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
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
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 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!”
Thank you to all who attended Deep Listening with 2025 Music Director and flutist Claire Chase on May 15, 2025, presented by The Listening Garden x Ojai Music Festival at Light & Space Yoga.
It was an unforgettable night, where our two vibrant communities came together. We loved connecting through music and mindfulness, listening and conversation, in such a beautiful way. We certainly hope to see the guests again, whether that’s around town, at The Listening Garden, or at the Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8.
A special thank you to Naomi’s Kitchen, whose bento-style food was delightful. Enjoy this gallery of photos by Eric Andersen, who captured this special evening beautifully.
Sky Islands Will Have Its West Coast Premiere on Sunday June 8, 10:30am At Libbey Bowl
2025 Ojai Music Festival composer Susie Ibarra was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her groundbreaking Sky Islands. In its West Coast premiere, the celebrated work will be performed at the Festival’s Sunday concert, 10:30am, at Libbey Bowl.
A longtime innovator in sound, rhythm, and environmental storytelling, Ibarra’s Pulitzer-winning composition explores themes of biodiversity, climate change, and community practices with traditional Philippine sounds. The Pulitzer Board praised Sky Islands for “[challenging] the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisational skills of a soloist as a creative tool.”
Commissioned by the Asia Society in New York, Sky Islands premiered on July 18, 2024, featuring Ibarra who is also a percussionist, flutist and 2025 Music Director Claire Chase, pianist Alex Peh, and percussionist Levy Lorenzo with members of the Bergamot Quartet.
In Ojai, Ibarra’s award-winning work will be performed by herself, Chase, Peh, and Lorenzo with the JACK Quartet. The Sunday morning program will also include a world premiere by Ibarra, Nest Box, for sheng and percussion. ABOUT SUSIE IBARRA Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary. She has performed around the globe and collaborated with artists such as Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, and Yo La Tengo. Her past works have been presented at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Museum of Modern Art. She was raised in Houston by Filipino parents and trained in both Western classical and Philippine kulintang traditions. Her career spans avant-garde jazz, opera, electronic music, and theatre. ABOUT THE 2025 OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL: JUNE 5 TO 8 The Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists, flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, the 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape as caretakers and participants and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers. The four days of the Festival will explore common themes of rebirth, re-imagination, reclamation, and re-wilding with concerts, films, free community events, a sound installation, and social gatherings.
EXPERIENCE THE OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL Single tickets and day passes are available and may be purchased at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. Single tickets range from $55 to $165 for reserved seating in the Libbey Bowl. General admission for the Lawn in Libbey Bowl is $25, and add-on event prices are $55. Ojai Films can be purchased directly at OjaiPlayhouse.com. Student discounts and group sales are available by inquiring with the Festival Box Office at [email protected].
SUN MORNING CONCERT 10:30AM | LIBBEY BOWL, OJAI Wu Wei, sheng | Alex Peh, piano | Claire Chase, flute | Susie Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo, percussion | JACK Quartet Modern Medieval (arr. Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman) Susie IBARRA Nest Box (World Premiere) Tania LEÓN Ritual Susie IBARRA Sky Islands (West Coast Premiere)
Welcome to OJAICAST, where we pull back the curtain to take a sneak-peek at the upcoming Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, in beautiful Ojai Valley, California. All are welcome here, from newcomers to long-time music fans. In-depth insights and special guests will help introduce this year’s programming and whet your musical appetites for what’s to come with host Christopher Noxon.
EPISODE 4
In our fourth and final episode of this series leading up to the 2025 Ojai Music Festival, Leilehua Lanzilotti discusses giant reverbs and how Hawaiian culture influences her music. Composer Liza Lim then talks about writing for solo flute and explains How Forests Think.
Will Thomas, Writer & Producer Christopher Noxon, Host Leilehua Lanzilotti and Liza Lim, Guests
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
EPISODE 3
This week we look behind the scenes of how the Ojai Music Festival is curated with this year’s Music Director, Claire Chase and the Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director, Ara Guzelimian. Claire tells the story of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece, Sky Islands by Susie Ibarra. She also demonstrates some of her exotic flute sounds and techniques.
Music featured – 1. Pan – Death of Pan composed by Marcos Balter and performed by Claire Chase 2. Pan – Pan’s Flute composed by Marcos Balter and performed by Claire Chase 3. Pan – Harmony of the Spheres composed by Marcos Balter and performed by Claire Chase 4. Holy Liftoff composed by Terry Riley and performed by Claire Chase, unreleased 5. Sex Magic: II. Oracles I “Salutations to the Cowrie Shells composed by Liza Lim, performed by Claire Chase & Senem Pirler 6. Sky Islands composed by Susie Ibarra and performed by Claire Chase, unreleased 7. Sunbird composed by Susie Ibarra and performed by Claire Chase, unreleased 8. On the Overgrown Path, JW VIII/17, Book 1: I. Our Eveningscomposed by Leos Janacek and performed by Rudolf Firkusny 9. Yenna performed by Ali Farka Touré 10. Horse Sings From Cloud composed and performed by Pauline Oliveros
Will Thomas, Writer & Producer Christopher Noxon, Host Claire Chase and Ara Guzelimian, Guests
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
EPISODE 2
In this episode, cellist Jay Campbell discusses the adventurous programming of the Ojai Music Festival (June 5-8) and his recurring role on the Libbey Bowl stage with the JACK Quartet. Composer Annea Lockwood then takes us on an aural journey down rivers and bayous as she shares about her decades-long trials of recording the wind.
Music featured – 1. Chambers composed by Marcos Balter and performed by the JACK Quartet, unreleased recording 2. The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arccomposed by Julius Eastman and performed by Seth Parker Woods/Wild Up 3. Sky Islands composed by Susie Ibarra, unreleased recording 4. Eastre composed by Autechre 5. Bayou-Borne composed by Annea Lockwood and performed by Ensemble Maze 6. Housatonic River Recording by composer Annea Lockwood, unreleased 7. Wind by composer Cathy Lane 8. Arctic Winds by composer Maggi Payne
Will Thomas, Writer & Producer Christopher Noxon, Host Jay Campbell & Annea Lockwood, Guests
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
EPISODE 1
We launch season five of OJAICAST as your host Christopher Noxon dives into the lineup of the 2025 Ojai Music Festival (June 5-8). He joins composer-in-residence Marcos Balter and talks about writing music at a young age, audience participation in his music, and collaborating with this year’s Music Director and longtime friend Claire Chase.
Music featured – 1. Processional performed by Claire Chase (composer Marcos Balter) 2. Pan’s Flute performed by Claire Chase (composer Marcos Balter) 3. Harmony of the Spheres performed by Claire Chase (composer Marcos Balter) 4. Alone performed by Claire Chase (composer Marcos Balter), unreleased 5. Chambers performed by Spektral Quartet (composer Marcos Balter) 6. Sugarcane Fields Forever by Caetano Veloso 7. Processional performed by Claire Chase (composer Marcos Balter)
Will Thomas, Writer & Producer Christopher Noxon, Host Marcos Balter, Guest
ABOUT OUR HOST Christopher Noxon writes and paints in Ojai, CA. His solo show “Terra Incognita” opens at Oxford House Projects in LA on May 17. He’s on the board of the Ojai Valley Museum and the Ojai Studio Artists. He’s the author and illustrator of Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook,Plus One: A Novel and Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons Cupcakes and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine.
ABOUT OUR WRITER & PRODUCER Will Thomas is a composer, producer and sound artist based in Ojai, CA. He has composed music for TV, Film scores, movie trailers and has released multiple albums on labels Thrill Jockey, Hydrogen Dukebox and his own Neutral Music imprint. He is a frequent collaborator including works with Joseph Arthur, Roger Eno, Natalie Walker, and Jason Bentley. His music has been featured in countless programs on Netflix, HBO, SyFy, NBC, and he won the award for Best Score at the Filmquest Film Festival for The Haunted Swordsman. Most recently, he has experimented with mechanical instrument making and sound art installations.
Maddy’s Thursday Afternoon/Evening Patron Services and Development Associate, Intern Alum 2021
“My ideal Thursday at the Festival would start with attending the Ojai Talks, then heading downtown to find a good parking spot between Fox and Signal Streets. I’d wander around the Ojai Community Farmer’s Market, probably buying some fresh-cut flowers and Bonito Coffee beans for the week.
I’d then meet friends for dinner at Izakaya Full Moon, an intimate spot serving Japanese favorites and an ever-rotating list of specials. The Corn Kagi-age, Agedashi Tofu, and the Chef’s Choice Nigiri are my favorite menu items. Dinner would be followed by a walk to Libbey Park, setting up a spot on the Lawn with cozy blankets and a glass of wine, and enjoying the first concert of the Ojai Music Festival.”
Anna’s Saturday Morning Director of Philanthropy
“My perfect Saturday starts with Morning Meditation at the Ojai Meadows Preserve—there’s something peaceful and grounding about beginning the day surrounded by nature and music. Afterward, I’d head into town, find parking, and grab a coffee from Pinhole’s coffee van in Libbey Park. After the morning concert, I’d take a scenic drive to Upper Ojai for lunch at The SummitDrive-In. My go-to is the Western BBQ bacon burger, and you have to try one of their famous milkshakes. I’d take lunch to go and drive up to Avatar Point at Meher Mount for one of the most breathtaking views in Ojai. Then, it’s time to head back into downtown Ojai for more Festival events!”
“For me, the best way to experience the Ojai Music Festival is by embracing the town’s natural beauty, eclectic shops, and local flavors—preferably by bike.
My day begins by browsing my favorite vintage and thrift shops on foot. Stops include Gratitude Vintageand Help of Ojai, where I dig for treasures, especially vinyl records. Just in time for the 3:30 PM Beyond the Bowl concert, I pedal over to Ojai Valley School, taking in the fresh air and rolling hills along the way.
For dinner, my go-to is Zadiee’s at Soule Park Golf Course, located at the eastern end of the bike path. If the weather’s warm, I always request a patio seat for the stunning views. My usual order? An iced tea and either the Buffalo Chicken Sandwich or the Baja Tacos. As the sun sets, I meander back along the bike path toward Libbey Park, where I unwind in the Green Room in the Park, hoping to catch a surprise musical pop-up before the 8PM Libbey Bowl concert.
It’s a perfect Ojai day—one filled with music, nature, and the town’s unique charm.”
Fiona’s Sunday Afternoon Producer and Artistic Administrator
“I’d start by shopping at the upstairs portion of Bungalow, a local shop featuring handmade goods and gifts. The upstairs room has amazingly high-quality clothing items. Across the street from Bungalow is Move Sanctuary, where Annea Lockwood’s Housatonic sound installation is playing.
From there, I’d head up to Shelf Road for an easy hike with a great view of Ojai that isn’t too far out of town. Then it’s back into downtown to end the afternoon with a 30-minute chair massage at the Relaxing Station before the Festival’s final concert.”
ONE NIGHT ONLY: THU May 15 7PM-10:30PM Light and Space Yoga in Ojai
The Ojai Music Festival partners with The Listening Garden for an evening of immersive sonic exploration led by 2025 Music Director and flutist Claire Chase. The event invites attendees to participate in the legacy of experimental and electronic music pioneer, Pauline Oliveros.
Joining Claire Chase will be sound artist Colloboh and dublab founder Mark “Frosty” McNeil to begin and end the evening.
Naom’s Kitchen bento-style Japanese dinner available for purchase, as well as complimentary tea ceremony & wine.
Tickets are $47/person. Limited seating available. Hurry now to save your spot.
Described by The New York Times as “the most important flutist of our time,” Claire Chase is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. One of today’s most generative forces of new music, Chase returns to Ojai later this season as Musical Director of the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.
Chase has recently performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia. She is currently collaborating with The Getty Center on a public offering inspired by the listening philosophies of Pauline Oliveros (PST ART x Science Collide festival, 2024-25).
Colloboh is a Nigerian-born, LA-based sound artist, producer, composer, and DJ. While known for his modular synth works, he’s broken new ground in experimental performance with recent collaborations with Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Getty Center.
Mark “Frosty” McNeil is a DJ, radio host, sonic curator, and founder of dublab radio, a pioneering web-based radio station exploring wide-spectrum music since 1999. McNeill currently serves as a Creative Producer for Los Angeles Philharmonic.
About Pauline Oliveros + Deep Listening
Pauline Oliveros was a sonic visionary; her work in composition, improvisation, and teaching was imaginative, ground-breaking and largely dedicated to accessibility.
Deep Listening describes philosophies and practices that explore the space between the physical phenomenon of hearing and the conscious practice of listening. It includes listening and sounding exercises, sonic meditations, and interactive performance. In the words of Oliveros, “Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.”
Everything you need to know to immerse yourself in and prepare for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival!
CONTENTS
I)The Basics Your introduction to the Festival II) Composer Context Who’s who and who will be in town at the 2025 Festival III) Podcast Listen now to delve even deeper IV) Book Recs Read your way to understanding more about 2025 V)Suggested Films Things to add to your watchlist before the Festival VI)Free Concert Livestream Enjoy all Libbey Bowl concerts in the comfort of your home for free
VII)Between the Downbeats What to do and where to go between concerts VIII) Quick Links A few final tips to point you in the right direction
The Basics
Since 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has offered four days of innovative programming each spring, blending contemporary, classical, and experimental approaches to music-making. A new music director curates the Festival annually, bringing fresh perspectives and fostering collaboration among world-class artists. Core concerts take place at the historic Libbey Bowl, with additional free and off-site events—including intimate theatrical concerts, thoughtful symposiums, and family-friendly pop-ups—throughout Ojai.
For the 2025 Festival, June 5-8, the music director is Claire Chase: expert flutist, interdisciplinary artist, and community-focused educator. Among many other accolades, Chase is known for launching the 24-year commissioning projectDensity 2036. Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, and educational initiatives. Works that are part of Density 2036 punctuate the Festival’s programming in Thursday night’s opening concert with Marcos Balter’s Pan and on Friday afternoon with Liza Lim’s Sex Magic.
Under Claire Chase, this Festival’s programming centers on responses to landscape as caretakers and participants, and celebrates collaboration and dialogue across multiple generations of composers and performers. The 2025 Festival includes four World Premieres of works by Susie Ibarra, Tania León, Terry Riley, and Bahar Royaee; the US Premiere of Liza Lim’s Cardamom; eight West Coast Premieres; and seminal works by John Coltrane, Julius Eastman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and more.
Central threads of this year include:
Connection to and conservation of ecology and nature
Using music as a means to symbolize an idea or meaning
Meditative and mindful contemplation
Deep listening
What to listen for:
Unique instrumentation, such as Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute, or the use of bamboo as a percussive element in Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands
Extended techniques of traditional instruments, such as percussive flute playing or playing a cymbal with a double bass bow
Music that is part of or descended from minimalism, a 20th-century compositional movement that emphasizes repetition, drones, and/or gradual shifting between notes or techniques
Microtonal music (not necessarily atonal), which is music that utilizes pitches in between the 12 in the equal-tempered European chromatic scale
Here is a bit of context about each composer. Something special about this year’s Festival is that many of the featured composers will be in attendance, so be on the lookout for them at Ojai Chats, in the audience, or around town.
Marcos Balter
Works performed at Festival events: THU 8PM, SAT 10:30 AM
Marcos Balter’s Pan is a central work of Claire Chase’s epic Density 2036 project. The Brazilian-American composer’s work for solo flute, live electronics, and community participation evokes the life and death of the Greek god Pan (himself a player of flutes) in a collaborative work that has elements of theatrical ritual. Here is an evocative description of the work by the writer Lisa Hirsch.
Marcos’s Alone for solo flute and wine glasses (Thursday at 8pm) will be the first music to be heard at this year’s Festival, followed later on the same program by Pan. In addition, the JACK Quartet will play Marcos’s Chambers to open the Saturday morning 10:30am program.
In attendance at 2025 Festival Works performed at Festival events: SAT 8AM, SUN 10:30AM
Susie has had a wide-ranging career as both percussionist and composer in a wide vocabulary of genres, with her collaborators ranging from Wadada Leo Smith and John Zorn to Pauline Oliveros.
Here is a sampling of Susie in action in her extended album titled Talking Gong. First, Sunbird, written for Claire Chase and to be heard in a different version this year in Ojai on the Sunday early morning concert. And then, Paniwala from the same work, with Susie Ibarra joined by pianist Alex Peh, who is also a key collaborator in Sky Islands.
In attendance at 2025 Festival Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8PM, SAT 10:30AM, SUN 8AM, SUN 5:30PM
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. Lanzilotti’s piece koʻu inoa will begin the Friday Evening concert in Libbey Bowl.
In the Hawaiian language, koʻu 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 Hawaiʻi 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. “Hawaiʻi 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.” Listen to the piece and read more about it on Lanzilotti’s website here.
In attendance at 2025 Festival Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8AM,SAT 8PM, SUN 10:30AM, SUN 5:30PM
Friday, June 6 begins with an early morning program featuring the JACK Quartet performing, among other treasures, Abanico, a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. This concert is one of our OJAI DAWNS, an annual intimate concert in our farthest venue from downtown: Zalk Theater (on the stunning campus of Beasant Hill School).
The sound of a solo instrument is expanded and multiplied in this 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. 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.
Works performed at Festival events: FRI 8AM, FRI 2:30PM, SAT 8PM
In its West Coast premiere, Australian composer Liza Lim’s Density 2036 contribution Sex Magic for solo contrabass flute and electronics centers Friday afternoon. Inspired by Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute (Bertha), Sex Magic evokes and celebrates women’s power across time and cultures, evoking the giant bass flutes of Papua New Guinea and the Australian didgeridoo in a work that ritually moves across three altars, creating a mystical, mesmerizing evocation of both the present and the timeless past. Find more about this piece on Lim’s website.
Saturday evening’s concert concludes with Liza Lim’s large-scale How Forests Think, a work inspired by the imagery of ancient forests as vibrant, symbiotic communities that, as Lim writes, “nourish the old connections and keep a song going. One might think of a forest as a choir or certainly as an ensemble. Stories, dreams, and thoughts inhabit multiple forms in a living matrix.” Find more about this piece on Liza Lim’s website.
In attendance at 2025 Festival Works performed at Festival events:THU 8PM, SAT & SUN 2-5PM, SAT 10:30PM
Annea Lockwood is a composer known for integrating the interplay of sound in nature into her musical creations. The 2025 Festival opens on Thursday, June 5, with Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, an affectionate tribute to a collaborator and dear friend, Pauline Oliveros. Her piece Spirit Catchers will be played in a special late-night setting at the Ojai Playhouse after the Saturday Evening concert, How Forests Think. Try to arrive with time to grab a snack or drink from the newly remodeled historical cinema!
Lockwood’s sound map of the Housatonic River, captured as a four-channel sound installation, will be installed and played from 2-5PM on both Saturday and Sunday during the Festival in the serene pilates/yoga space of Move Sanctuary. Here are Lockwood’s notes explaining the creation of the piece:
“A Sound Map of the Housatonic River is a four-channel sound installation; it is an aural tracing of the river from its sources in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, to Long Island Sound, Connecticut. Each recorded site is located on a wall map with a number. Beside the map is the corresponding number, followed by the time at which that site can be heard, the place name, and where the recording was made. The installation was commissioned by the Housatonic River Museum, a project in development in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.”
In attendance at 2025 Festival Works performed at Festival events: FRI 10:30AM, SAT & SUN 3:30 & 2:30PM
The Libbey Bowl concert on Friday celebrates the old made new in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions for harpsichord and ends with a summit meeting between Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe, two dazzlingly inventive composers and pianists whose worlds encompass creative music, free jazz, new music, and beyond.
The afternoon of Saturday, June 7, is punctuated by the West Coast premiere of Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics. Taborn’s critically acclaimed Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms was inspired by a dream in which plants awake, blossom, grow, and change as the dreamer walks through a garden. (A second performance of Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms will be offered on Sunday afternoon, June 8.)
For the past three years, the Ojai Music Festival has produced a podcast, OJAICAST, which aims to prepare listeners for the Festival by contextualizing the composers, performers, and intentions behind them all. In the spring of 2025, the Ojai Community Radio station, KOJY, was founded. Their mission is to provide Ojai and the surrounding communities with a freeform platform for music, community voices, education, and emergency broadcasting, without ads or commercial influence.
For this fourth installment of our podcast, each episode will first air as a radio show on KOJY and then be available for streaming. This installment is also special in that the artists and composers of the 2025 Festival will be featured on the show in conversation with host Chris Noxon, a visual artist and writer based in Ojai. It will be produced by Will Thomas, composer and producer, also based in Ojai. Listen to it live on KOJY on Fridays starting May 9, or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts anytime after.
In this astonishing book, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human–and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems.
Liza Lim’s large-scale work of the same title is the finale of Saturday night’s Libbey Bowl concert. She was inspired to create this piece after reading this book.
A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick #1 New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
In Virtual Ojai Talks, Claire Chase mentioned reading this book and feeling inspired by it in her curation of this year’s concerts.
A Year of Deep Listening, Stephanie Loveless (Editor)
365 scores for listening in celebration of the legacy of groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros.
A Year of Deep Listening is a publication of 365 scores for listening gathered by the Center for Deep Listening in celebration of the legacy of groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros.
Originally begun online, in honor of what would have been Oliveros’ 90th birthday (May 30, 2022), the project shared one score per day across social media for 365 days. The book version of A Year of Deep Listening brings these scores together into one beautiful and historic volume. An expression of the Deep Listening community, the scores were created by over 300 artists—ranging from prize winning composers to ear-minded grocery store clerks, from those who worked closely with Oliveros for decades to those who never met her.
Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators, and anyone interested in how consciousness may be affected by profound attention to the sonic environment. Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Sonic Meditations Sonic Meditations is a set of exercises that aim to help the reader have a deeper understanding of the self through sound-based meditation practices. Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Sounding the Margins Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009 by Pauline Oliveros documents her activity over this period and her advances in electronic and telematic musical performance, improvisation, artificial intelligence, and the role of women in contemporary music. Featuring contributions by John Luther Adams, Monique Buzzarté, and Stuart Dempster. Purchase on Bookshop.org.
Quantum Listening Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in we act from compassion and peace. This timely new edition brings Oliveros’ vision together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE. Purchase on Bookshop.org.
An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us.
“Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros” tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the only females amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians, a gateway to music and sound for non-musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with severe disabilities to create beautiful music. On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Since 2012, the Ojai Music Festival has expanded its global footprint, building a worldwide audience and deepening connections with patrons throughout the year with free live broadcasts. All Libbey Bowl concerts are streamed in real time. Open our website’s homepage at the start time of each concert to view!
Most concerts are available on our YouTube channel after the Festival takes place. Watch livestreams from previous years and stay updated on new Festival videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel below.
Wondering where to go, shop, and eat in between concerts? Use the links below to read what our staff recommends, a full list of our local favorites, and even more recommendations in the mobile app.
Each year, the Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program welcomes a dozen college students and recent graduates to go behind the scenes of a renowned summer music festival. Interns work closely with the staff and production team, providing critical support and simultaneously gaining invaluable hands-on experience and skills for their future careers.
“As an intern for the Ojai Music Festival, you become a messenger for the organization’s purpose: to dare the audience to be innovative listeners of new music. The office staff and other interns become your mentors and family for the duration of your internship experience. Working with like-minded people creates the perfect atmosphere for discussion and pushes you to be your best creative self.”
Emily Persinko, San Diego State University, Ojai Alum 2016-2018
About the Program
The Festival invites students from all fields of study to apply for our internship program. The program is ideally suited for curious, motivated individuals who are interested in the diversity of possible careers in either the arts, live event management, or the nonprofit world. Festival interns have gone on to have successful careers in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Those who have gone on to work in the arts have done so at organizations across the country, including the AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Pacific Symphony, Early Music Guild of Seattle, and Voices of Change, as well as forged new paths as entrepreneurial performing artists and composers.
Each intern receives during their two-week internship:
An immersive experience within a world-renowned music festival in addition to inside knowledge into the many different pieces that come together for a successful weekend of concerts
Training for their areas of responsibility from staff as well as leaders in the field
Free and discounted tickets to Festival concerts (as much as work schedule and ticket availability allow)
Housing and/or homestay in the beautiful Ojai Valley and most meals during the Festival
Stipend
Production Fellowship
Previous experience in production and/or previous internship with Ojai Music Festival is strongly preferred. The production intern fellow will get hands on experience in details that help create a successful experience for musicians, patrons, and other production staff.
“I had an incredible experience as an intern and got a first-hand look at what life as a stage manager and concert producer is like, and knew exactly what I wanted to do as a career! Shortly after the internship, using the skills I gained and my experience working with high-level artists, I secured several professional stage managing and artist liaison gigs in Santa Barbara. After graduating, I secured a position at Pacific Symphony in Irvine, CA, working as a production manager in their Youth Ensembles program. I am also grateful to have returned to Ojai every year since as a permanent member of the production team! The skills I picked up from my time at Ojai have been a huge influence on my professional career and I am forever grateful for that opportunity!”
Jonathan Bergeron, University of California Santa Barbara, Production Fellow 2021
Internship Requirements
Applicants must be 18 or over, and current college (undergraduate or graduate) students. Knowledge of classical music is suggested but is not a requirement. Interns commit to 1-2 weeks in Ojai and must be available during the Festival week (June 3-9, 2025). Please indicate on your application if you have special schedule requirements.
Festival interns have come from colleges and universities throughout the country. Expand to see the list!
“If you want to grow your interpersonal skills, understand the music industry, and learn more about contemporary music, this is a really great experience.”
Complete the internship application: fill out the forms, select your department interests (listed below), respond to the two essay questions, and return with a cover letter and resume. The application form is at the bottom of this page.
Submit two letters of recommendation: Letters from college faculty should include both how the applicant would benefit from the Internship, and how the Internship would strengthen the applicant’s specific college and career goals. Letters from college faculty must be on school letterhead. These letters may be uploaded with the application or sent to the office directly.
“It is exciting to see modern music and a large audience interested in new things. I enjoyed hearing such versatile musicians. Nice balance of density of events. I learned so much!”
Each of the Festival’s internship opportunities places interns in a specific area of responsibility, enabling them to gain specialized experience. However, the multilayered nature of the Festival means that interns will often assist in many different departments, as projects require. Read the brief descriptions below to see what might best interest you and indicate your interests in order of preference when you apply. The “good fit for” is not at all a requirement, just a suggestion.
Audio/Sound
The audio/sound intern works with the production team and the sound designer for the Libbey Bowl concerts.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in sound design and logistics.
Development and Special Events
Development and special events interns work with the Director of Development to produce the various social and donor events throughout the Festival. They also manage RSVP lists, coordinate and schedule vendors, create materials, and assist with other fundraising projects.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in special events coordination and fundraising.
Patron Experience (Front-of-House)
Patron Experience interns work with the Front-of-House team including the House Manager and Lead Usher to provide a welcoming and hospitable experience for Festival patrons, with attention to safety and security measures.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in event coordination and gaining experience in patron interaction.
Live Stream
These interns work with our live stream crew which provides a high-quality online broadcast of concerts during the Festival. Live stream interns are also responsible for helping with graphics related to live stream and can handle working with the film crew. Knowledge of Photoshop, Google Docs, I-Movie, and Final Cut Pro.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in video editing and live-stream, film work.
Stage
Stage interns work backstage and assist Festival stage managers in various performance venues.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in stage management.
Patron Services (Box Office)
Patron services interns work in the box office, not only selling tickets, but also serving as a guide to the Festival experience for ticket buyers, donors, and community members.
A good fit for: interns who thrive in a fast-paced environment and are interested in gaining customer service, communications, database, and hospitality experience.
Operations
The Operations interns work with the Operations Manager to provide physical and organizational support, including interfacing with the park manager, producer, administration staff, and patrol officers. They are responsible for assisting with signage and off-site communications.
A good fit for: interns looking to gain experience in the hands-on, behind the scenes workings of the Festival.
Production
The production intern works with the Festival Producer to coordinate artists and their needs throughout the Festival. They also work on stage and with the Stage Manager to help produce the Festival’s concerts, manage rehearsals and performances, stage changes, and coordinate between lighting and sound engineers.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in concert production.
Public Relations and Marketing
Marketing interns work with the Director of Marketing & Communications and other marketing team members in communicating with and coordinating press in the days leading up to and during the Festival. They also assist with the Festival’s social media presence during the Festival and creating and distributing marketing materials.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in public relations, marketing, and social media.
Patron Services (Retail/Concessions)
Patron services work with the Retail Managers to sell and manage merchandise. They complete pre- and post-inventories, determine signage and décor needs, and provide a warm customer experience during the Festival.
A good fit for: interns interested in gaining experience in customer service and retail management.
“The Ojai Music Festival was an amazing experience. I met great people, listened to fabulous music, and learned about the ins and outs of putting on a music festival. Having a team of interns to hang out with throughout the days was a bonus highlight of my experience. All of the people working with OMF were kindhearted and nice. This experience was extremely rewarding. I learned a lot while I interned at the Ojai Music Festival and can’t wait for next year!!”
Lizzy Tepaske, University of California Santa Barbara, Ojai Alum 2021
Submit your application by filling out the form below. If you are a returning intern, fill out the returning intern application by clicking this button:
This Privacy Policy describes Our policies and procedures on the collection, use and disclosure of Your information when You use the Service and tells You about Your privacy rights and how the law protects You.
We use Your Personal data to provide and improve the Service. By using the Service, You agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy has been created with the help of the Privacy Policy Generator.
Interpretation and Definitions
Interpretation
The words of which the initial letter is capitalized have meanings defined under the following conditions. The following definitions shall have the same meaning regardless of whether they appear in singular or in plural.
Definitions
For the purposes of this Privacy Policy:
Account means a unique account created for You to access our Service or parts of our Service.
Affiliate means an entity that controls, is controlled by or is under common control with a party, where “control” means ownership of 50% or more of the shares, equity interest or other securities entitled to vote for election of directors or other managing authority.
Application refers to Ojai Music Festival App, the software program provided by the Company.
Company (referred to as either “the Company”, “We”, “Us” or “Our” in this Agreement) refers to Ojai Festivals Ltd., 201 S Signal St.
Country refers to: California, United States
Device means any device that can access the Service such as a computer, a cellphone or a digital tablet.
Personal Data is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual.
Service refers to the Application.
Service Provider means any natural or legal person who processes the data on behalf of the Company. It refers to third-party companies or individuals employed by the Company to facilitate the Service, to provide the Service on behalf of the Company, to perform services related to the Service or to assist the Company in analyzing how the Service is used.
Third-party Social Media Service refers to any website or any social network website through which a User can log in or create an account to use the Service.
Usage Data refers to data collected automatically, either generated by the use of the Service or from the Service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit).
You means the individual accessing or using the Service, or the company, or other legal entity on behalf of which such individual is accessing or using the Service, as applicable.
Collecting and Using Your Personal Data
Types of Data Collected
Personal Data
While using Our Service, We may ask You to provide Us with certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify You. Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to:
Email address
First name and last name
Phone number
Address, State, Province, ZIP/Postal code, City
Usage Data
Usage Data
Usage Data is collected automatically when using the Service.
Usage Data may include information such as Your Device’s Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that You visit, the time and date of Your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.
When You access the Service by or through a mobile device, We may collect certain information automatically, including, but not limited to, the type of mobile device You use, Your mobile device unique ID, the IP address of Your mobile device, Your mobile operating system, the type of mobile Internet browser You use, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.
We may also collect information that Your browser sends whenever You visit our Service or when You access the Service by or through a mobile device.
Use of Your Personal Data
The Company may use Personal Data for the following purposes:
To provide and maintain our Service, including to monitor the usage of our Service.
To manage Your Account: to manage Your registration as a user of the Service. The Personal Data You provide can give You access to different functionalities of the Service that are available to You as a registered user.
For the performance of a contract: the development, compliance and undertaking of the purchase contract for the products, items or services You have purchased or of any other contract with Us through the Service.
To contact You: To contact You by email, telephone calls, SMS, or other equivalent forms of electronic communication, such as a mobile application’s push notifications regarding updates or informative communications related to the functionalities, products or contracted services, including the security updates, when necessary or reasonable for their implementation.
To provide You with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless You have opted not to receive such information.
To manage Your requests: To attend and manage Your requests to Us.
For business transfers: We may use Your information to evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which Personal Data held by Us about our Service users is among the assets transferred.
For other purposes: We may use Your information for other purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and to evaluate and improve our Service, products, services, marketing and your experience.
We may share Your personal information in the following situations:
With Service Providers: We may share Your personal information with Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service, to contact You.
For business transfers: We may share or transfer Your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of Company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of Our business to another company.
With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us.
With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.
With other users: when You share personal information or otherwise interact in the public areas with other users, such information may be viewed by all users and may be publicly distributed outside. If You interact with other users or register through a Third-Party Social Media Service, Your contacts on the Third-Party Social Media Service may see Your name, profile, pictures and description of Your activity. Similarly, other users will be able to view descriptions of Your activity, communicate with You and view Your profile.
With Your consent: We may disclose Your personal information for any other purpose with Your consent.
Retention of Your Personal Data
The Company will retain Your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use Your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.
The Company will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of Our Service, or We are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.
Transfer of Your Personal Data
Your information, including Personal Data, is processed at the Company’s operating offices and in any other places where the parties involved in the processing are located. It means that this information may be transferred to — and maintained on — computers located outside of Your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from Your jurisdiction.
Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by Your submission of such information represents Your agreement to that transfer.
The Company will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that Your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of Your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of Your data and other personal information.
Delete Your Personal Data
You have the right to delete or request that We assist in deleting the Personal Data that We have collected about You.
Our Service may give You the ability to delete certain information about You from within the Service.
You may update, amend, or delete Your information at any time by signing in to Your Account, if you have one, and visiting the account settings section that allows you to manage Your personal information. You may also contact Us to request access to, correct, or delete any personal information that You have provided to Us.
Please note, however, that We may need to retain certain information when we have a legal obligation or lawful basis to do so.
Disclosure of Your Personal Data
Business Transactions
If the Company is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, Your Personal Data may be transferred. We will provide notice before Your Personal Data is transferred and becomes subject to a different Privacy Policy.
Law enforcement
Under certain circumstances, the Company may be required to disclose Your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).
Other legal requirements
The Company may disclose Your Personal Data in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to:
Comply with a legal obligation
Protect and defend the rights or property of the Company
Prevent or investigate possible wrongdoing in connection with the Service
Protect the personal safety of Users of the Service or the public
Protect against legal liability
Security of Your Personal Data
The security of Your Personal Data is important to Us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While We strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect Your Personal Data, We cannot guarantee its absolute security.
Children’s Privacy
Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. If You are a parent or guardian and You are aware that Your child has provided us with Personal Data, please contact Us. If We become aware that We have collected Personal Data from anyone under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from Our servers.
If We need to rely on consent as a legal basis for processing Your information and Your country requires consent from a parent, we may require Your parent’s consent before We collect and use that information.
Links to Other Websites
Our Service may contain links to other websites that are not operated by Us. If You click on a third party link, You will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise You to review the Privacy Policy of every site You visit.
We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may update Our Privacy Policy from time to time. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us:
At the Ojai Music Festival, we thrive on experimentation and discovery—both in the music we present and in how we engage with our community. Each year, we take creative risks to offer a unique and transformative experience. But none of this would be possible without our supporters, our passionate music lovers, our community.
Feedback from our patrons is essential to our growth and evolution. Whether it’s thoughts on a particular performance, insights into the festival experience, or suggestions for how we can better serve our audience, their perspective is invaluable.
“Learned a lot. Enjoyed the Libbey Bowl area for relaxed environment, easy parking and other amenities nearby.”
“I loved the music and the entire experience. I can’t wait until next year and might attend a few of this year’s concerts as well.”
“We enjoyed meeting new people and we enjoyed running into people we know but didn’t know that they have attended the Festival for several years (or longer).”
“Every year we wonder how we could possibly top this next year, but it happens – the magic keeps growing!”
“An introduction for me to hear new artists perform whom I ordinarily wouldn’t not be familiar with and to be awakened to new sounds and proficiency of the artists.”
“Lovely, enriching experience for the whole family.”
“It means satisfying my curiosity. It means great people. It means discovery. It means good food. It means beautiful setting. It means staggering artistry.”
As this year rapidly winds down, I wanted to take a moment to savor some favorite moments and glimpses of the 2024 Festival with the wondrous Mitsuko Uchida as Music Director. It was a particularly joyous and rewarding Festival, with the members of Mahler Chamber Orchestra turning up in every corner of Ojai, delighting in their California adventure. Who would have thought a European-based chamber orchestra would have a Johnny Cash cover band in their ranks! Before we let the year recede in memory, here are some personal snapshots of a few public and private moments that I cherish.
Behind the Scenes
photo by Ara Guzelimian.
Mitsuko Uchida, a musician of boundless curiosity and exuberance, getting an orientation on percussion instruments by Festival artist Sae Hashimoto.
photo by Ara Guzelimian.
Mitsuko is one of the most exacting of artists when it comes to pianos. We were very fortunate to have the superb piano technician Joel Bernache as our house piano “doctor” to look after the splendid concert Steinway. Here are both Mitsuko and Joel in action!
Joyful Moments
photo by Ara Guzelimian.
Violinist Alexandra Preucil (with bunny ears) with members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in their delightful children’s concert in Libbey Park. A few moments after the concert ended, the tiny daughter of friends spied the violinist walking through the park (without the ears!) – she pointed with delight and said, “there’s the bunny,” at which point the extraordinarily kind Alexandra Preucil came to visit with her.
photo by Ara Guzelimian.
One of my favorite new traditions at the Festival is the early morning free meditation concerts at Chapparal Auditorium on Ojai Avenue. Who knew that a hearty audience would turn up at 8 a.m. on a weekend morning to hear some quiet, reflective new music? Never underestimate the Ojai audience! Here’s cellist Jay Campbell with a rapt morning audience.
Photo by Timothy Teague.
I particularly love this photo as it captures the ebullient good spirits felt by all at the 2024 Ojai Festival. We are very lucky in the company we keep.
Looking Ahead
All of us here send you our wholehearted thanks for creating this very special community that is the Ojai Music Festival. I’m always fond of saying the miracle of Ojai is this improbable standard of artistic excellence and innovation that happens to take place in a lovely small town park, with perhaps the most open-eared and open-hearted audience to be found anywhere. The Festival depends to a very large degree – 75% – to contributed income. Please consider making a year-end contribution to help us start the new year with a solid foundation of support. We are grateful to each of you for your continued engagement and so look forward to seeing you in the coming year.
Think about surprising someone with a Libbey Bowl Pass for the Ojai Music Festival in 2025, scheduled for June 5-8 featuring Music Director Claire Chase. From Libbey Bowl passes to individual tickets, you can customize an unforgettable musical journey, perfect for your loved one’s musical tastes. This gift promises not just a fantastic event but also an immersive experience in the enchanting Ojai!
A cozy hoodie or blanket to stay warm. A baseball cap or t-shirt to add to your collection. Purchase your OMF merchandise as a gift for someone special or treat yourself!
The promo code MERRY automatically adds an additional 15% discount. Order soon to ensure it arrives before the holidays.
Mitsuko Uchida and Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the 2024 Festival Finale Concert | Photo by Timothy Teague
It begins with your commitment.
Because of your curiosity and adventurous spirit, Ojai becomes a gathering place where the world’s most innovative musicians connect with an inspired community. You make it possible for us to create transformational experiences year after year.
Your gift today can help sustain this extraordinary tradition.
Alexi Kenney at SOUND+WALK, free member event in Ojai, spring 2024 | Photo by Elizabeth Herring
It begins with your generosity.
Because of you, the Festival’s impact reaches far beyond its four unforgettable days.
In 2025, nearly 3,000 students and seniors in the Ojai Valley will experience the joy of music through our BRAVO Education and Community Programs. Year-round events will foster deeper connections locally, while free livestreams will bring Ojai’s magic to thousands worldwide.
Your gift today ensures that this impact will grow even further.
Claire Chase, 2025 Ojai Festival Music Director
It begins with your adventurous spirit.
Because of you, Claire Chase will present a bold, inventive program inspired by Ojai’s natural beauty and sonic landscapes. Together, we will welcome a vibrant, multigenerational collective of composers, performers, and improvisers to create an unforgettable experience.
Your support makes all this possible. Please join us in creating another extraordinary Festival season by making your year-end gift.
BRAVO Music Van | Photo by Cindy BurtonBRAVO Music Van | Photo by Cindy Burton2024 Festival Finale Concert | Photo by Timothy Teague
A Small Expense with a Great Impact
Throughout the year, the Ojai Music Festival prioritizes community, artistic curiosity, and innovative programs, culminating with our treasured Festival in June. The Festival’s year-round programs are made possible by donations from our loyal audience members, like you!
Recurring gifts allow you to give at the level and timing that works best with both your budget and schedule. They simultaneously allow the Festival to rely on a consistent, year-round revenue stream.
I hope this Thanksgiving week finds you well, with time to reflect and savor the joys of life. This is one of my favorite times of the year – the mornings are suddenly chillier, the sweaters come out of the drawers, the afternoon light is longer and lower on the horizon, we are perhaps more keenly aware of the passing of the year.
It is also a moment to pause and express gratitude. Among life’s many joys, I am deeply grateful for my life in music, keeping company with the most inspiring of musicians and fellow listeners. I started coming to the Ojai Festival when I was barely out of my teens and the lovely community that is created each year in Libbey Park is high on my list of treasurable experiences, an annual tradition that renews and surprises at every turn.
Much of life lately has been at a high decibel level, what with a singularly contentious election year, war and devastation of loss in so many parts of the world, and more locally, the sirens signaling an unusual wildfire season from Camarillo to New York (!). Faced with so much troubling noise, my response has always been to turn to music. So, in that spirit, I offer what I call a “quiet playlist of thanksgiving,” featuring a cross-section of wondrous Ojai artists from the last ten years.
This very personal selection reminds me of beauty, a deep inner life, and the things that we cherish, and which endure apart from all the noise. The tone is set from the start by our 2025 Music Director Claire Chase with Felipe Lara’s Meditation and Calligraphy and includes such treasured Ojai artists as Víkingur Olafsson, the Attacca Quartet (playing John Adams), Julia Bullock, Vijay Iyer, Steven Schick, Mitsuko Uchida, and the JACK Quartet. I want to single out one particular track – Rainy Day from the Silk Road Ensemble’s just-released album American Railroad. One of my fondest memories of the 2023 Festival was the magical duet between Rhiannon Giddens and Wu Man at the closing concert. This is that very piece, a souvenir of a magical Ojai pairing.
I offer this music as our gift, with much gratitude to each of you for all you do to create and nurture this Festival community.
Join us for a special occasion featuring former Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris and now published author. “Always the Music” is the fascinating story of Tom Morris’ personal metamorphosis through the highest levels of the world of classical music, his learning and insights into how storied musical institutions function, great artists create, and audiences engage. The final chapter synthesizes Morris’ career lessons into an unequivocal but thoughtful prescription for the American orchestra. Mostly, though, this is the entertaining story of one man’s lifelong love affair with great music and the people who make it.
THU December 5.2025 | 5:30-7PM | Ojai Music Festival Lounge (201 S. Signal Street)
5:30PM: Enjoy a complimentary wine bar
6:00PM: Book reading and interview with Tom Morris and host Jeremy Turner, followed by a book signing.
We look forward to sharing this special evening with you!
This event is free to Ojai Music Festival friends. Limited seating. RSVP by clicking the link below.
Thomas W. Morris had a distinguished career in the music business, having long service as chief executive of the Boston Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, as well as artistic director of California’s Ojai Music Festival. His work in Ojai was highly recognized for the span and creativity of programming, as well as the breadth of artists with whom he collaborated.. He was one of the three founding partners of Spring for Music, an innovative orchestra festival held at Carnegie Hall from 2011 to 2014, and he has consulted nationally and internationally with over 75 orchestras and performing organizations. With a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Princeton University, as well as an MBA from the Wharton School, Morris is well versed in music, finance, marketing, fundraising, management and leadership. He is frequently sought out by major media as an expert to comment on music business issues of the day and has been featured in The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The New Yorker, and more. A percussionist, he has performed extensively in Boston Symphony, Boston Pops and the Blossom Festival Band. Thomas W. Morris | About
About Jeremy Turner
Composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Turner is known for creating innovative and diverse music for the moving image and the stage. He is a two time EMMY® nominee, has won the Music + Sound Award, an ASCAP Screen Music Award, an International Documentary Association Award, the AICP Award, and has been listed in NPR Music’s Favorite Songs of the Year. Jeremy regularly writes film and television scores for Disney+, HBO, Netflix, MAX, and Hulu; simultaneously creating concert music and composing for collaborative installations. Recent works include the score for the upcoming MRC film Let’s Have Kids!, directed by Adam Sztykiel; Shorebirds, a piece for solo violin premiered by Simone Porter at Lotusland in Montecito, California; and The Coast of Industry (2024), an art installation that recently opened at MASS MoCA.Performing throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, Jeremy has participated in the music festivals of Aspen, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Seattle, La Jolla, Moab, Sarasota, Interlochen, and Music at Plush. He has conducted twice at the LACMA Art + Film gala, has performed collaborations for Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana, and conducted in New York’s Central Park for Ralph Lauren’s 50th Anniversary.
As a composer, his music has been heard around the world, from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. Noted works include The Inland Seas, composed for violinist James Ehnes and mandolinist Chris Thile and commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society; Suite of Unreason, a commission from the Music Academy of the West for their 70th Anniversary season; and a choral work for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Wave Hill in New York. He has written music for The Jack Quartet, yMusic Ensemble, Brooklyn Rider, and Flux Quartet, as well as five installation pieces with the artist Chris Doyle. Jeremy Turner Studio
The 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape, as caretakers and participants, and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers, as well as multimedia artists whose works defy categorization.
The 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists flutist Claire Chase. Reflecting on Ojai’s natural and sonic environment, 2025 Festival programming offers responses to landscape, as caretakers and participants, and welcomes a multi-generational collective of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers, as well as multimedia artists whose works defy categorization.
West Coast Premieres of Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique, Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, and Terry Riley’s Pulsefield
The Festival celebrates multiple generations of composers, including residencies by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Liza Lim, and Marcos Balter; composer-performers include Craig Taborn (piano), Leilehua Lanzilotti (viola), and Susie Ibarra (percussion)
An all-star “meta-ensemble” of Festival musicians including Seth Parker Woods, cello; Wu Wei, sheng; Steven Schick, conductor and percussion; the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell); Katinka Kleijn, cello; Cory Smythe and Alex Peh, piano and keyboards; Ross Karre, percussion; Joshua Rubin, clarinet; M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone and electronic hurdy-gurdy; and members of Australia’s ELISION Ensemble
THU November 7.2024 | 5-7PM | Museum of Ventura County (100 East Main St, Ventura)
It was a mesmerizing evening with flutist Emi Ferguson, a favorite of Ojai Music Festival audiences, on November 7 at the Museum of Ventura County.
After enjoying the company of others and exploring the museum’s latest exhibits, Emi led attendees through a beautiful journey of the flute through time and place. Special thanks to Emi for creating a playlist of the program and other fun resources to come back to time and time again when we need the beauty of music to give us comfort and joy.
Become a docent and guide tours at the Holiday Home Tour, or sign up to help at the Holiday Marketplace on November 16 & 17, 2024.
Serving as a Docent at one of our four homes is a FUN way to volunteer! As a docent, you have an opportunity to view a beautiful home, meet new people, and get to know members of the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee.
Volunteering at the marketplace involves helping with load-in and load-out, and assisting staff and vendors with any other needs. Note that some marketplace shifts may require heavy lifting.
Each shift is a 3.5-hour commitment, and you can sign up for more than one. We encourage you to sign up with a spouse or a friend!
Sign Up Today!
In an effort to use less paper, you can sign up online via the button below.
Top: Jolly Boy Threads, The Whole 9, Sunrise Via Lola Bottom: Pixie Candle Studio, Rosehip Ramble, Surf Gems
Meet the vendors! All of the following small businesses, artists, and artisans will be participating in this year’s Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace. The Marketplace is free and open to the public at Libbey Park, November 16 & 17, 2024, from 10am – 4:30 pm. Join us for gift shopping and holiday fun!
NEW! Convenient, no-hassle check-out directly at vendor booths!
Zero-waste & sustainable global goods vendor: up-cycled & plastic free alternatives to everyday items using natural materials including bowls, utensils, hammoks, and more
Sound healing tools such as singing bowls, therapy drums, and crystal bowls, as well as bracelets, smudge sticks, incense, dream catchers, and eco-friendly ethnic accessories.
Original, one-of-a-kind Kinetic Sculptures (also called, “mobiles”) hand crafted from Semi-Precious Gemstones and Crystals. There is a singular comment when people see these in person: “I have never seen anything like this before”!
Organic soaps, soy candles, wax melts, botanical bath salts and room mists with unique designs and quality scents inspired by nature and many beautiful aspects of Ojai
Locally sourced personal care and home goods capturing the quality of heritage heirloom botanicals (including Ventura County citrus and lavender) farmed in California and fresh local beeswax
Artist in Residence, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, making Chumash music with students
In 2023, the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO Education and Community Program was honored to accept a grant from The Ojai Women’s Fund for our Artist in Residence Program during our 2023 school year. The Ojai Women’s Fund is a volunteer collective Giving Circle dedicated to making substantial grants on an annual basis. The recipient organizations target critical needs in the Ojai Valley (focus areas include the arts, education, the environment, health services, and social services).
The following article was shared in the Ojai Women’s Fund August 2024 Newsletter.
Ojai Festivals, LTD. Artists in Residence Program, $15,000
The Ojai Music Festival Artists-in-Residence program has brought the joy of live music into the classrooms of Ojai’s children. Our grant enabled about 450 OUSD students from Topa Topa and Mira Monte Elementary Schools in Ojai and Sunset Elementary School in Oak View to have a personal experience with musicians right in their own classrooms.
The artists, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie with Chumash music, Rosanne Forgette with drums, and Ruben Salinas on saxophone, shared their music and instruments to build a relationship with music that deepens the love of music. At each interactive Artists-in-Residence presentation, the musicians talk with the students about the instruments they play, the history and cultural background of the music they perform, and their paths to becoming professional artists. Other artists who participate in the program include Kathleen Robertson (violin), Dave Cipriani (Indian slide guitar), and Shelley Burgon (harp).
“They get exposure whether they want to play an instrument or be an audience member,” said Laura Walter, education coordinator for the Ojai Music Festival, so it becomes an “intentional part of their experience of beauty.” It also opens the door to a pathway for music in their future.
“Thank you for coming to Mira Monte School. I really enjoyed the song you played from Star Wars. Next year, I’m going to try playing the flute. I want to play an instrument for my career too,” wrote student Selena after Salinas’ performance.
“Thank you for letting us play your instruments, telling your stories, and showing us dance,” said Jasper after Tumamait-Stenslie shared her Chumash music and culture.
“Thank you for letting us play all those cool instruments! I liked it when we got to go inside the circle, and we made all the instruments really loud or quiet or medium,” said Eve when the entire class played percussion instruments.
“This is why I love working with children,” said Walter, “being together and caring about each other is what is important.”
Members of AMOC* Bobbi Jene Smith, Julia Bullock, and Or Schraiber.
Julia Bullock,soprano Conor Hanick,piano Bobbi Jene Smith,dancer/choreographer Or Schraiber,dancer/choreographer
The 2022 Ojai Music Festival Music Director, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), returns to Southern California to present Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting song cycle for voice and piano in a newly physicalized and dramatized version. Over the course of a dozen interconnected love songs – the first installment in a series of song cycles known as the composer’s Tristan trilogy – dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber bring Messiaen’s romantic surrealism to life through their original choreography. All four artists – Smith and Schraiber, plus pianist Conor Hanick and soprano Julia Bullock – are contributing members of AMOC*, an adventurous, enterprising collective of artists that has been called “blindingly impressive” and “preternaturally talented” by The New York Times. By incorporating dance, this unique production of Harawi opens up Messiaen’s song cycle, adding a new dimension and greater intensity to its portrayal of love and loss.
Harawi was meant to be premiered at the 2022 Ojai Festival by the artists of AMOC* but was waylaid when soprano Julia Bullock became ill with COVID-19 and was unable to travel to California. Now, this moving song cycle will come to life in performances in Los Angeles on October 1, presented in association with the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills and in Santa Barbara on October 4, produced with our friends at UCSB Arts and Lectures. For UCSB tickets: use promo code OJAI24 and get a 20% discount. Deadline is October 3.
