OJAI TALKS
Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 3:00pm Ojai Presbyterian Church
PART I Music Director Claire Chase with Ara Guzelimian
BREAK
PART II 2025 Featured Composers and Artists with host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds
PAN
Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone Wu Wei sheng | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre, Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion Alex Peh piano | M.A. Tiesenga electronic hurdy-gurdy
Marcos BALTER Alone Claire Chase flute Daphne and Penelope DiFrancesco tuned glasses
Annea LOCKWOOD bayou-borne Joshua Rubin clarinet Steven Schick, Ross Karre, Susie Ibarra, and Wesley Sumpter percussion Wu Wei sheng Dan Rosenboom trumpet Mattie Barbier trombone M.A. Tiesenga electronic hurdy-gurdy
INTERMISSION
Marcos BALTER Pan
I. Death of Pan
II. Lament for Pan’s Death
III. Pan’s Flute
IV. Music of the Spheres
V. Echo
VI. Serenade to Selene
VII. Dance of the Nymphs
VIII. Fray – The Unravelling
IX. Soliloquy
Claire Chase flute Ojai Pan Community Ensemble Ben Richter Ensemble Director
Lighting and production design by Nicholas Houfek
Video by Adam Larsen
Projection design by Ross Karre
Original direction by Douglas Fitch
Original sound design and electronics by Levy Lorenzo
Commissioned and developed by Project& and Jane M. Saks as part of Density 2036 part vii (2020)
Marcos BALTER (b. 1974) Alone (2013)
Annea LOCKWOOD (b. 1939) bayou-borne (2016)
Marcos BALTER (b. 1974) Pan (2017; rev. 2023)
Bathed in the afterglow of Ojai’s evening sky, as nighttime ushers in new mysteries, Libbey Bowl becomes a place of transformation befitting the enigmatic Pan. The ancient Greeks imagined this demigod as an embodiment of contradictory forces — simultaneously beastly and divine, playful and fearsome, herald of ecstasy and terror. His name gave rise to the English word panic, a reflection of the outburst of irrational fear his sudden appearance could ignite. But in Greek, pan also means “all” or “everything” — a root found in words like panorama and pandemic — suggesting his ability to blur boundaries and connect the seen and unseen, the earthly and the cosmic.
Pan is also a bringer of music. As the inventor of the panpipes, he might be considered an ancestral god of the flute — the instrument that serves as the artistic alter ego of this summer’s Ojai Festival Music Director, Claire Chase. In Marcos Balter’s boldly imaginative reinterpretation of the legends associated with the demigod, Pan becomes the great connector between the multiple — and contradictory — facets of our own humanity. He thus emerges as an especially compelling protagonist for the opening night of the 2025 Festival. As Chase notes, her hope is to “open the whole space to demonstrate what it is to be in community,” inviting the audience into a dynamic ecosystem of sound, collaboration, and renewal.
First, though, Libbey Bowl awakens with the delicate twilight shimmer of ambient triangles, mingling with aleatory birdsong to begin this evening’s adventure with another piece by Balter. Alone is an excerpt from Poe, another large-scale musical drama by the Brazilian-born composer.
When Balter first met Chase more than two decades ago — while he was a doctoral student in Chicago — he recalls sensing instantly that they were “twin souls.” Like Pan, Poe is a product of their deep and enduring artistic collaboration. Balter created Poe during a summer residency in 2013 at Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskills, which he shared with Chase and percussionist Svet Stoyanov. For this creative retreat, Balter arrived without sketches or a predetermined plan — just a single text to which he had long felt a special connection: “Alone,” a poem written in 1829 by a 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe is a half-hour, multi-movement work that meditates on the artist’s paradoxical sense of isolation and connection with the natural world. Two movements — Pessoa and Alone — have taken on lives of their own through Chase’s ongoing advocacy. She often programs Alone, a duet for flute and tuned glasses, as a freestanding piece and invites audience members to join her by playing the glasses. For tonight’s performance, two festival family members share the stage with Chase.
The principle of collaboration extends — quite literally — to nature itself in Annea Lockwood’s mesmerizing bayou-borne, created to mark the 85th birthday of her close friend and fellow maverick Pauline Oliveros, who passed away in November 2016 — just six months shy of that milestone. Acclaimed for her compositions and installations that foster mindfulness about the environment, Lockwood designed a sonic realization of a map of the bayou flowing through Houston, where Oliveros was born and grew up. “I always imagined Pauline splashing around one of the bayous nearby and coming back into the house, her feet all muddy and full of what she discovered as a little kid.”
An important part of Lockwood’s artistic practice centers on her exploration of the infinite variety of “life spans” of the sounds that unfold within natural environments. The New Zealand–born composer, who has been based in the U.S. since the 1970s, also pays tribute to Oliveros’s reputation as a great improviser. bayou-borne creates a framework in which each performer is required to improvise by interpreting a map of the slow-moving main tributaries feeding into the marshy Buffalo Bayou that flows through Houston. Lockwood translates these map lines into parts, leaving it to the performers to make decisions about such factors as tempo or density of the musical texture according to where the lines thicken or curve.
The choice of instrumentation is left to the players, who begin spatially separated and individualized, entering the space from different angles. For this performance, some parts will be played by pairs of musicians. Gradually, they converge and blend until they form what Lockwood describes as “a massive sound block.”
Attentive to nature’s ever-changing contours, bayou-borne’s climax incorporates a reference to Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston just weeks before the piece was premiered in 2017. Lockwood asks the players to darken their tone color as they recall the hurricane, realizing in sound “how the bayous change under storm conditions — from languorous, slow-flowing rivers into overwhelmingly powerful, stormy waterways.”
With Marcos Balter’s genre-defying Pan, we move from environmental memory to another kind of transformation — one rooted in myth and its truth-telling about the human condition. While Ojai audiences witnessed a shorter preliminary version of the work in 2017, tonight’s performance is of the fully realized and staged Pan, the fifth part of Claire Chase’s epic — and ongoing — Density 2036 project.
Balter suggests thinking of Pan as “a musical gathering based on storytelling.” He designed the narrative by juxtaposing various legends associated with the demigod, casting a musical drama in nine short tableaux. Instead of English, Balter opted to tell the story using the lingua ingnota (“unknown language”) invented by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen — “a celestial language she used to communicate with the angels when she was writing her prophecy.”
The first tableau shows Pan’s agonizing death as he is tortured, having dared to challenge Apollo to engage in a musical competition. Inwardly, he mourns what has been lost and, as if in a series of nonlinear flashbacks, relives his story. Pan’s discovery of music reflects his connection with nature, but it also stems from his unwanted advances on the nymph Syrinx, who flees and is metamorphosed into a cluster of reeds — through which Pan breathes to create the first panpipes.
Pan’s music confers power because it allows him to enchant a band of followers. Manifesting the complex protagonist, Chase plays a wide array of electronically processed flutes, underscoring Pan’s central theme of transformation. But as his followers come to understand how Pan’s acts of violence have wronged his lovers — Echo, Selene, and Syrinx — his power begins to unravel.
Condemnation by the community triggers “the moment when Pan becomes human,” according to the Irish musician and philosopher Jenny Judge, who has written extensively on Density 2036. In the final tableau, he seeks forgiveness. “But it is too late,” Judge observes. “Pan has spent his entire existence as an outcast, shunned by the worlds of god, man, and beast alike. At the very end, he proves that he belongs in the human world. But the very moment at which he does so is the moment of his final, and irrevocable, banishment.”
For Balter, the myth of Pan involves not only art and music but “the abuse of power, greed, oppression, violence, tendencies toward tyranny.” Crucial to his presentation is the part played by the community — the followers shown to interact with Pan as well as the audience, who, in lieu of a Greek chorus, are called to go “beyond the act of witnessing and be part of the action itself.”
OJAI DAWNS
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 8:00am Zalk Theater, Besant Hill School
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin John Pickford Richards viola Jay Campbell cello
Eduardo AGUILAR HYPER (West Coast premiere)
Liza LIM Cardamom (U.S. premiere) Christopher Otto violin
Tania LEÓN Abanico
Austin Wulliman violin
Maddie Baird and Nathan Grater interactive computer
Vicente ATRIA Roundabout (West Coast premiere)
About the Round
At midnight the dance
Yet again
Last night’s opening concert posed open-ended questions about what it means to make music in community, culminating in the expansive ritual of Pan. This morning, we begin anew — with the intimacy of chamber music at dawn.
Written on a commission from the JACK Quartet, the New York–based Mexican composer Eduardo Aguilar’s HYPER explores the intricate relationships among physical motion, sonic energy, and perception. He points to the title’s connotations as a prefix suggesting “excess; over; beyond; above” — an apt description indeed for music that pushes the players to extremes not only of sound but of physical gesture.
Aguilar even goes beyond conventional notation to convey his ideas, employing a system of detailed spatial-temporal grids that resemble seismic charts, which he calls topochronography — a method of mapping movement and sound in precise coordinates across time and space. The result is music that is enacted through physical gesture as much as it is played, a kind of kinetic sculpture shaped in real time. Zooming in on the micro-movements of quartet playing, Aguilar’s highly original score becomes “a complete deconstruction of what a string quartet is,” according to JACK violinist Austin Wulliman.
More than just music, HYPER, in the composer’s words, is “a continuous flow of energy” that is “driven by an ethereal force, like the iridescent reflection on a CD; it spreads out radiant in a space-time continuum, like the laser beam; it fragments explosively, like chemical reactions inside a pyrotechnic device; it is structured in memory, like the architecture of a firework, like the tension in a dense knot of hair; it perpetuates itself into nothingness, like intangible particles, like air, like space impossible to reach.”
Cardamom (2024) is a short piece for solo violin that its composer Liza Lim describes as “an unfolding of an attunement — a sort of offering through resonance.” Its material is modest, presenting a figure that “floats into the air, tracing and retracing a rising scale and elaborating it.” Like the slow blooming of scent from its namesake spice,” Cardamom takes shape, says Lim, “the way that a lot of raags unfold,” offering a meditative, spacious beginning to the day.
The sound of a solo instrument is expanded and multiplied in Tania León’s 2007 piece for violin and interactive electronics. Abanico takes its name from the Spanish word for “fan” — a reference both to the decorative folding fans found throughout Spanish and Cuban culture and to the swirling motion at the heart of the piece. “An abanico is a handheld Spanish/Chinese fan, a semicircular ‘instrument’ that opens and closes like the tail of a peacock,” writes the composer. “The Spanish abanico is sometimes decorated with paintings and laces.”
That sense of motion and elegance informs the music, which León describes as “a bouncing scherzo of images, using sound as a mirror of physical motion. It is built of emerging lines that sometimes mutate into rhythmical pulses. Juxtapositions of bouncing textures become echo effects; memories, associations, and images of abanico dancing in mid-air.” With a nod to her Cuban roots, León incorporates a brief quotation from a 1920s song by Eusebio Delfín.
Certain violin pitches and dynamics trigger pre-recorded material processed electronically, blurring the boundaries between memory and enactment. As Claire Chase observes, Abanico is “a tour de force for the sound engineer and the violin,” with virtuosic writing that calls on the full expressive range of the instrument.
A Chilean composer and drummer currently based in Santiago, Vicente Atria explores hybrid musical vernaculars and microtonality in his artistic practice. Roundabout was commissioned by JACK as part of their Modern Medieval program and is loosely inspired by the ars subtilior — which Atria defines as “a late medieval tradition of rhythmic and notational complexity.” Most significantly, from Atria’s contemporary perspective, these techniques entail “a deep sensibility for and appreciation of play and humor.”
This is immediately apparent in the layered wordplay and personal associations behind the title. “Rounds are simple musical canons, whose more academic cousins (prolation canons) feature prominently in the piece,” Atria explains. “Rounds are also a kind of dance (which inspires the urban version of a roundabout). If read all at once, the titles of the three movements — ‘About the round, at midnight the dance, yet again’ — are a kind of psychedelic, self-referential short verse about dance, rounds, and their repetitive nature.”
Opening with highly contrapuntal textures, Atria bases the rhythmically propelled second movement on the technique known in medieval music as hocketing — distributing the line so that it alternates rapidly among different voices. A spiral canon (where the melody repeats at different pitches with each entrance to create a “spiral” effect) forms a chorale in the last movement that “drifts ever so slowly downwards with each repetition.”
Alongside medieval counterpoint, Roundabout draws on influences as diverse as bagpipe ornamentation and Chilean organ-grinders and contains two hidden “Easter eggs”: extensive quotation from Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight at the end of the first movement and the sensibility of the progressive rock anthem Roundabout by Yes — “whose spirit infuses a lot of my music,” Atria says, including his earlier JACK-commissioned piece Seasons Will Pass You By.
—THOMAS MAY
PULSING LIFTERS
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 10:30am Libbey Bowl
Alex Peh harpsichord and keyboard | Cory Smythe and Craig Taborn piano
Terry RILEY (arr. Alex PEH) Pulsing Lifters (World premiere of trio arrangement)
Alex Peh, Cory Smythe, and Craig Taborn keyboards
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR Impressions
Alex Peh prepared harpsichord
John COLTRANE/Cory SMYTHE Countdowns
Cory Smythe piano
Craig TABORN and Cory SMYTHE Duo Improvisation for Ojai
Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe piano
Making music often involves an act of reimagining — taking a source that inspired the performer/composer and transforming it into something newly alive. The source might live in a piece of music that already exists, or even the concept of an earlier music separated by a gulf from the present world; it might be a memory, a dream, a fragmentary found sound from the natural world. The works on this morning’s program reflect that impulse to reimagine and rearrange. The three keyboard artists who perform this morning — Cory Smythe, Craig Taborn, and Alex Peh — have each collaborated closely with Claire Chase, whose own work exemplifies the same spirit of boundlessly curious transformation.
Terry Riley, one of the “elders” being honored in this edition of the Festival, is currently immersed in an expansive new project he calls The Holy Liftoff (see the program note for this evening on page 51 for more background). Open-ended by design, The Holy Liftoff unfolds across a series of modular scores that invite myriad realizations and improvisational approaches. Pulsing Lifters is one such section — a page from the larger work that has previously been arranged for multiple flutes and string quartet. Alex Peh introduces a new version he has created for a trio of keyboards of unspecified variety, reimagining Riley’s material in collaboration with his fellow performers.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions, written in 2015 for fellow Icelandic artist Guðrún Óskarsdóttir — a frequent artistic partner — opens a very different window into transformation. Thorvaldsdottir, best known for her vast orchestral landscapes, here turns to one of Western music’s oldest keyboard instruments, reimagining the harpsichord from the inside out. The title hints at fleeting perceptions, but also at the physical act of imprinting sound on silence. The performer is required to generate these impressions both from the side of the instrument and from the conventional position at the keyboard.
Thorvaldsdottir develops a novel timbral vocabulary using six small superballs, a superball mallet, a small metal object for sliding along the strings, and two electronic bows (E-bows), which produce continuous, bowed-like tones without percussive attack. Comprising three brief movements that flow together without interruption, Impressions incorporates chance elements arising from the specific properties of these materials, and features passages without fixed pitch. In the third movement, the performer attempts to keep all six superballs moving over the strings for the duration — an act that is both physical and ephemeral.
The bizarre and unexpected sounds produced through these preparations blend and interact with the “period” timbre we associate with the harpsichord, creating a flexible sonic sculpture that feels simultaneously ancestral and experimental, familiar and strange, as Thorvaldsdottir presses against the fragile boundaries of sound itself.
Cory Smythe describes his practice as an improvising pianist as involving “growing and mutating identities” as he seeks to invent “a personal and compelling approach to the piano’s peculiar sonic constraints.” His reimagining of John Coltrane’s “Countdown” is part of an ongoing effort “to make music in meaningful conversation with that of my heroes … and, like them, to make possible a flowering of unique, powerful, thick, collective experiences of sound and substance in the world.”
“Countdown,” a composition from Coltrane’s landmark 1960 album Giant Steps, is itself a reimagining of “Tune Up,” a jazz standard from the early 1950s traditionally credited to Miles Davis. Coltrane’s hard-bop classic is celebrated for its rapid-fire harmonic changes — so-called “Coltrane changes” — and tightly coiled form.
To transform the piece, Smythe augments the acoustic piano with a microtonal detuning mechanism to create what he calls “a kind of fantasized piano.” To his left, a small table holds two MIDI keyboards resting on felt pads, allowing him to simultaneously control a virtual piano tuned a quarter-tone sharp from the real one. Its tones radiate from three transducer speakers — two attached to the soundboard and one to the lowest strings — each vibrating a small disc fitted with a protective silicon pad. These transmit sound directly into the body of the instrument, blurring the line between “real” and “fictional” piano tones.
The result is a piano recast as a site of layered inquiry — both homage and reinvention — filtered through Smythe’s kaleidoscopically surreal lens. He has described his recent projects as involving “an element of (auto)fiction,” through which he aims “to conjure speculative musical cultures, each with sonic affinities, texts, and subtexts that defamiliarize American musical idioms.”
Smythe then joins with the like-minded experimental improviser Craig Taborn to perform a brand-new duo improvisation created especially for Ojai. This morning’s offering continues an evolving series of exploratory performances the pair have undertaken in recent years. Taborn describes their approach as an “information-rich, improvisational process” shaped by structural elements proposed in advance. Their music emerges through an unpredictable interplay of preparation and freedom — an ever-shifting dialogue that reimagines the possibilities of real time.
—THOMAS MAY
OJAI AFTERNOONS
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 3:30pm
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
Claire Chase flute | Levy Lorenzo sound design and electronics | Nicholas Houfek lighting design
Liza LIM Sex Magic (West Coast premiere)
Pythoness
Oracle i: Salutations to the cowrie shells
Oracle ii: Womb-bell
Oracle iii: Vermillion: On Rage
Oracle iv: Throat Song
Oracle v: On the Sacred Erotic
Oracle vi: Telepathy
Skin-Changing
The Slow Moon Climbs
Claire Chase contrabass flute, kinetic percussion, alto ocarina, Aztec death-whistle
Levy Lorenzo sound design and electronics
“Ritual appears everywhere in human life,” observes Liza Lim. “It’s one way of holding states of attention and ways of knowing the world that are part of the way in which we as humans process things that we don’t know and that we can’t understand immediately. We need rituals to hold the known and the unknown in some kind of balance.”
For her contribution to Claire Chase’s Density 2036 — Part VII of the ongoing project, which premiered in 2020 — Lim imagined a 45-minute ritual exploring various traditions of the sacred in women’s spiritual lineages. She describes Sex Magic as “a work about the sacred erotic in women’s history … an alternative cultural logic of women’s power as connected to cycles of the womb — the life-making powers of childbirth, the ‘skin-changing,’ world-synchronizing temporalities of the body, and the womb center as a site of divinatory wisdom.”
A key source of inspiration was the totemic aspect of musical instruments as generators of whole environments — specifically, the magnificent contrabass flute that holds pride of place in Chase’s collection, and that her mentor Pauline Oliveros affectionately dubbed “Bertha.” Lim points out that Chase relates to Bertha “not just as an instrument, but as a living being, a partner to music making.” In addition to reflecting on — and perhaps activating a sense of — ritual, Sex Magic opens a space in which this living relationship between performer and instrument becomes an act of communion, transformation, and sound-making as embodied knowing.
A similar treatment is accorded the other instruments and sound-producing objects with which Chase interacts, including an ocarina and an Aztec “death whistle.” Just as Bertha conjures ancestral memories of giant bass wind instruments from Indigenous cultures — such as the didgeridoo from Lim’s Australian homeland — the alto ocarina that Chase plays and sings into during one of the central “oracles” evokes the clay flutes found in both Mesoamerican and ancient Chinese traditions. Visually, the contrast between the contrabass flute and the tiny, handheld ocarina is particularly striking.
Sex Magic additionally calls for an installation of “kinetic rotary percussion instruments” that are positioned on two vibrating “altars.” Custom electronics designed by Levy Lorenzo using multiple transducer speakers on membranes transform the live sounds of flute keys and breathing, providing a rhythmic pulse and a feedback system. In collaboration with Chase and Lorenzo, Lim developed performance techniques to enhance these interactions, such that “the whole environment becomes an instrument.”
Structurally, Sex Magic unfolds in nine short movements, with lighting design by Nicholas Houfek to articulate a journey that begins by invoking the ancient figure of the Pythoness through gestures of awakening. Lim refers to the Greek priestess of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi, who would fall into a trance as she channeled the divinity’s voice through her ambiguous prophecy.
“The flute and flutist become channels for oracular utterance,” writes Lim and “flute becomes drum” through the elaborate feedback system. Six oracles ensue, ranging widely in expressive vocabulary and dimension. Lim weaves in allusions to diverse cultural legacies — such as cowrie shells symbolizing fertility and wealth in Arabic and African traditions; an “intense red” associated in Chinese cosmology with “blood, life force, and eternity”; and menstrual cycles interpreted by matriarchal societies as a “skin-changing” that confers a kind of semi-immortality. Sex Magic also summons the “pure primal power” of Kali the Destroyer Goddess.
The final and longest movement, “The Slow Moon Climbs,” quotes a line from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses that also serves as the title of a book about the cultural significance of menopause that explores “the importance of post-reproductive women and female wisdom to human evolution.” Through this vast range of such references, Sex Magic pays homage to female spiritual power.
—THOMAS MAY
THE HOLY LIFTOFF
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl
Claire Chase flute | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola Jay Campbell, Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cello | USC Cello Ensemble Steven Schick conductor
Leilehua LANZILOTTI ko‘u inoa
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
Sofia GUBAIDULINA Mirage: The Dancing Sun
Seth Parker Woods cellos USC Cello Ensemble: Ernie Carbajal, Isabelle Fromme, Joe Kim, Peter Ko (guest artist), Samuel “Cole” Leonard, Kaya Ralls, Elaina Spiro Steven Schick conductor
Julius EASTMAN The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc
Jay Campbell, Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cellos USC Cello Ensemble: Ernie Carbajal, Isabelle Fromme, Joe Kim, Peter Ko (guest artist), Samuel “Cole” Leonard, Kaya Ralls, Elaina Spiro Steven Schick conductor
INTERMISSION
Terry RILEY from The Holy Liftoff
A selection of movements adapted for this performance
Realization by Samuel Clay Birmaher for Density 2036 part xi (2024)
Claire Chase flute JACK Quartet
A Kanaka Maoli composer, violist, interdisciplinary artist, and music writer based in Hawaii, Leilehua Lanzilotti creates open spaces for deep listening and connection — with the natural environment, language, and community. Her music often emerges from a broader practice of storytelling and stewardship, centering Indigenous values to repair erasure and reimagine the concert experience. She has frequently collaborated with the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, for example, performing ko‘u inoa amid a group of Isamu Noguchi sculptures.
In the Hawaiian language, ko‘u inoa translates as “my name” or “is my name,” according to the composer — a simple phrase that carries the weight of identity, ancestry, and presence. Lanzilotti’s own first name, Leilehua, signifies “a garland of lehua blossoms” — “the first plant to grow back after the volcano destroys all vegetation,” she explains. “Looking beyond the direct translation, it means ‘creating beauty out of destruction.’”
Lanzilotti calls this piece, which is of flexible duration, “a homesick bariolage” — referring to the rapid alternation between strings to produce a shimmering effect – based on Hawai‘i Aloha. With lyrics written in the 19th century by Makua Laiana, the anthem is “usually sung at the end of large concerts or gatherings, with everyone joining hands and swaying side to side as they sing,” but here, as Lanzilotti notes, it serves to invite introductions. “Hawai‘i Aloha evokes not only a homesickness for place and sound, but this action of coming together — a homesickness that we’re all feeling right now, where music and human interaction are home.”
From a ceremonial, communal greeting rooted in Indigenous practice and intimate sound, we proceed to a pair of works that come from vastly different worlds yet form a striking diptych for cello choir. The late Sofia Gubaidulina’s Mirage: The Dancing Sun, scored for eight cellos, treats sound as spiritual metaphor, evoking the interplay of light and shadow, faith and uncertainty — an expression of her preoccupation with the sacred and the unseen.
Intersecting cello lines form metaphoric crosses, pitting phrases low in the register that allude to the apocalyptic Last Judgment chant, the Dies irae, against the ethereal sound of natural harmonics — tones produced by lightly touching a vibrating string at precise points — to suggest “the shape of a dancing sun.” The first two-thirds of the piece prepare for the radiance of the culminating section, which Gubaidulina likens to “a sun disc spinning very rapidly around its own stationary center, throwing ‘flaming arrows’ in different directions.” For Music Director Claire Chase, the cello choir evokes “a suspended heart throb” as it moves toward the ineffable, just around sunset in this evening’s performance.
Chase adds that Gubaidulina’s music “sets us up for the longing and release” that follow in Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Trained through church singing in his youth and formal studies at the Curtis Institute, Eastman emerged in the 1970s as a celebrated composer and performer, collaborating with Meredith Monk and even singing under Pierre Boulez. But during the 1980s, amid personal struggles, Eastman became unhoused and died in 1990 at the age of 49. A long period of neglect of his music followed.
The resurgence of interest in Eastman’s legacy in recent years has helped restore a singular and incendiary creative voice — one that complicates prevailing narratives of American Minimalism and experimentalism. A gay Black composer who both embraced and redefined Minimalist aesthetics, Eastman confronted racism and homophobia in life and through his music. His compositions are urgent, militant, and spiritual, demanding total engagement from performers and listeners alike.
The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc pulses with the fierce, uncompromising vitality that marks Eastman’s final creative period. The energy and rhythmic thrust of the 10-cello ensemble encompasses moments of pain and ecstasy that soar like sirens, evoking the martyr-saint’s aura as a metaphor for personal liberation. As composer Mary Jane Leach notes, the program for the premiere at The Kitchen in downtown New York opened with this credo from Eastman: “Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage.”
We end with an immersion in the boundless creative spirit of Terry Riley, the great American musical visionary now based in Japan, as he approaches his 90th birthday later this month. The Holy Liftoff, the latest in Claire Chase’s annual Density 2036 commissions (for 2024), is an evolving folio of full-color, cartoon-like drawings — some whimsical, some mysterious. One image features a cigar-smoking, bearded angel (or possibly a merman) soaring over a modular musical idea. Other pages include through-composed passages that interleave with freely interpreted material.
This hybrid visual-musical creation abounds in open-ended invitations: Performers are free to re-sequence sections, choose their instrumentation, and interpret Riley’s gestures ad lib. The Holy Liftoff Chorale that opens this realization offers a perfect example: a radiant, hymn-like ascent for four flutes. Chase began the collaboration by sending Riley multi-tracked recordings of her flute playing, sparking further musical responses. To develop the material into an expanded performance version, she enlisted New York composer Samuel Clay Birmaher, who orchestrated the score for a larger flute chorus and string quartet. What we hear on this program is actually just one manifestation of Riley’s cornucopia.
Groovy, buoyantly irreverent, and transcendent, The Holy Liftoff reflects what Chase calls “a multi-modal way of making music,” echoing the communal, DIY spirit of Riley’s In C (1964). Instead of existing as a fixed score, the piece functions as a generative kit — an open system designed for collaboration and evolution.
In an interview with the Density 2036 commentator Jenny Judge, Riley described the animating impulse behind The Holy Liftoff: “Everything is going up, it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s kind of like gravity has suddenly released everything. And that’s what I want the piece to eventually leave people with: a lightness. It’s all just floating up into the air. I’m going to lift off too, in the not-too-distant future. I’m looking forward to that!”
—THOMAS MAY
MORNING MEDITATION
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 8:00am Ojai Meadows Preserve
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Susie Ibarra percussion
MORNING MEDITATION
Susie IBARRA Sunbird (West Coast premiere) (arr. Aleks PILMANIS)
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute Joshua Rubin clarinet M.A. Tiesenga saxophone
Kolubrí Susie Ibarra percussion
Pauline OLIVEROS Horse Sings from Cloud
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute Joshua Rubin clarinet M.A. Tiesenga saxophone Susie Ibarra percussion
The recently rewilded landscape of Ojai Meadows Preserve invites quiet reflection: walking paths wind through native plants, a small pond glints in the morning light, and a natural clearing opens like a miniature concert hall. What better setting could there be for this morning meditation program?
The music, you will have noticed, has already begun. “Birds are some of our oldest drummers on the planet. I think we’ve been singing and playing their songs and their rhythms for a long time,” says the remarkable Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra. Her work emerges from a practice informed by wide-ranging research — whether into environmental soundscapes in the Philippine rainforests, Himalayan glaciers, or the polyphonic dusk of nightingale season in Berlin, where she is currently based.
“The purple Philippine sunbird,” writes Ibarra, “often has an olive back and underneath is bright yellow, sometimes with metallic green or blue.” Celebrated for its strikingly beautiful songs, she adds, the sunbird is often found “in tropical rainforests and also in open woodlands.” Ibarra originally composed Sunbird for Claire Chase and her many-voiced flute persona, creating a solo that overlays solo piccolo, flute, and bass flute, with moments of percussive breath and vocalization folded into the texture. We hear the piece in a brand-new arrangement for a quartet of two flutes, clarinet, and saxophone — with ad libitum accompaniment by the birds of Ojai, who transform the ensemble into a kind of open aviary.
Kolubrí — a solo percussion piece that Chase singles out on her desert-island list of solo performances — was inspired by one of the smallest of songbirds, the hummingbird, an avian marvel that hums not only with its wings, but with song. “They are one of three bird orders to have evolved their song and vocal learning,” Ibarra notes. She translates their delicate vibrations into lower frequencies, using the language of drums and cymbals.
Ibarra’s compositions share a spirit of radical attentiveness that resonates with the practice pioneered by Pauline Oliveros in works like Horse Sings from Cloud. Instead of reproducing a fixed set of notes, performers realize a text score built around this deceptively simple, open-ended instruction: “Hold a tone until you no longer desire to change it. When you no longer desire to change the tone then change it.”
“This is a sounding in which control is relinquished, in which ‘the composer’ bestows the music not only into the hands of the performer, but into the force of the non-desire, the will of the non-will,” muses the sound artist and poet Sharon Stewart. “At that moment, when one note is held, one can become lost in the endless variety, the subtle variations of dynamics and tone color, the intricate ways in which that single pitch colors each moment that it passes, intersects with each breath, each twitch of a muscle, each sound that merges with it from the surrounding environment.”
Ever since Oliveros introduced the profoundly meditative, dream-inspired Horse Sings from Cloud nearly half a century ago, it has taken countless forms — from her own renditions with accordion and voice to mixed ensembles and electronics, even an iPhone app (as longtime Ojai audiences might recall). Claire Chase, who was mentored by Oliveros and is one of her most passionate advocates, has performed the work in many contexts and credits it with transforming how she listens, collaborates, and thinks about musical time.
For this morning’s manifestation, the ensemble will begin the piece with four wind players and percussion, then invite the audience to join in — handing out instruments before gently leading everyone back down the trail. Another first for Ojai.
—THOMAS MAY
CHAMBERS
Saturday, June , 7, 2025 10:30am Libbey Bowl
Claire Chase flute | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cello Cory Smythe piano | Levy Lorenzo electronics
Marcos BALTER Chambers
JACK Quartet
Leilehua LANZILOTTI ahupua‘a
JACK Quartet
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR Ubique (West Coast premiere)
As part of Density 2036 part x (2023)
Claire Chase flute Cory Smythe piano Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello Levy Lorenzo electronics
All three composers sharing the bill on this morning’s program have a close creative affinity with Claire Chase. Both Marcos Balter and Anna Thorvaldsdottir create abstract sonic spaces in their respective works — from intimate chambers to awe-inspiring expanses that transform perception — while Leilehua Lanzilotti’s music celebrates her Hawaiian heritage by delineating the interconnectedness of a particular ecosystem.
Each of the three short movements comprising Chambers, Balter’s only foray into the string quartet to date, constructs a sonic environment that might indeed be likened to a chamber with its own architectural and atmospheric properties. The focus of the first movement, according to Balter, is on “attentive listening,” inviting the listener to become immersed in “seemingly static textures that in return gradually unveil their many complexities and hidden hyperactivity, primarily through timbre.” The delicate textures of the opening — including instructions for the players to almost imperceptibly whistle their own lines in the viola-cello register — contrast strikingly with the rapid-fire, scherzo-like interchanges of the second movement, where Balter plays high and low registers off each other. Dancing pizzicato rhythms and flickers of melody drive the intricately crafted dialogue of the third movement.
Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti wrote her string quartet ahupua‘a as part of a larger educational project designed to teach children about the water cycle. The traditional Hawaiian ahupua‘a system refers to land divisions that extend from mountain to sea, designed so a single community could sustain itself through shared care of ecosystems. “Within any community, you had people that were farming taro in the middle of the ahupua‘a, or fishing in the ocean and creating freshwater ponds,” according to Lanzilotti. “Through these community connections, you had everything that you needed within one community.”
Lanzilotti’s piece adapts the ahupua‘a concept into sonic metaphors for the water cycle that unites these ecosystems, each of its three movements representing a different stage. The first movement evokes the “air sound” of wind in the mountains, where water builds up and the wind at times resembles “the ocean rumbling,” while the clouds then give way to stars. The playful second movement conveys the sounds of the community and its activity at daytime, with children running about and “people pounding poi,” the traditional Hawaiian paste made from taro. The final movement takes us into the sea level stage, depicting the ocean and how these varied elements “drift in and out of each other.”
ahupua‘a was created in collaboration with the self-taught fashion designer Manaola Yap, whose vibrantly multilayered designs are based on traditional bamboo cutting patterns used for tapa cloth. For Lanzilotti, this partnership centers Indigenous ways of knowing.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s endlessly spacious compositions resonate with a gorgeous austerity that tempts listeners to anchor them in the natural beauty and powerful forces of her Icelandic homeland. But a profoundly introspective quality also comes to the fore in Ubique, her large-scale contribution to Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project. The title — a Latin adverb meaning “everywhere” — directs our attention toward the infinite, the omnipresent. But ubiquity extends inward as well as outward, encompassing infinity in both directions: “Throughout the piece,” notes the composer, “sounds are reduced to their smallest particles” while “their atmospheric presence [is] expanded towards the infinite.”
Thorvaldsdottir was inspired by “the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle.” Fragments and interruptions commingle with aspects of a sonority that are sustained “beyond their natural resonance.”
Ubique unfolds in 11 seamlessly connected parts and is scored for an unusual quartet consisting of solo flutes (one performer), piano, and two cellos (Thorvaldsdottir’s own instrument), together with electronics. Incorporating some surprising contrasts in material — particularly in the second, lengthiest part — the work is anchored by deep, persistent drones. A descending motif — almost suggesting a lamentation — proceeds by steps against shifting background gradations of darkness and light. The piece “lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion,” says Thorvaldsdottir.
An unmistakably “organic” sensibility emerges from the impression she creates, on a vast scale, of inhalation and exhalation — the gesture of blowing into a flute that generates tremulous music as the material is presented in and out of focus. According to Thorvaldsdottir, “the flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction — of various kinds and durations — as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure.” Through this evolving ecology of sound — porous, breathing, expansive — she attunes us to both the infinite and the infinitesimal.
—THOMAS MAY
OJAI AFTERNOONS
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 3:30pm & Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 2:30pm
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Susie Ibarra percussion Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics | Nicholas Houfek lighting and production design
Craig TABORN Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms (West Coast premiere)
As part of Density 2036 part ix (2022)
Claire Chase flute Joshua Rubin clarinet Susie Ibarra percussion Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics
As an outside-the-box composer-performer and musical thinker, Craig Taborn was bound to come up on Claire Chase’s radar. Always on the lookout for visionary collaborators for her ongoing new-music initiative Density 2036, Chase found in Taborn an ideal partner for its ninth annual commission. Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms celebrates the boundary-defying imagination and spirit of improvisational co-creation that align perfectly with the ethos of the Density project.
The Minneapolis-born, Brooklyn-based Taborn moves fluently across jazz, electronic, experimental, and art-pop contexts. Acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble work, he is equally at home as a pianist and as an electronic musician — he plays both roles in Busy Griefs — crafting immersive soundscapes and expanding the dimensions of improvisation across formats.
The imaginative seed for Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms was planted by a dream. “I was inspired by a weird, fantastical dream of Claire moving through some kind of garden,” recalls Taborn. “Just as she approached each of the plants and flowers it contained, they opened up, and there was a sense of a conversation happening.” That vision evolved into a performance concept in which Chase, playing a family of flutes (from piccolo to her contrabass flute, nicknamed “Bertha”), initiating musical dialogues as she physically and sonically engages with each of the three other performers stationed around her. Upon her prompting, “the flower opens up.”
Conceived as “a flute protagonist piece,” Busy Griefs takes shape as a series of through-composed solos and duos that are radically different in mood and material. The duet with Susie Ibarra’s array of percussion, for example, develops into a microcosm of its own. The interactions expand to include several ensemble pieces as well. Bridging these sections are improvised extrapolations on the pre-composed material, for which the musicians draw from a palette of improvisational gestures that serve as a kind of “kit” to build the piece.
The musical architecture — or narrative — is similarly aleatory and modular rather than predetermined. Each of Chase’s interactions is triggered by how she responds to the continually changing sonic environment. Another layer of interaction is the one between acoustic and electronic sounds, including live processing of the former, which Taborn performs from his position at the keyboard. This further intensifies the sense of aural proximity and interaction that is central to the piece.
Alongside his image of a musical kit, Taborn likens the structure to the unpredictable interactions of a game: the path traced by Busy Griefs differs with each iteration. “I’m an improviser at heart and don’t cling to the authorial position too tightly,” he says. (Ojai audiences have an opportunity to compare and contrast the experience, with performances on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.)
While Taborn had no specific narrative in mind, he points out that the poetic title reflects the emotional undercurrents at play. The dream that initially prompted the work — a source of inspiration he says is not usually part of his process – was unusually vivid and involved “some sense of grief work. When each flower was approached and opened, there was an element of healing and love. It’s not a piece about grief but a piece about surmounting grief.”
More than a fixed composition, Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms is a living framework that invites transformation, presence, and unpredictability. “There is no ultimate, final realized version… it’s supposed to be performed and continually worked with,” says Taborn. The musical process of improvisation, movement, and interaction becomes a metaphor for this process of healing. “The openness of encountering an experience musically always feels that way for me,” he adds. “Each performance is a working through of something towards some kind of healing, in more abstract ways.”
—THOMAS MAY
HOW FORESTS THINK
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 8:00pm Libbey Bowl
Wu Wei sheng | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Festival Artists | Steven Schick conductor
J.S. BACH Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668 (arr. Samuel Clay BIRMAHER) Wu Wei sheng | Christopher Otto violin | John Pickford Richards viola Jay Campbell cello
Sofia GUBAIDULINA Meditation on the Bach chorale Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668 Alex Peh harpsichord | JACK Quartet | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass Steven Schick conductor
Tania LEÓN Hechizos Michael Matsuno flute | Claire Brazeau oboe | Joshua Rubin clarinet M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Danielle Ondarza horn Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Ross Karre and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Cory Smythe piano/celesta/harpsichord Colin McAllister guitar | Christopher Otto violin | John Pickford Richards viola Seth Parker Woods cello | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass Steven Schick conductor
INTERMISSION
Liza LIM How Forests Think
Tendril & Rainfall
Mycelia
Pollen
The Trees
Wu Wei sheng | Michael Matsuno flute | Breana Gilcher oboe Joshua Rubin clarinet | M.A. Tiesenga alto saxophone Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Katinka Kleijn cello Ross Karre percussion | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass Steven Schick conductor
Ever since music co-evolved with humanity, it has forged paths to transcend the limits of human perception — whether through prayers or spells — and connect us to forces beyond our everyday confines.
Though it was programmed before Sofia Gubaidulina’s death in March 2025 at the age of 93, her Meditation on J.S. Bach’s so-called “deathbed chorale” now takes on the character of a final benediction, befitting a composer whose entire body of work was shaped by spiritual quest.
In 1993, soon after resettling in Germany following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina received a commission from the Bach Society in Bremen. It offered her a platform to express her lifelong “deep reverence” for that composer in the form of a musical meditation on the chorale prelude for organ Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (“Before Your Throne I Now Appear”).
We hear the source work at the outset in a special arrangement Claire Chase commissioned from Samuel Clay Birmaher, who parses the chorale’s four parts into an ensemble of violin, viola, cello, and sheng — an instrument featured in Liza Lim’s work on the second half that can evoke the sonority of an organ.
Much lore surrounds the manuscript of BWV 668. Bach’s heirs popularized the story that the blind, dying composer had dictated this version of a chorale prelude reworked from his early Weimar years as a final testament. It was even printed (with a different title) as the capstone to the unfinished Art of the Fugue and thus has a special status as the “closing chorale” of Bach’s life and career. The 18th-century German theologian Johann Michael Schmidt wrote that “everything the advocates of materialism might come up with collapses in the face of this one example.”
Gubaidulina scored her reflections on the chorale for string quintet (with double bass) and harpsichord. Fragments of the chorale tune are interspersed among increasingly dissonant clusters and clouds. She explained that her highly rational system of numbers and proportions to organize musical events within the score’s 189 measures is modeled after Bach’s own “virtuoso use” of number sequences encoding his name as well as theological concepts. “The four development sections, each concluding with a line from the chorale, are steps in the direction the music must go before the chorale can finally be heard in its entirely,” Gubaidulina writes. The process at the same time traces “the ascent of Bach’s soul” toward the divine throne “like the visible and invisible parts of a soul awaiting an encounter with God.” For all the meticulous abstraction of her design, a sense of personal fantasy and emotional connection emerges from the live sounds of Gubaidulina’s music.
In the wake of the Russian composer’s solemn colors and prayerful contemplation of last things, Tania León’s Hechizos bursts forth with exuberant vitality. Composed in 1994 for Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Hechizos represents one of her most Modernist scores in its harmonic language, textural experimentation, and rhythmic complexity. It offers a glimpse into León’s eclectic fusion of styles from the period when she was rapidly gaining recognition in Europe.
The title, Spanish for “spells” or “enchantments,” may hint at an otherworldly subtext; however, the true magic of Hechizos lies in its spellbinding and continual metamorphosis of musical elements — gestures, timbres, fleeting instrumental licks, and shifting meters evolving with the speed of thought. Léon, who dedicated the piece to her mother, characterizes it as “something that transforms constantly.”
León instructs the ensemble to play the first 50 measures three times, but with a difference: first with percussion and keyboards alone, then with brass added on, and, for the third round — following these two “prologues,” as Léon calls them — with the entire ensemble joining. Hechizos then proceeds as an ever-evolving landscape of high-contrast episodes, propelled by a restless momentum and a kaleidoscopic energy that vividly attests to León’s unbounded and distinctive musical imagination.
In his 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn challenges the anthropocentric Western assumption that humans are the sole possessors of thought, sentience, and agency. Liza Lim drew on her own experiences of the presence of nearby rainforests in Borneo, where she was raised, to give musical voice and form to the “living matrix” of forest ecosystems Kohn explores — a network of interconnected communities extending from invisible roots through lofty canopies. Lim’s work traces a sonic journey that seeks to alter our understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world, emphasizing its interdependence and interconnectedness. “The way in which the musicians offer energies to each other and interact — and how that flows out into the audience — is the basic premise,” she says, How Forests Think is scored for a diverse ensemble that allows for individual instrumental personalities as well as unusual timbral combinations to emerge from this immersive, symbiotic tapestry. Lim also expands the vocabulary of sounds with special instructions: dried peas are dropped onto a variety of surfaces, and the cello and bass use specially prepared bows — with the hair wound around the wood — to create what Lim describes as an “uneven, serrated, gnarly playing surface.”
Wu Wei not only plays his sheng (an ancient Chinese mouth organ that doubles as a symbol of the phoenix rising from its ashes) but performs low Tibetan throat singing and recites a poetic fragment in ancient Chinese. The other musicians are also asked to sing and vocalize; at the end of the second movement, a love story is whispered into the flute and saxophone. Lim imagines the ensemble as an organism, Wu Wei’s sheng serving as its “lungs.”
With the expansive dimensions of a symphony, Lim’s dynamic canvas unfolds in four movements. She likens the tiny “grains of sound” in “Tendril & Rainfall” to “proto-words” for a grammar that is developed in this first and longest movement. “These single drops, which start off like raindrops, become an overwhelming, metallic tsunami of sound” in the second movement. Titled “Mycelia,” this movement evolves “a more singing texture woven into more continuous phrases” in a process Lim imagines as “tree roots and fungal mycelia intertwining and exchanging — a language of enzymes, and an exchange of minerals.”
The “very bright, potent, high-keyed, and rhythmic” third movement (“Pollen”) presents a striking contrast: “like particles flying in the air.” Lim employs a technique of irregular repetition, “where you pass through the same points in slightly different ways each time” to convey how we experience time “not as a smooth, linear unfolding, but as something much more glitchy and textured — a much more unpredictable flow of time.”
In the meditative conclusion of the final movement (“The Trees”), as the score becomes more open, the conductor joins the other musicians as they softly sing and whistle, becoming mindful of their own breathing. “By the end,” says Lim, the music is “listening to itself” and the experience of time is transformed from a transient phenomenon into “something that is breathing and emergent, present and growing.”
—THOMAS MAY
MORNING MEDITATION
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 8:00am Chaparral Auditorium
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola | Seth Parker Woods cello | Ross Karre percussion
Leilehua LANZILOTTI the embryology of the heart
i resources for healing the voice
ii there are only so many breaths
iii if this should be
Seth Parker Woods cello and reciter brooke smiley reciter (section i)
Bahar ROYAEE A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture (World premiere)
Ross Karre percussion
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR Sola
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
This final day of the 2025 Festival begins with a trio of works that invite the audience into the intimate, often interior world of the solo instrument. Leilehua Lanzilotti developed the embryology of the heart — in which the cellist not only plays the instrument but has a substantial speaking role — during a residency at the Tusen Takk Foundation, an idyllic retreat on an isolated peninsula in Northwest Michigan. She composed it for Andrew Yee, the cellist and composer known for their work with the Attacca Quartet. This morning’s performance by Seth Parker Woods marks the first public presentation of the piece by another cellist.
Comprising three brief sections, the embryology of the heart sets texts by three Americans – two of them contemporary, the third a classic Modernist – to what Lanzilotti describes as “timbral commentary” by a solo cellist. The first section draws on a 2021 talk given by Ojai-based poet, movement artist, and activist brooke smiley, titled “Learning to Speak: Resources for Healing the Voice From Embodied Social Justice Summit.” An Indigenous dance and somatic movement practitioner, smiley described her session as “centering an Indigenous perspective” to explore “what embodied resources support one’s personal relationship to speaking with the possibility to invite new choices,” and how we might “look to the elements of the earth, ourselves, and one another to inspire a relationship of harmony, interconnectedness, and homeostasis.” The second section turns to the poem “feelings are biological facts” from the pandemic-era collection Your Wound/My Garden by the non-binary poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor Alok Vaid-Menon. In the third section, Lanzilotti sets a line from e.e. cummings’s “it may not always be so; and I say,” which originally appeared in the section titled “Sonnets – Unrealities” in his first book of verse, Tulips and Chimneys, published in 1923.
Commissioned by Claire Chase for Ojai Music Festival 2025, percussionist and instrument builder Ross Karre worked in close collaboration with Royaee, providing her with “sound objects — some broken, some fully embodied” to explore “the tension between determined and indeterminate sonic patterns,” in the composer’s description. “Each object contributes to a kind of memory-in-the-making: a desired recollection for a future not yet lived.”
The program closes with Sola, a work for solo viola and pre-recorded electronics by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir that presents Lanzilotti in her guise as a performer. The piece was “inspired by abstract structural elements of solitariness in the midst of turmoil — by the desire for calm and focus in chaos,” Thorvaldsdottir explains. She complicates the gesture of “solo-ing” by entangling viola and electronics as “different sides of the same being,” with the viola serving as a constant while the electronics slip in and out of focus, shadowing the solo line.
The musical materials expand and contract across the span of the piece, juxtaposing unity with fragmentation, stillness with unease. “As with my music generally,” Thorvaldsdottir writes, “the inspiration behind Sola is not something I am trying to describe through the piece … The qualities I tend to be inspired by are often structural, like proportion and flow, as well as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move in perspective between the two — the details and the unity of the whole.”
—THOMAS MAY
RITUALS
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 10:30am Libbey Bowl
Claire Chase flute | Susie Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo percussion | Wu Wei sheng | Alex Peh piano JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello
Christopher OTTO Angelorum Psalat, after Rodericus JACK Quartet
Austin WULLIMAN Dave’s Hocket: For Guillaume and Arvo JACK Quartet
Susie IBARRA Nest Box (World premiere) Commissioned by Ojai Music Festival and Music Director Claire Chase in honor of Steven Schick’s 70th birthday Wu Wei sheng Susie Ibarra percussion
Tania LEÓN Rituál
Susie IBARRA Sky Islands (West Coast premiere) Claire Chase flute Susie Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo percussion Alex Peh piano JACK Quartet
The JACK Quartet’s “Modern Medieval” programming concept forges new connections with the “neglected, though not forgotten, musical rites of the Medieval arts” by considering some of the most intriguing figures of early music through a contemporary lens. The examples we hear are by two of JACK’s own members. Christopher Otto offers a reworking of music by a late-14th-century French composer about whom little is known. Even his name is ambiguous. The ballad Angelorum psalat (“The Angels Are Singing”) is the sole extant work attributed to Rodericus, who is credited in the manuscript by his anadrome (“S. Uciredor”). It is often cited as an example of the ars subtilior (“subtler art”), a style involving greater rhythmic complexity that developed around Paris and other centers.
In Dave’s Hocket, Austin Wulliman turns to Guillaume de Machaut, a pivotal 14th-century composer in the period leading up to the emergence of the ars subtilior. Wulliman uses as his point of departure Machaut’s instrumental piece Hoquetus David, which illustrates the technique of “hocketing” — a kind of hiccup effect created by divvying a melody among multiple voices. “The tiling of notes over the cantus firmus made me think of light coming through the individual glass panes of a church window,” he says. “Light and darkness and the ecstatic religious vision made me reread Umberto Eco’s astounding scene at the church door from The Name of the Rose, and then suddenly my brain was mashing up the sound of Machaut with Arvo Pärt’s Fratres.”
While JACK bridges the gap from medieval to present, Susie Ibarra homes in on the timeless music of birds in Nest Box. The Filipinx American composer, percussionist, and sound artist dedicates her Ojai Music Festival–commissioned piece to fellow percussionist Steven Schick — with whom Ibarra performed for the first time during the opening concert — and salutes the impact of his “generous and inspiring artistry” on the community.
Following her two pieces on Saturday’s morning meditation program inspired by birds from the Philippines, Ibarra continues the avian thread with a playful homage to birds in Ojai Meadows Preserve as well as in Berlin, where she is currently based. Among the specific bird calls she cites are Cassie’s Kingbird, California Towhee, House Finch, House Wren, and Bewick’s Wren. Ibarra additionally wanted to highlight the extraordinary musicianship of Wu Wei and his 37-reed sheng by shaping Nest Box as a duo for sheng and percussion.
“Much like a nest box which nurtures and protects birds, the piece is a home for these musical motifs,” explains Ibarra. “While acting as a launching point, performers also venture out. It also is a play between different birds who live in it, want to move in and out, or cannot move in and out of the box.” The score embeds passages open to improvisation on given motifs and rhythmic patterns. As the duo performs, their rhythm and pacing at times depart from the established tempo, instead being guided by their own natural breath cycles, Ibarra remarks — much like the irregular rhythms of birds themselves.
On one level, Tania León’s widely performed Rituál from 1987 is a vibrant homage to the creative spirit itself. She dedicated the score to Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, who together founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem at the height of the civil rights movement. They encouraged León, who became the company’s first music director, to find her path as a composer and conductor. Rituál, she has said, “is about the fire in the spirit of people who encourage other people, because they see something that the person doesn’t see themselves. It’s the fire that initiates something.”
An image that inspired León, she recalls, was “seeing the embers jumping” while watching the fireplace one evening. Another was the powerful physicality of conga drummers in performance: “the way they sometimes have to move their torsos and spread their arms to reach the drums.” Compact but teeming with events, Rituál begins in a mood of slow, ruminative fantasy and proceeds to accelerate with a gradual but relentless drive. The performer must steer a long-range sense of “constant propulsion” while navigating the keyboard’s span with wide leaps and displaced rhythmic accents. The frenzy turns rhapsodic, igniting a sense of ecstasy that quickly dissolves in a final moment of reflection.
The title Sky Islands refers to the isolated high-altitude rainforests found in Luzon, Philippines. These are biodiversity hot spots abounding in rare species — and their associated musics — where evolution itself becomes accelerated. Susie Ibarra’s expansive composition, premiered last summer in New York by the Asia Society, celebrates this stunningly varied — yet fragile and endangered — ecosystem with a musical variety that mirrors its rich textures and complex interconnections. When Sky Islands was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Music last month, the jury praised how Ibarra “challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisatory skills of a soloist as a creative tool.”
To undertake the project, Ibarra expanded her Talking Gong Trio (with Claire Chase and Alex Peh) into an ensemble of eight musicians by adding another percussionist and string quartet. The percussion duo presides over a vast array of instruments, forming what Ibarra dubs a “floating garden” of sonic marvels.
Along with traditional instruments of the Philippines and neighboring regions, such as kulintang and sarunay (related instruments consisting of a horizontal row of tuned, knobbed metal gongs — kulintang also referred to the percussion ensemble itself), as well as agong (large, vertically suspended gongs), this garden incorporates bells, large pans, sheet metal, and even live plants that are wired for sound and a water bucket supplied with hydrophones and koi. The collection of percussion also includes bespoke metal sound sculptures that come alive to the touch.
Sky Islands opens with a ritual dance as both percussionists, positioned at opposite ends of the stage, play traditional Luzon rhythms with long bamboo sticks. The score instructs them to “introduce the sounds of the bamboo to the audience” and slowly converge at the center, settling into interlocking rhythms that prepare for our journey into the heart of the sky islands.
Throughout the performance, Ibarra incorporates pockets of improvisation, highlighting the unique coloristic possibilities of her ensemble. Extended duos for kulintang and sarunay and for drum set and agong, respectively, showcase the virtuosity of imagination inherent in her musical conception of this unique setting.
In another passage, the members of the JACK Quartet improvise around the contours of Claire Chase’s embellished flute line, with the piano then adding “small sounds within strings and flute.” In the final section, Chase performs an improvisation on bass flute and is then joined by bells and “small forest sounds.” In the closing moments, Ibarra instructs the entire ensemble to form a line, one by one, each musician picking up a small percussion instrument to play. They proceed in a ritualistic procession through the space, underscoring that the aesthetic experience is at the same time a communal rejoicing and a call to action.
—THOMAS MAY
PULSEFIELD
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 5:30pm Libbey Bowl
Claire Chase flute | Festival Artists | Steven Schick conductor
Leilehua LANZILOTTI ko‘u inoa JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
The Witness Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Wu Wei sheng | M.A. Tiesenga saxophone Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre, Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Alex Peh and Cory Smythe piano
INTERMISSION
Tania LEÓN Singsong (World premiere of new version for solo flute) (arr. for solo flute by Singsong (solo bass flute) Claire CHASE)
The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude (solo alto flute)
Scarf (solo flute)
The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude (solo flute)
Claire Chase flute
Terry RILEY Pulsefield
Pulsefield 1
Pulsefield 2
Pulsefield 3
Realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher (World premieres of Pulsefield 2 and 3)
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Wu Wei sheng Danielle Ondarza horn | M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Dan Rosenboom trumpet Mattie Barbier trombone | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre, Levy Lorenzo, Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Alex Peh, Cory Smythe, and Craig Taborn piano JACK Quartet | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola | Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Previously heard in a solo version at the start of Friday evening’s The Holy Liftoff concert, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s ko‘u inoa now serves to launch the Festival’s closing performance. Her arrangement of the piece for string ensemble sets the tone for a communal celebration — and poignant farewell. The Hawaiian title, translating to “my name” or “is my name,” carries the weight of identity, ancestry, and presence and is associated with both greetings and leave-takings (see p. 53 for additional discussion).
From the communal embrace of Lanzilotti’s opening, we turn to a performance piece in which Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of Deep Listening seeks to instill a state of profound mindfulness that has far-reaching implications. The legendary American composer was staunchly committed to democratizing music and dismantling barriers between professional musicians and audiences. Yet that mission did not preclude her text scores, which consist of verbal instructions rather than written notes, from varying significantly in complexity. Claire Chase, who worked closely with Oliveros, considers The Witness one of her “most demanding and sophisticated text scores” and places it at the far end of the spectrum of difficulty in comparison with a piece like the dream-inspired Horse Sings from Cloud (experienced by those present for yesterday’s site-specific morning meditation program at Ojai Meadows Preserve).
The Witness is open to performance not only as music, movement, or drama — or any combination of these media — and in a limitless range of spaces or environments. The text score prescribes three “strategies” of focus: (1) “attention to oneself,” which, Chase notes, “can feel anti-musical, because you are not allowed in this strategy to respond to anybody and try purposely not to have a relationship between what you and other people are doing”; (2) “attention to other” by reacting not to what is heard in the present but “according to the past or future of a partner’s playing”; and (3) “attention all over,” which Oliveros clarifies as trying to perform “inside of the time, exactly with the time, or outside the time of a partner’s performance sound.” Chase recalls once asking with puzzlement how this is possible, to which Oliveros responded — “dead serious, but with a smile” — “You just need to be telepathic.”
It was while collaborating on a project related to The Witness during the pandemic that Chase struck up a friendship with Eduardo Kohn, an influential anthropologist who researches Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Kohn has developed a particular fascination with The Witness and compares the piece to “Amazonian strategies of using dreams and visions as a form of deep listening. Like these, it is a psyche-delic, literally mind-manifesting practice.” Bearing witness in this way becomes “both an ecological and ethical practice” that can encourage attunement to “the fragile ecology that holds and sustains us.” For Chase, the goal is to become “maximally attuned to each other and to our environments — which is what we want to happen throughout Ojai Music Festival.”
Tania León first collaborated with Rita Dove to create the song cycle Singin’ Sepia in 1995, when Dove was completing her term as U.S. Poet Laureate. León again turned to the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet for Reflections (2006) and, more recently, for Singsong, a cycle for choir and solo flute; the complete Singsong will receive its world premiere at Carnegie Hall next spring. Chase has created an arrangement of four of its movements for solo flute (alternating among bass, alto, and C flutes).
León sets five poems by Dove in Singsong. Four of these were published in the 2021 collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, which contemplates the role that art should play in these chaotic times. “Like music itself,” writes fellow poet and critic Brian Brodeur, Dove “provides readers with a salve for traumas both historical and contemporary.” She adopts the voice of a spring cricket in several of these poems to offer ironic reflections on marginalized voices and the Black American experience. Commenting on the significance of the blues, Dove’s cricket announces in one of the poems that “all wisdom/is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.”
While León composed her settings of these poems to be sung by the chamber choir The Crossing in the original version of Singsong, Chase introduces bits of the text during the improvised cadenzas that feature prominently in the score. Occasionally, this involves simultaneously playing and singing excerpts from an entire sentence, such as “It’s just what we do. No one bothered to analyze our blues” (from “The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude”). For the most part, she plays with words, vowels, and fragments of phrases, such as the vowel sounds in the sensual “Scarf” (“the music silk makes settling across a bared neck”).
Just weeks shy of his 90th birthday, Terry Riley has gifted Ojai audiences with the most recent addition to The Holy Liftoff, his ongoing epic contribution to Chase’s Density 2036 project. Continuing the modular graphic scores of the larger project (see p. 51 for a description), Pulsefield 3 features musical fragments embedded within vividly colorful drawings — in this case, invigorating flames illuminating recumbent, baseball-capped figures, with rays emanating from a central eye.
The musical material primarily outlines rhythmic patterns and a fundamental harmonic progression, leaving instrumentation and organization open to interpretation. “The piece is in so many ways an invitation to listen unconditionally to one another, in delighted deference to the surprises and unexpected outcomes that such listening conjures,” Chase says. “At the end of Pulsefield 3, the newest of the scores, Terry asks the players to return to the oldest and most urgent mode of music-making known to humankind: song. We’re not singers, but we’re going to sing for you!”
—THOMAS MAY
