen, a four-movement work she has described as “an offering” to a tree in a coniferous forest on one of the islands in the Salish Sea separating Canada and the U.S. Shaw’s vivid, gestural writing for the strings reclaims the Romantic aspiration toward “organically” inspired art for our climate- anxious time.

A decade ago, on their Fellow Traveler album devoted to the string quartet music John Adams had written up to that point, Attacca Quartet put their own stamp on his 1994 collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, John’s Book of Alleged Dances. They play two of the 10 dances — whose “general tone is dry, droll, sardonic,” according to the composer — that call for a pre-recorded percussion track played by prepared piano.

One of the Attacca Quartet’s most experimental projects to date in crossing borders is their 2021 album Real Life, which gave them a platform to repaint the musical canvases of leading artists and producers in electronica and avant hip-hop, including Squarepusher. Their blending of the string quartet — historically, a benchmark of acoustic intimacy — with the contemporary dance floor’s amplified reverberations can sound by turns thrillingly chaotic and serenely surreal.

—THOMAS MAY

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Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00am
OJAI DAWNS – Program Notes

Emi Ferguson flute | Ross Karre percussion | Tara Khozein soprano | Niloufar Shiri kamancheh | Aida Shirazi electronics | Steven Schick percussion | red fish blue fish percussion

Calligraphies of Sound

For all its antiquity, the flute has taken a lead, liberating role in the transition to modernism. Pierre Boulez cited Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as the “origin” point of modern music. Georges Barrère, who played the epochal flute solo that begins Debussy’s trailblazing score at its premiere in 1894, asked Edgard Varèse to write Density 21.5 for him 42 years later. In Lost Wind, Golfam Khayam similarly uses the flute to imagine a new sound world. But the reference point in her case is the rich and diverse Persian classical music tradition.

Like many composers of her generation, Khayam ventured outside her native Iran to continue her studies. After immersing herself in contemporary experimental music in Cincinnati and Geneva, she returned to Iran and now teaches in Tehran. Lost Wind is a written score but breathes the spirit of improvisation that is central to Persian music and offers the flute soloist ample opportunity to make individual choices about phrasing and rhythmic articulation. Extended techniques calling for breathing in and out of the instrument, bending pitch, “aeolian sound,” and the like suggest a wordless poetry being communicated. Khayam’s accompaniment with the deeper-rimmed heng gong (a favorite of sound healers) seems to extend the flute’s own voice, often playing in its low range but ascending to the heights at the climax.

Aida Shirazi also refracts Persian traditions through a contemporary and experimental perspective, combining layers of live and processed electronics with onstage improvisation by the kamancheh virtuoso Niloufar Shiri in her new work Yearning, Every Dawn. While growing up in Iran, Shirazi was trained classically in both Persian and Western music and went on to study in Turkey and at the University of California at Davis, where she recently completed her doctorate. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48), Shirazi was able to realize her desire to collaborate with two admired colleagues for her Ojai Music Festival commission (one in live performance and the other through a pre-recorded tape).

In addition to performing and improvising live, Shiri provided Shirazi with recordings of her work to be incorporated into the processed and pre-recorded electronics. The Iranian American soprano Tara Khozein contributed another layer by recording a short improvisatory song based on a text (see p. 48) by the 19^th-century poet Táhirih Qurrat al-’Ayn, which was also processed. Shirazi, who spent a period training at IRCAM in Paris, has woven these recorded materials into Yearning, Every Dawn, thus combining sources that are acoustic and electronic, live and recorded, played and sung, improvised and fixed. Rather than merely juxtapose traditions and sound worlds, she aims to create “a hybrid that will sound as natural and organic as possible — so that it’s all of them, and at the same time none of them, but with my voice.”

Edgard Varèse is often cited as a tutelary spirit to colorful figures of the Western avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen, Frank Zappa), but his influence extended to non-Western composers. He left an indelible mark on Chou Wen-Chung (see sidebar on p. 64), who became his student and copyist when they met in 1949 and, following the death of Varèse, his literary executor. Density 21.5 dates from the previous decade (1936) and was composed for the above-mentioned Georges Barrère, who planned to inaugurate a newly engineered platinum flute at the upcoming New York World’s Fair. The title refers to the density or specific mass of this rare metal, which is 21.5. (Cocktail party conversation point: The new flute was in fact a platinum-iridium alloy with an estimated specific mass of 21.6.) Varèse crafts a novel language from alterations in timbre, use of the extreme high and low ends of the register, and percussive effects.

Varèse mentored the young Chou Wen- Chung, who in turn had a profound influence on the generation of composers emigrating from China after the Cultural Revolution (including Ge Gan-Ru, Lei Liang, and Tan Dun). Chou Wen-Chung anticipated their quest to synthesize Asian and Western idioms in his own integration of classical Chinese aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Also a prominent scholar, Chou Wen-Chung described Varèse’s concept of sound as “living matter” as “a modern Western parallel of a pervasive Chinese concept: that each single tone is a musical entity in itself, that musical meaning lies intrinsically in the tones themselves, and that one must investigate sound to know tones and investigate tones to know music.”

This overarching idea pervades the subtly fluctuating soundscape of Echoes from the Gorge, completed in 1989 after a lengthy break from composition during which Chou Wen-Chung had worked on his edition of Varèse’s scores. Among Chou Wen-Chung’s most substantial works, Echoes is regarded as on one level a tribute to his former mentor as well.

Chou Wen-Chung organizes his quartet of percussionists to preside over a vast panoply of instruments. These are divided into various family groups based on timbre (wood, metal, skin, and various other kinds of drums), articulation, and even where and how the instruments are struck.

Chou Wen-Chung’s devotion to Chinese calligraphy and its philosophy also informs the shaping of sounds in a delicate balance between predetermination and seeming spontaneity. In the view of Steven Schick, Echoes from the Gorge ranks with the most significant yet overlooked works for percussion written in the 20^th century. Comprising an introduction and 12 sections labeled with nature imagery (“echoes from the gorge,” “falling rocks and flying spray,” etc.), the piece reflects what Chou Wen-Chung described as “the preeminent musical form in East Asia, wherein all sections of a composition are elaborations or reductions of one and the same nuclear idea.”

—THOMAS MAY

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Friday, June 9, 2023 | 10:00am
VIS-À-VIS – Program Notes

Lara Downes piano | Gloria Cheng piano | Emi Ferguson flute | Mario Gotoh viola | Leonard Hayes piano | Karen Ouzounian cello | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Steven Schick percussion | Michi Wiancko violin | Wu Man pipa

Due to injury, pianist Leonard Hayes has had to reduce his playing commitments and has withdrawn from this concert. We are deeply grateful to Lara Downes for agreeing to step in on short notice. Please note the revised program:

Face to Face

The face of American concert music has been changing dramatically in our time, immeasurably enriched by the acknowledgment and celebration of voices that, not long ago, were largely excluded. Contributions by woefully undervalued Black American composers of the past are finding eager new audiences, and young artists of color are galvanizing the scene by bringing their own perspectives to classical traditions. This morning’s program spans three generations of composers active today, with a nod to a rediscovered elder from the last century.

Commissioned as part of a project inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, Shawn Okpebholo’s mi sueño: afro-flamenco responds to the Spanish-flavored fourth movement, “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”), from Ravel’s original piano suite. The title (“my dream: afro-flamenco”) combines his “pre- pandemic nostalgia” with “post-pandemic dreams” to travel again and revisit Spain and Africa. References to flamenco as well as rhythms and idioms inspired by his Nigerian musical heritage and African American music convey the composer’s longing to reconnect to these sources.

American Tableau (Tableau XI) is one of a larger cycle of a dozen pieces, each for a different solo instrument, by Tyson Gholston Davis, the youngest composer on Leonard Hayes’s opening set for solo piano. Davis interrogates the straightforward assurance of the melody known as “America the Beautiful” — and the betrayal of the values it signifies — by weaving it into a chromatically ambivalent context.

A student of Florence Price who later collaborated with her and with the poet Langston Hughes, the composer and pianist Margaret Bonds in 1933 became the first Black musician to perform with the Chicago Symphony. Troubled Water originated as the finale of a three-movement suite Bonds composed to bring her solo recitals to a rousing close. Rather than a mere “arrangement” of a famous spiritual, Bonds offers a multifaceted pianistic fantasy infused with idioms from jazz and European Romanticism. The words to “Wade in the Water,” her source, originally encoded lifesaving information for fugitives following the Underground Railroad to freedom.

For her album marking the Leonard Bernstein centennial in 2018, the pianist Lara Downes asked an array of composers to write short pieces honoring his legacy. Michael Abels explains that he sought to convey his impressions of “the personality and not the sage” in his witty Iconoclasm. Bouncy rhythms and restlessly shifting meters echoing Bernstein’s own style evoke how he embodied “the puckish life of the party.”

Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2023, Jessie Montgomery grew up amid the rebelliously creative experimental scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. Both her parents led active careers in the performing arts, and their home became a meeting place for boundary-crossing musicians from free jazz; their prodigy daughter meanwhile pursued training in classical violin and began composing as a child. Rhapsody No. 2 is part of set of in-progress solo violin works, each dedicated to a particular contemporary violinist. Citing Béla Bartók as one of her inspirations, Montgomery wrote No. 2 for Michi Wiancko, who included it on her Planetary Candidate album (released in 2020).

Both Nasim Khorassani and Nina Barzegar are members of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48). Khorassani began composing at the age of 8 and spent time in Germany and the U.K. before coming to San Diego, where she is a doctoral composition student at the University of California. In her single-movement string trio Growth, she restricts herself to just four pitches that are closely adjacent (B, C, D, and E-flat). But changes in texture, dynamics, and rhythmic articulation produce a sense of restless pressure to metamorphose.

Both a composer and an actor, Nina Barzegar studied in Tehran before enrolling in the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and combines interests in film music, improvisation, and the Iranian classical tradition. The New York Times singled out the world premiere of her quintet Inexorable Passage at a concert last October, noting that the work was “thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.” Barzegar introduces the piece as a depiction of “the stages of life”: “We enter this world with hope, we learn, we strive, fall in love, we fight, we fail and triumph. Despite all our wishes, we eventually surrender, accept, and get off the train of life. This is the miracle of being in this world.”

Our morning program concludes with an innovative reconsideration of the principle of musical dialogue and virtuosity. Lei Liang composed vis-à-vis for Wu Man and Steven Schick — fellow San Diego–based colleagues who, he notes, share a “magnetic stage presence and unparalleled virtuosity on their instruments.”

This substantial duo for pipa and percussion goes far beyond simple confrontations of East with West or the traditional with the experimental. Lei Liang uses the paradoxical formula “new music that is old” to depict his aesthetic, adding that he prefers writing “music that has layers of memories underneath.”

Although he grew up in Beijing, Lei Liang has observed that he didn’t discover China until he was living in America. The process of using instrumentation outside one’s own culture, he says, resembles constructing a “mirror that makes us look at ourselves with a kind of X-ray vision. It allows us to penetrate the surface.” The part that Schick plays alone in vis-à-vis accomplishes this by inhabiting three states of mind or three very different spaces simultaneously: “looking inward, looking outward, and resting in a state of motionlessness.”

Juxtaposing the ancient pipa, an instrument with thousands of years of history, versus modern percussion, which began to come into its own in Western classical music only over the last century, is intentionally extreme. Lei Liang points out the jarring humor inherent as well in pitting the pipa’s image as a silk-string instrument of refined delicacy against the brute strength of the sonorities percussionists can produce. “I imagine the piece to be at times serious, challenging, probing, and even contentious; and at other times, relaxed, playful, and humorous,” writes the composer. “This is what a contentious friendship between kindred spirits would be like!”

—THOMAS MAY

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Friday, June 9, 2023 | 3:30pm & Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 3:30pm
GHOST OPERA – Program Notes

Wu Man pipa | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | PeiJu Chien-Pott dancer/choreographer Jon Reimer director | Nicholas Houfek lighting designer

TAN Dun (b. 1957)
Ghost Opera (1994)

We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on

During his youth in Hunan Province, Tan Dun became fascinated by local lore associated with shamans and sorcerers, listening eagerly to the ghost stories his grandmother told him as a boy. But he had to rediscover the folk traditions of his own culture following the upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which banned not only Western composition but Chinese music as well — unless it had the “revolutionary” seal of approval.

Since he came from a family of “intellectuals” — his mother was a doctor and his father a researcher — Tan Dun was forcibly separated from them as a teenager and sent to an agricultural commune to be “re-educated” by toiling in the rice fields. Mao’s death in 1976 put an end to these policies, and Tan Dun was allowed to gain experience playing violin with a Beijing Opera troupe and to hear Western classical music on the radio. He was accepted to the newly reopened Central Conservatory in Beijing to study composition and eventually found his way in the mid-1980s to Columbia University — where Chou Wen-Chung numbered among his mentors. New York City has since remained home base for Tan Dun’s tirelessly peripatetic career, which keeps him internationally in demand as both a composer and a conductor.

Even when Chinese folk traditions were still forbidden during his period on the collective farm, Tan Dun found a way to experience these sources by offering to set texts of Maoist propaganda to the folk tunes he persuaded the farmers to share with him. The impulse to reconnect with aspects of Chinese culture was later intensified by his encounters with John Cage and similar figures in New York’s experimental downtown scene, which provided an enlightening counterpart to what he was learning more formally uptown. As with so many émigré composers, the stimulation of distance encouraged a fresh perspective on his native culture.

Ghost Opera is an early breakthrough work in which Tan Dun comes to terms with these formative influences by forging them into a strikingly original musical language. The result, as in this composer’s oeuvre overall, transcends reductive (and bland) formulas such as “East meets West” or “ancient juxtaposed with avant-garde.”

Indeed, Tan Dun relishes the creative tension generated by combining perspectives often assumed to stand in contradiction — whether Buddhist and Christian traditions (in his Water Passion and Buddha Passion, both modeled on J.S. Bach) or the spontaneous music of nature and “composed” music (a fusion integral to his vocabulary, which plays a key role in the soundscape of Ghost Opera).

Originally created for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, Ghost Opera is also characteristic of Tan Dun’s artistic practice in its engrossing theatrical sensibility. The scenario alludes to a tradition of shamanistic performance that is believed to reach back thousands of years, which later became integrated with Buddhist philosophy. In its traditional format, according to Tan Dun, the performer “has a dialogue with his past and future life — a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature.”

For his version of this long tradition, Tan Dun created a sequence of five acts or movements. Among the departed who are invoked by the performers are the spirits of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach, who join the proceedings through references to their work — via quotations from The Tempest and the C-sharp minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. In addition to their usual instruments, all five musicians are called on to play percussion and “natural” instruments

(water, metal, stone, and paper) that allude to the classical Chinese philosophy of the elements. In the Ojai Music Festival’s new production, a dancer mediates between the spheres of the living and those who have passed on.

Although Tan Dun’s treatment of the pipa itself, according to Wu Man, involves no avant-garde extended techniques, the idea of a dialogue between pipa and string quartet is unprecedented — and a novel kind of music theater. Tan Dun never merely evokes the past. His “ghosts” join together in a dialogue whose surprising twists are spellbinding. The “exhalations of a ghostly monk” in the first movement, for example, underline the porousness of the borders between sound and silence, the motions of breathing that mark the passage of time against eternity.

Ghost Opera is also, for Wu Man, “a very personal piece” because of her close involvement in the process while Tan Dun was composing it. When Tan Dun was searching for a folk tune, she suggested “Little Cabbage,” which is played on the pipa in the third act and which she sings in the fifth. During this final movement, the song’s significance is revealed as the lament of “a little girl who has lost her parents,” explains Tan Dun. “Such an odd, sad song. It’s the essence of ghostliness. You can talk to the past, the stone can talk to the violin, and the cabbage can sing of her sorrowful life.”

Tan Dun’s use of the visual aspects of the performers interacting with their instruments — and, in the final scene, with the paper installation — is further enhanced in this production, specially designed for the Ojai Music Festival, with new choreography, lighting, and stage direction.

Through the strands that he weaves together in Ghost Opera’s unique counterpoint of cultures, eras, and instruments, Tan Dun himself becomes a contemporary shaman able to communicate between realms thought to be inseparably divided.

—THOMAS MAY

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Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00pm
EVENING WITH RHIANNON GIDDENS AND FRANCESCO TURRISI – Program Notes

Rhiannon Giddens vocals and banjo | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist

The program will be announced from the stage.

Hybrid Spaces

Songs are the most versatile of musical artifacts. As a medium of communication, song isn’t even confined to the human species. The impulse to sing accompanies the relationships that define our lives, from the intimate and familial to the spiritual to the political: whether it’s a soothing lullaby to calm a child, a heartfelt moment of prayer, or a defiant chant of protest.

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi make this versatility itself into an art in their song programs. The notion of songs as “repertory” items to be temporarily retrieved from the shelf, dusted off, and ritually performed — as if the singer were merely ventriloquizing the past — couldn’t be more antithetical to the experience Giddens and Turrisi seek to convey in their performances.

Part of what makes this approach possible is their shared conviction that the categories we’ve been trained to assign to songs are artificial — above all, the categories that reinforce hierarchies of “high” and “low,” “classical” and “popular.” “Art songs” written by privileged composers in the Western classical tradition or folk songs that originated with enslaved African Americans and have been passed down over the generations: the distinctions cued by labels reinforce preconceived ideas about what to expect and even how we should respond to a musical experience.

Giddens refers to the “hybrid spaces” that emerge when we break down these boundaries — spaces where new contexts can be created through boldly original juxtapositions that freshly illuminate the familiar with a haunting, at times surprising, relevance.

One of Giddens’s models for this approach is Nina Simone — whose birthday she happens to share and to whom she paid tribute by making Tomorrow Is My Turn the title song of her debut solo album (2015), adding her own layer to Simone’s unforgettable version of the Charles Aznavour hit.

“The idea is that a recital for piano and voice doesn’t have to be attached to any concept of a ‘classical’ recital — even when we’re also doing some classical pieces,” says Turrisi. “We’re exploring the fluidity between the classical and popular sound.” For example, surprising crosscurrents can emerge between a madrigal by Monteverdi and an Italian pop song from the 1960s. Even within the realm of what we generally consider “vernacular” music, hidden and suppressed histories are brought to light — such as the unacknowledged origins of country music from African American sources. (To explore more of this topic, Giddens’s contributions to the 2019 Ken Burns Country Music series are highly recommended.)

Giddens and Turrisi show how timeless folk tunes can take on a burning relevance for today, as with the songs about final things that they interpret on their recent Grammy Award–winning They’re Calling Me Home album, produced in isolation during the pandemic.

On the other hand, Giddens’s original song Build a House, which she premiered online with Yo-Yo Ma on Juneteenth 2020 — and recently transformed into a children’s book (see p. 83) — works back from frustration over contemporary racial injustice to condense a history of the African American experience into a song that seems to have always been part of the folk tradition.

“It’s the song that matters, not what category it is, not where it originally appeared,” says Giddens. “If the song is compelling, what’s to keep it from being done as an art song?”

—THOMAS MAY

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Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 10:00am
THE WILLOWS ARE NEW – Program Notes

Gloria Cheng piano | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Nathan Schram viola | Wu Man pipa

Next month marks the official centennial of the birth of Chou Wen-Chung, who left us only four years ago. Along with his remarkable but woefully underrecognized oeuvre, his legacy extends to his influence on several generations of Chinese composers and performers he mentored over a long, productive career. Many of them, like Chou Wen-Chung, settled in the U.S., where they have explored innovative ways of synthesizing various aspects of Chinese culture with currents in contemporary Western music.

Framing this morning’s focus on that legacy is music representing two generations of Iranian artists. We begin with Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a young composer and pianist born in Karaj and now based in the U.S. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see p. 48), she wrote Veiled in response to the Iranian protests in 2017. Nourbakhsh points to the anger she carries within as a result of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.” The cello’s eloquence, pitched high in the register, mixes with an electronically processed track of a woman singing, transforming her anger “into a collective force that is both beautiful and resilient.” She describes Veiled as a “tribute to the Iranian women who made such transformations possible.”

Lei Liang (see p. 53), a featured composer at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival who is based at the University of California San Diego, was appointed artistic director of the Chou Wen-Chung Research Center at the Xinghai Conservatory in 2018. Mother’s Songs, which he wrote for Wu Man, gives voice to a tension that accompanies the experience of being “between worlds” — the power of musical memory sharpened by distance.

Lei Liang recalls the deep impression left on him by the Mongolian scholar Wulalji, his teacher since childhood. A friend of his musicologist parents, Wulalji taught Lei Liang traditional folk music against the backdrop of 1970s Beijing, when the music officially approved by the authorities centered around “happy propaganda songs.” Wulalji instead shared his traditional “long songs” from Mongolia, which deal with themes of solitude and homesickness — a sadness that acquired a deeper resonance after Lei Liang came to America. Both Mother’s Songs and the more recent Mongolian Suite for solo cello (which was premiered this past February) tap into this source.

When Lei Liang visited China in 2019, he again met up with Wulalji, who sang for him songs that he had learned from his mother. “These songs are of a traveler’s longing for home and a daughter’s desire to be reunited with her mother,” Lei Liang explains. “At age 83, my teacher is the only one in Inner Mongolia who still remembers these ancient melodies, and he sang them with deep emotion. I, too, am away from home. My teacher’s singing evoked a strong sense of longing even as it offered profound solace.” The result is a moving meditation on memory and on music’s role in creating a sense of home.

Ge Gan-Ru studied at the conservatory of his native Shanghai following the Cultural Revolution. Even after the reopening of exchange with the West, Ge Gan-Ru’s avant-garde inclinations made him an outsider in China. His controversial landmark Lost Style for solo cello (1983) has staked a claim as “the first avant- garde work in China.” Ge Gan-Ru left his homeland to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1983 with Chou Wen-Chung.

He also captured the attention of avant- garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. She commissioned him to compose a work simultaneously inspired by the songs of the qin (ancient Chinese zither) and the Western piano.

Ge Gan-Ru, who refrains from using actual Chinese instruments, responded with Gu Yue (“Ancient Music”). Each movement of this four-movement suite for prepared piano conjures the sonority and spirit of a different traditional Chinese instrument. We hear the first movement, devoted to the gong (the other movements imitate the qin, pipa, and drum, respectively). Ge Gan-Ru also has the performer actively manipulate the prepared piano’s innards, evoking not only timbres but traditions, such as the “morning ringing of bells.”

Writing about Ge Gan-Ru’s music, the scholar Yiming Zhang notes that Gu Yue “has many similarities with ancient Chinese visual arts … particularly painting and calligraphy” through the balance of shape, emotion, and abstraction. Chou Wen-Chung similarly draws a connection to ancient Chinese calligraphy with The Willows Are New, comparing his process to how, in calligraphy, “the controlled flow of the ink — through the interaction of rhythm and density, the modulation of line and texture — creates a continuum of motion and tension in spatial equilibrium.”

Chou Wen-Chung evokes ancient music and poetry from Chinese tradition, taking as his source a composition for qin attributed to the Tang Dynasty musician, poet, painter, and politician Wang Wei (689-759). His title occurs as a line in Wang’s poem associated with this ancient music, which Chou Wen-Chung translates:

In this town by the river,
morning rain has cleared the light dust.
Green, green around the tavern,
the willows are new.
Let us empty another cup of wine —
For, once west of Yang Kuai
There will be no more friends.
(Sprigs of willow, he notes, were “used in farewell ceremonies and regarded as a symbol of parting.”)

“Mutations of the original material are woven over the entire range of the piano and embroidered with sonorities that are the magnified reflexes of brushstroke-like movements,” Chou Wen-Chung writes. Through his calligraphy-inspired musical treatment, he amplifies “the restrained emotion of the poem and the subtle nuances of the qin technique.”

Working with sources from ancient tradition to create something new, unrepeatable, belonging to the present moment: this is an art that Kayhan Kalhor has perfected over decades. The great tradition of Persian classical music, which flourished in the court, draws on a repertoire of melodic figures and songs that have been passed on orally over many generations, from teacher to student. These were eventually gathered into a collection known as the Radif.

Kalhor describes how these melodies, long since memorized, are metamorphosed into unexpected larger constructions through the process of improvisation — a process that lies at the heart of all classical traditions, though it became separated from composition in the Western tradition with the development of written music and increasing specialization.

The kamancheh, the main bowed instrument in Persian music, traveled both east and west, Kalhor explains, and became responsible for many different bowed instruments in Europe. When playing a solo improvisation, Kalhor says that the focus is mostly on melody. “Before we had a way to write music, this was the only way people had to memorize a melody and interpret it according to their own ideas and playing skills.”

The challenge for an improviser is “to expand the melody beyond recognition,” so that it becomes something completely different from what he began with, illuminated by nuances and angles — much like the transformative process of working with themes and variations.

Is Kalhor able to replicate an improvisation that he has found particularly beautiful? “I should be able to start from the same place if I want to, but it will probably go elsewhere in terms of direction and development,” he responds. “It depends on the audience, yourself, what kind of day you are having. You’re human and have emotions, and those emotions are heavily reflected in what you produce.”

—THOMAS MAY

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Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 8:00pm
OMAR’S JOURNEY – Program Notes

Limmie Pulliam tenor (Omar) | Rhiannon Giddens soprano (Julie) | Cheryse McLeod Lewis mezzo-soprano (Fatima)
Michael Preacely bass-baritone (Abdul/Abe) | Andy Papas bass-baritone (Owen/Johnson) | Emi Ferguson flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Leonard Hayes piano | Ross Karre, Francesco Turrisi percussion | Justin Robinson fiddle | Seckou Keita kora

Rhiannon GIDDENS (b. 1979) Michael ABELS (b. 1962)
Omar’s Journey (2023)

Necessary Stories

In 2019, Spoleto Festival USA asked Rhiannon Giddens whether she would consider writing an opera based on Omar Ibn Said (see sidebar p. 70). Giddens was shocked that she had not previously known of this remarkable figure. The fact that his story had been eclipsed by the standard historical narrative of enslavement in America made Giddens all the more determined to use the resources of her art to bring Omar Ibn Said to the attention of contemporary audiences.

To transform all this material into an opera, Giddens adopted an unconventional collaborative strategy that would remain true to her own identity as a singer: She reached out to Michael Abels as her composing partner, impressed by his score for the Academy Award–winning Jordan Peele film Get Out. According to Abels, he and Giddens share a clear sense “of what a good and effective opera sounds like” as well as a passion for folk music — an ideal match to undertake what was for both the formidable task of writing their first opera.

The result, Omar, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music (see sidebar on p. 71). Originally to have premiered in 2020, Omar finally reached the stage, to rapturous reviews, at the opening of the 2022 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina — less than a mile from the dock where some 40% of enslaved Africans brought into the U.S. passed through, including Omar in a pivotal scene in the opera. Omar has since been presented by Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera and will return to California in November as part of San Francisco Opera’s season.

While the scope and implications of Omar’s story called for the large-scale, multidimensional treatment for which opera is so well-suited, Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian shared Giddens’s conviction that this story needs to be as widely told as possible. He therefore commissioned Omar’s Journey as a concert piece to capture the arc of the full-length opera — without the demands of a full-scale stage production.

When she was deciding whether to accept the original opera commission, Giddens found herself deeply moved by what she discovered in her research and realized that she could not turn away from the challenge. Omar recovers multiple historical perspectives that have been unjustly overlooked: the perspective of enslaved persons coerced to immigrate to the “New World” as well as the perspective of Muslims in the African diaspora (about 30% of Africans captured to be enslaved in the U.S. are estimated to have been Muslim).

The libretto, also by Giddens, interweaves what she learned of Omar’s real-life story with fictional threads to give fuller context to his experience as an enslaved person during a certain period of American history. She invented the character of Julie, for example: an enslaved woman whom Omar reminds of the father she was separated from long ago. (Giddens sings this role for the first time in tonight’s performance.) In an interview she gave shortly before the Spoleto premiere, Giddens explained that she aimed to allow Omar’s own words to speak as much as possible — including the Qur’anic quotations that were so central to his identity: The themes of Arabic versus English and the sacred texts corresponding to the faiths of the enslaved and their enslavers are a defining thread in the original production design.

Giddens composed whole scenes by singing her way through them, accompanying herself with banjo, piano, or guitar. She then sent recordings of the work-in-progress to the Los Angeles– based Abels via WhatsApp. Giddens found her way into the story from her

perspective as an expert in American roots music and the deep history of American vernaculars. She complemented this with research into the music Omar Ibn Said would have known from his West African upbringing as well as the modal music that accompanied the Muslim African diaspora — idioms that come to the fore, for example, when Omar is conversing internally with the spirit of his mother. Instrumental selections from Senegal and the folk music of the Carolinas provide a general context for the sources that influenced Giddens.

Abels went beyond merely transcribing and orchestrating this material. He describes serving as a “sounding board” for Giddens, allowing her to focus on her melody-centered process and then “bringing that into a world that is operatic.” This involved enhancing the music with transitions and harmonic context, as well as ensuring that the musical narrative would be effectively paced as an unfolding drama — a skill that Abels has fine-tuned through his career in film music.

Abels emphasizes that he and Giddens both intend Omar “to be written in one artistic voice” that preserves the identities of each. By eschewing a clear-cut division of labor with compartmentalized tasks assigned to each party, their collaborative process might be said to embody another sense of “liquid borders.”

A new stage has been added to their collaboration with the creation of Omar’s Journey. According to Abels, the biggest challenge has not been scaling down the orchestration but rather selecting what needs to be retained in order to preserve a sense of the journey at the opera’s core. It’s a journey in two senses, he adds: both Omar’s physical journey — during his prime, from his life as a flourishing scholar to a foreign land where he was subjected to unimaginable dehumanization — and his inner emotional and spiritual journey. The second of the opera’s two acts focuses on the spirituality that sustains Omar and gives him a sense of purpose, despite the attempts of the enslavers to suppress and replace it with their own worldview.

While the chorus has a significant presence in the opera, the concert version relies on five singers to tell the story; they sometimes join forces to form an intimate chorus. Replacing an orchestra hidden in the pit with an onstage ensemble contributes to the music making “in a way that you might not be as conscious of in an operatic format,” as Abels puts it, with the instrumentalists becoming “equally as important as the singers.” (This involves not so much a reduction as a return to the small ensemble he and Giddens used while workshopping the opera.)

Omar and Omar’s Journey convey the pain and trauma carried by the African people — by people “descended from these stories,” as Giddens puts it. But essential to her retelling is Omar’s triumph in overcoming these impossible circumstances and finding the strength to remain true to his identity. That triumph resounds in the music that has in turn nourished America’s cultural identity.

—THOMAS MAY

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Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 10:00am
EARLY MUSIC – Program Notes

Francesco Turrisi curator and keyboards | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Wu Man pipa | Joshua Stauffer theorbo

On this program, you might hear Monteverdi on the Persian kamancheh, Luca Marenzio’s madrigals performed by a modern string quartet, Dowland sung as a jazz ballad, or a Baroque theorbo

playing folk-inspired original music.

This concert challenges the idea of late Renaissance and early Baroque music and reinterprets it as a universal language that can connect the 17^th century to today through an imagined historical and geographical journey.

—FRANCESCO TURRISI

Early, Not Old

This summer’s Festival seeks to cross borders not only in the geographical sense but across time as well. The area generally known as “early music” has in fact turned out to have remarkably liquid borders. The antiquarian preoccupations that once underscored the alienness of early music are increasingly giving way to engagement by contemporary composers and performers who sense an affinity of values.

“Early music didn’t sound ‘old’ to me,” says Francesco Turrisi, recalling his discovery of parallels between early music and jazz in their attitude toward improvisation. His dual grounding in folk and early music further deepened this sense of the ongoing relevance of music from centuries ago.

Turrisi points to the connections between Renaissance and early Baroque music, especially from Italy, and folk sources: “There was much less of a distinction between classical and folk music, especially in the dance rhythms, the melodic quality of that music, and a certain type of improvisation. But things changed very dramatically after those times, and early music speaks to me in a different way,” he adds. This was roughly around the time that the concept of a “standard repertoire” started taking shape in Western music — a powerful tool for reinforcing musical borders.

Turrisi is interested in exploring the idea of early music from several angles on this program — during the “very magical time” of Sunday morning on the final day of the Festival, as Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian puts it. There will also be new music Turrisi has written, which is inspired by early music. The use of period instruments became a signature of the early music revival in the last century. We will hear various mixes of old and modern instruments as well as instruments that are not part of the tradition of Western music.

Wu Man, for example, presents the oldest music on the program, sharing her research into the music scrolls from the caves in Dunhuang — an important crossroads on the ancient Silk Road, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China — which date back some 900 years. “This will give the audience a sense of what early Chinese music sounded like,” she says. “These are very simple melodies in the low register, not pentatonic and very different from the Chinese music we think of today.”

“We both have a very similar way of looking at these things,” says Rhiannon Giddens of her collaboration with Turrisi. “Both of us want to tear down false notions that you can only do a certain kind of music in a concert.”

The versatility of weaving in early music from different eras and cultures is the point — and that includes sharing the musical material itself among instruments from different contexts, whether cello, pipa, or kamancheh. The path from ancient Persia to modern jazz is shorter than we imagined…

—THOMAS MAY

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Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 2:30pm
BETWEEN WORLDS – Program Notes

Mazz Swift violin | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Ross Karre projection designer

Carlos SIMON (b. 1986)
Between Worlds (2019)

Deceptive Simplicity

An increasingly prominent presence in the new music world, Carlos Simon is a versatile composer who writes solo and chamber pieces, orchestral works, and music theater works with equal fluency. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of a family who encouraged his love of music as a way to participate in church services at the African American Pentecostal church founded by his father, who comes from a line of preachers stretching back several generations.

Much of Simon’s work conveys his conviction that art can serve as a powerful platform to bring attention to suppressed and marginalized voices. Elegy: A Cry from the Grave for string quartet (2015), one of his most-performed pieces, uses music to reflect on “those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.” Requiem for the Enslaved is a rap opera featuring spoken word and hip-hop artist Marco Pavé and appears on Simon’s debut album for the Decca label (released last summer); it was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in the 2023 Grammy Awards.

Now based in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at Georgetown University as a member of the performing arts faculty, Simon was deeply moved when he attended a landmark exhibition devoted to the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (see sidebar on p. 80), which was presented from September 2018 to April 2019 by the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art. Titled Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, this comprehensive retrospective — the fruit of seven years of intense curation by Leslie Umberger — marked the first major exhibition devoted to an artist who had been born into slavery.

In 1939, at the age of 84, Traylor suddenly began to express himself in an outpouring of paintings and drawings. By the time of his death in 1949, he had produced a remarkable series of untitled works. Many were lost, but around 1,200 survived.

They range from drawings of single human or animal figures to more complex compositions. Silhouette shapes or abstractions are characteristic of Traylor’s vocabulary and are painted using a palette often limited to brown and black, with an occasional eruption of red or deep blue.

The deceptively simple style cultivated by the entirely self-taught Traylor “has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paintings, and something spanking new,” wrote the late Peter Schjeldahl in a review of the Smithsonian exhibition. “Songlike rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images.”

Recognition by the white-dominated art establishment was belated, despite the efforts of fellow artist Charles Shannon, who befriended Traylor and attempted to champion his work. The reception history of Traylor is a textbook case of how curation in the visual arts, just as in music, can also be used to reinforce reductive, tone-policing labels and boundaries — or to dismantle them. Once the word about Traylor began to spread in the 1980s, when his work appeared as part of a larger show at the Corcoran Gallery, it tended to get categorized as “primitive” or “folk art.”

But we are now more attuned to the multifaceted implications of what Traylor created. His art truly exists between worlds. As the critic Alana Shilling-Janoff puts it, his images portray “nothing less than the predicament of a man caught between past enslavement he cannot forget and present liberty he struggles to accept.” In addition to his achievement as an artist, Traylor is “an eloquent annalist of a nation’s history: its brutality.”

Simon recalls that, before attending the exhibition, he had not been aware of Traylor’s life or work. But the encounter caused him to feel an immediate sense of connection to Traylor. An eyewitness to the social and political turbulence of this crucial period in American history, Traylor fascinated Simon as a creative figure who moved between the worlds of slavery and freedom, wealth and poverty, rural and urban life, white and Black culture, the traditional and the modern.

Between Worlds originated as a series commissioned for the young artists of the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. Simon created a series of solo pieces — one each for violin, viola, cello, and double bass — that can be played separately or as a kind of suite. Each lasts about four minutes and is marked “sorrowful” at the beginning.

Simon moves between worlds stylistically to evoke the kind of music he imagines Traylor would have heard. He spans such vernacular idioms as the blues with phrasings reminiscent of Bach to cast new light on the “themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion [that] pervade Traylor’s work” — he doesn’t limit himself to interacting with a particular drawing or painting. “In many ways, the simplified forms in Traylor’s artwork tell of the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture,” explains Simon. “I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study, hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.”

—THOMAS MAY

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Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 5:30pm
STRINGS ATTACHED – Program Notes

Amy Schroeder violin | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Seckou Keita kora | Rhiannon Giddens vocals/multi-instrumentalist | Wu Man pipa | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Joshua Stauffer theorbo

Connection Variations

Throughout this edition of the Ojai Music Festival, Rhiannon Giddens and her colleagues have been celebrating the extraordinary creative boost that happens when artists — and audiences — venture into the hybrid spaces between worlds. Music is by its nature uncontainable and resists the boundaries and borders into which we are pressured to compartmentalize our experiences.

One of the side effects of the recent years of pandemic closure was to underscore how diminished we become when compelled to adapt to artificial constraints — and how essential it is to break free from whatever isolates us. The impossibility of live performance fueled a desire to reestablish connections through our technological Silk Road, the internet, and thus share musical discoveries with a global audience.

Michael Abels, whose collaboration with Giddens on the concert piece Omar’s Journey has been a centerpiece of the Festival, captures this phenomenon in the Isolation Variation he wrote in 2020 for violinist Hilary Hahn. Conceived as a solo encore piece, it “commemorates and validates the experience of being a musician in a time of constant change and uncertainty,” Hahn observes, “the hypnotic, repetitive, yet unpredictable nature of working indefinitely on something you love, a metamorphosis in progress.”

Defying racism, classism, political rivalries, and similarly divisive influences, music around the world has always thrived on exchange between cultures or between people across the hierarchies of a particular society.

Instruments cross borders, too. We have the actual Silk Road to thank for the diffusion of instruments across borders that helped shape Europe’s string culture, for example, which in turn became a hallmark of Western classical music.

“It may well have been along the Silk Road that some of the first ‘world music’ jam sessions took place,” says the ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin. “Innovative musicians and luthiers adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques.”

Our closing musical celebration replicates that process by staging encounters among the diverse kinds of string instruments from the cultures represented throughout the Festival: whether it’s Kayhan Kalhor and Seckou Keita improvising as a kamancheh-kora duo or Rhiannon Giddens and Wu Man bringing the banjo and pipa into dialogue. The stories of each of these instruments, as Giddens has so eloquently shown in her work, embody complex histories of social and political as well as artistic interaction.

“Humans came out of Africa and spread all over the world and changed along the way. That’s what instruments do as well,” observes Giddens. “The massive migration of instruments is connected to the migration of people. The banjo and the pipa have a common ancestor, just like we do.” Her hope is that the 2023 Ojai Music Festival encourages us to ignore artificial boundaries and see that “we’re really not that far apart.”

The spontaneity of the program is also grounded in Giddens’s philosophy. “Everybody brings something from what has been created over the course of the weekend, as we’ve been interacting through the concerts. These opportunities that we have to get to be together and play together are blessings. We need more collaboration in these worlds of music and more open-endedness, not less.”

—THOMAS MAY