From Ara: Music Now and What’s Ahead


I am writing this in the blissful quiet following Thanksgiving, a pause from the usually hectic days and a chance to reflect with gratitude. We are in a particularly troubled moment across the world, with much sorrow, animosity, and division seemingly everywhere. And yet, the enduring pleasures of life also assert themselves – the company of loved ones, a walk in the brisk autumn air, the smile of a child playing, and always, the boundless rewards of music.
I have been heartened by multiple musical joys these past few weeks. We’ve had the pleasure of presenting a California Festival concert at the Ojai Valley School’s Greenberg Center, our first “off-season” concert of new music in Ojai, one received with great enthusiasm and cheer. We delighted in the company of four exuberant and always inventive younger composers – Reena Esmail, M.A. Tiesenga, Dylan Mattingly, and Samuel Adams.
I then flew almost immediately to London, to spend a few days in the company of Mitsuko Uchida, our 2024 Festival Music Director. We had several rewarding visits together, putting the finishing touches together for next year. Mitsuko first came to Ojai as a guest artist at the 50th anniversary Festival in 1996. Those of us with long Festival memories will recall that as one of the hottest (literally!) festivals ever, with Mitsuko playing a hypnotically beautiful Schubert B-Flat Sonata and then capping the week with the Ravel Piano Concerto in G, with Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mitsuko’s response to the overwhelming heat was to play the Schubert with even more beauty and greater concentration, creating an intense quiet of listening that defied the weather. It was one of those unforgettable experiences, where one sensed a collective joining together of audience and artist, living fully in every moment of the piece, where nothing else mattered.
Mitsuko has always retained a special fondness for Ojai, and we are so fortunate to have her back. She is one of the most remarkable musicians of our time, someone who is constantly exploring and finding ever-deeper insights into everything she plays. Her lifelong passion for the Mozart piano concertos will be at the center of this year’s Festival, music that is constantly revealing new dimensions and humanity in her hands. She is joined by the musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, her closest collaborators in recent years – a well-honed partnership of exuberance and discovery that continues to grow.
Although Mitsuko is perhaps best known for her championing of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, she has had a close association with a number of today’s most vibrant composers in her role as an Artistic Director of the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. Each summer, she has personally invited a great musical thinker to be in residence at the celebrated chamber music festival, creating a fascinating intersection between tradition and innovation. We will happily benefit from these associations at Ojai next year with music by a number of these composers – Sofia Gubaidulina, Kaija Saariaho, Jörg Widmann, György Kurtág, and Helmut Lachenmann among them.

The programming that is emerging from our conversations is completely true to Mitsuko Uchida – the eternal freshness of the Mozart piano concertos, new and recent music by the composers she values most, and a focus on the composers of the Second Viennese School. Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg, a composer who is perpetually misunderstood. We will take a fresh listen to some of his most beautiful (yes, I did say beautiful!) works in the hands of musicians who believe deeply in the expressive power of this music.
As we make the first preliminary announcement of the 2024 Festival, I hope you will take pleasure in the characteristic Ojai mix of the expected and unexpected, the new and the old, and always, the sense of discovery. In the coming months, we will have a chance to meet the artists, beginning with Mitsuko Uchida herself and do a deeper exploration of the music to be programmed.
In closing, I want to linger again briefly in the spirit of the Thanksgiving just past by expressing my personal gratitude to each of you for your continued support of the Ojai Festival. We are fortunate to be in this music adventure together with you.
Ara Guzelimian
Artistic and Executive Director
2024 Festival Schedule


Join us for a curated journey, where music is the adventure, with the characteristic Ojai mix of new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, in the company of remarkable artists who bring vitality, freshness, and a sense of discovery to all that they do. View the preliminary schedule and look for more details to come.
THU 06|06
2:30PM OJAI TALKS
Greenberg Center (Ojai Valley School)
Two-part session with Music Director Mitsuko Uchida and featured artists, hosted by Ara Guzelimian and John Schaefer of WQXR New Sounds.
8:00PM OPENING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano | Mitsuko Uchida, piano | Jay Campbell, cello | Brentano Quartet
A chamber music summit focusing on some of the defining works of the Second Viennese School with an all-star cast of Mitsuko Uchida, cellist Jay Campbell, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and the Brentano Quartet. The evening culminates in Schoenberg’s emotionally charged Second String Quartet from 1908, one of the most transformative moments in music.
FRI 06|07
8:00AM OJAI DAWNS
location TBD
Program to be announced.
Ojai Dawns is a Festival Donor Circle Event. Learn more here>
10:00AM MORNING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Start your morning in Libbey Bowl with the intimacy of a chamber music concert with Festival artists.
3:30PM BEYOND THE BOWL: SHIFTING GROUND
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
Alexi Kenney, violin
Violinist Alexi Kenney curates a highly unusual and deeply personal program of music old and new, with works ranging from rarely-heard Baroque fantasies to recent work by Salina Fisher, Angélica Negrón, Paul Wiancko, and culminating in Bach’s towering Chaconne.
This performance is an add-on, separate from a Libbey Bowl pass. Click here >
8:00PM EVENING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Mitsuko Uchida, piano | Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Mitsuko Uchida basks in her close partnership with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, beginning a three-day exploration of Mozart Piano Concertos with the Piano Concerto in E-flat. K 482.
SAT 06|08
8:00AM MORNING MEDITATION
location TBD
Program to be announced. Free.
10:00AM MORNING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Program to be announced.
3:30PM BEYOND THE BOWL: SHIFTING GROUND (repeat performance)
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
Alexi Kenney, violin
Violinist Alexi Kenney curates a highly unusual and deeply personal program of music old and new, with works ranging from rarely-heard Baroque fantasies to recent work by Salina Fisher, Angélica Negrón, Paul Wiancko, and culminating in Bach’s towering Chaconne.
This performance is an add-on, separate from a Libbey Bowl pass. Click here >
8:00PM EVENING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Mitsuko Uchida, piano | Mahler Chamber Orchestra
In the evening, be enraptured by the music by Debussy, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the affecting beauty of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B flat, K. 595 with Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
SUN 06|09
8:00AM MORNING MEDITATION
location TBD
Program to be announced. Free.
10:00AM MORNING CONCERT
Libbey Bowl
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano | Jay Campbell, cello | Brentano Quartet
An always enchanting Sunday morning chamber music program ranging from Haydn to Sofia Gubaidulina’s extraordinary In Croce for cello and accordion.
2:30PM BEYOND THE BOWL: KAFKA FRAGMENTS
Greenberg Activity Center
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano | Alexi Kenney, violin
In the afternoon, the extraordinary invention of György Kurtag’s setting of Kafka’s diary is illuminated by Lucy Fitz Gibbon and Alexi Kenney.
This is a Donor Circle event. Learn more here >
5:30PM FINALE
Libbey Bowl
Mitsuko Uchida, piano | Mahler Chamber Orchestra
The festive finale features music of Haydn, Jörg Widmann inspired by Haydn, and to bring the Festival to a resounding close, the exuberance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G, K. 453, once again with the inspired partnership of Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Programs and artists are subject to change.
What the Festival Means to Me


The Ojai Music Festival is long known for being a place for experimentation, exploration, and interaction. We are in awe of our patrons, returning and new, who share the experience with the artists and community, and equally important, their feedback and insights every year. We thank you for making the time to share your personal “What the Festival Means to You.”
It means the joy of discovery and communication through music. It means openness to experience, willingness to engage deeply with something and give it a chance to touch your soul and change you forever…
This is a world-class musical event in a small-town atmosphere, which is a unique and delightful pairing.
The experience of live music in an outdoor setting that is more intimate than a concert hall.
“An inspirational weekend with incredible performers, devoted audience, and unpredictable concerts. We always find something weird and something wonderful throughout the events.”

Do you have questions? We’ve got answers!
Creative Lab concert launches during the California Festival


The Ojai Music Festival was delighted to participate in the California Festival, a statewide initiative organized by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony. This showcase of 100-plus California organizations, which runs from November 3 to 19, closely aligned with the Ojai Festival mission and history in celebrating new and adventurous music.
Our performance was a “maiden voyage” of presenting a non-summer concert on November 11 at the Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. With a supportive and enthusiastic audience, the program presented smaller-scale recent works by Samuel Carl Adams, Reena Esmail, Dylan Mattingly, and M.A. Tiesenga, performed by pianist Conor Hanick, clarinetist Sérgio Coelho, vibraphone player Sidney Hopson, violinist Gallia Kastner, vocalist Saili Oak, multi-instrumentalist M.A. Tiesenga, and Zelter String Quartet. These same forward-looking composers were then featured at the Green Umbrella concert, at the Walt Disney Hall, on November 14.
Take a look at some of our favorite moments from our Creative Lab concert on November 11 in Ojai. Special thanks to the Ojai Valley School.














photos by © Timothy Teague
LA Phil’s Green Umbrella: Chaparral and Interstates

photos by © Nick Rutter





That’s a Wrap!


On behalf of the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee, thank you so much for another wonderful year of this fabulous tradition! Keep your eye on your inbox for a survey from us. We’d love to hear from you. Thank you for shopping at the Holiday Marketplace! We hope this is not the last you see of the incredible vendors. Please visit the link below to connect with them on their websites and social media!
Mark your calendar for next year: November 9 and 10, 2024







The Ojai Holiday Home Tour and Marketplace is a benefit for the Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education & Community Programs. By supporting this treasured tradition, you ensure that the Festival continues providing free music education in Ojai public elementary schools and presenting the internationally renowned 78th Festival, June 6-9, 2024. Your support for BRAVO is deeply appreciated.
Creative Lab: Program Notes

Saturday, November 11, 2023 | 7:30pm
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School
Reena ESMAIL Ragamala (2015)
Saili Oak, vocals | Zelter Quartet: Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violins, Carson Rick, viola, Allan Hon, cello
I. Fantasie – Bihag Overlay
II. Scherzo – Malkauns
III. Recitativo – Basant
IV. Rondo – Jog
Samuel Carl ADAMS Études (2023)
Conor Hanick, piano
I. Clear, resonant
II. Rippling
III. Steady, quiet
IV. Pulsing
V. Rippling
VI. Steady, with a full sound
VII. Clear, resonant
Performed without pause
Dylan MATTINGLY After the Rain (2017)
Sérgio Coelho, clarinet | Gallia Kastner, violin | Sidney Hopson, vibraphone
M.A. TIESENGA Ganymēdēs (Arr. 2023)
M.A. Tiesenga, multi-instrumentalist | Zelter Quartet
There will no intermission during the performance. Running time of concert is apx. 80 minutes.
This concert is produced in conjunction with a Green Umbrella program by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, featuring different, larger-scale works by the same four composers on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Visit CAFestival.Org for more information about the California Festival
Program Notes
Today’s program gives us four pieces of distinct instrumentations and characters. While unique in their own musical content, each composition invites us to listen to how a single idea or micro-structure can develop into the larger architecture of an entire piece. This may be through the magic of the repeated introduction in Reena Esmail’s Ragamala, or through the intricate, mirror-like form of Samuel Adams’ Etudes. Or perhaps more abstractly, you might experience the dilation of a single fleeting moment in Dylan Mattingly’s After the Rain, or hear how the electroacoustic hurdy gurdy in M.A. Tiesenga’s Ganymēdēs can be the centerpiece of disparate dichotomies.
Ragamala—Reena Esmail
In a synthesis of Hindustani and Western classical music traditions, Reena Esmail’s Ragamala, for string quartet and Hindustani vocal improvisation, takes us through four seamless movements of both contemplation and vivaciousness. While each movement uses a different traditional raag as its basis, they all begin with the same musical introduction—an idea inspired by the beautiful audience-artist connection that Esmail experienced during raag performances in India: “When the artist would announce the raag to be sung or played that evening…the audience would begin humming the characteristic phrases or ‘pakads’ of that raag quietly to themselves…It had a magical feeling – as if that raag was present in the air, and tiny wisps of it were already starting to precipitate into the audible world…”
This magical feeling of musical wisps in the air permeates Ragamala beyond the introductory material and is carried throughout all four of the varied movements. The piece opens with “Fantasie – Bihag Overlay,” in which the melodies of each player dance and intertwine with each other in a push-and-pull between reflection and restlessness. The second movement, “Scherzo – Malkauns” slowly unfolds into a lively, upbeat setting of the Malkauns raag. “Recitativo – Basant,” uses a raag traditionally associated with springtime, embodied here by the solo cello which leads the rest of the quartet in a soulful call and response. “Rondo – Jog,” is a varied and rhythmically complex final movement that lifts the music joyously before returning to its final, contemplative ending.
Études—Samuel Carl Adams
Études was written for a premiere at Music Academy of the West by six pianists who alternated playing each separate movement. With this in mind, Samuel Carl Adams found that “The challenge in writing the piece was to create a set of short pieces that could both work as strung together in a seamless performance with multiple pianists as well as with one pianist doing the whole thing.” This challenge led Adams to compose a long-form take on the traditionally short forms of études, or musical studies.
In Études, each movement serves as its own étude, but rather than compiling seven unrelated technical studies, Adams writes each movement in sets of corresponding pairs: 1 with 7, 2 with 5, and 3 with 6. Études 1 and 7 focus on the nuances of resonance and pedaling, while 2 and 5 “challenge the pianist to create a sustained, rippling, and polyrhythmic surface above a river of constantly shifting harmonies.” Études 3 and 6 explore the interaction of contrapuntal lines that expand and contract over an unpredictable bassline. This leaves the lone middle movement, étude 4, which “stands alone as the only movement without a twin, showcasing the extreme dynamic range of the piano. It consists of a series of brightly hued bell-like gestures that hover over an almost imperceptibly quiet pulse, serving as the keystone of the seven-movement arc.”
Because the movements are performed seamlessly without pause, the overarching form of the piece becomes that of large mirror image, with étude 4 at its center. This creates, in essence, one large étude in itself that “goes beyond the material and individual technical challenges and becomes, in addition, about a kind of study in long-form structure.”
Études (vol. 1) was commissioned by Music Academy of the West. The first performance was given by the Piano Fellows of the Music Academy on July 17, 2023 at Hahn Hall, Santa Barbara, CA.
After the Rain—Dylan Mattingly
After the Rain is part of a series of works Dylan Mattingly composed that seeks to capture the essence of those most beautiful yet fleeting moments in life. “Each work in this series is devoted to a single moment of joy, a chance to focus for an instant on the transient communal ecstasies of being alive on this planet — walking along the ocean in excited conversation, finding ourselves in the endless dark between the stars or by the midnight Pacific in the saltspray, or hearing the rise and fall of breathtides from someone still asleep in the next room, or the smell of grass after the rain.”
We can unmistakably imagine just what moment Mattingly is capturing in After the Rain, as droplets of detuned pitches and rhythmic patterns shift kaleidoscopically in the piece’s opening. In this first section, rather than following a single melody or instrument, we are instead absorbed into the luminosity of the contrasting tunings and rhythmic interplay. After building in intensity, the piece takes on a more relaxed flow, with the clarinet shining above the hushed beads of the violin and vibraphone. This easier pace is short lived, however. The music gradually builds through a clever transition that lands us back to the original buoyancy of the opening, propelling the piece toward its exuberant end.
Ganymēdēs—M.A. Tiesenga
M.A. Tiesenga’s Ganymēdēs is part of a larger project, Wheel / Orb / Body, that uses the electroacoustic hurdy gurdy to explore the space between science and divination. For Tiesenga, this unique instrument is the perfect medium for bridging the past and the present, the celestial and the tangible, and the consonant and the dissonant. They note that “Despite its complexity, its basic mechanics have remained the same for almost a thousand years. Used for generating sound in the era of music of the spheres, the vielle becomes a vehicle for divination. The sound of the instrument that we hear today is not too different from the sounds that would have been heard resonating in monasteries centuries ago.”
With the electroacoustic hurdy gurdy as the centerpiece, Ganymēdēs, is “a microtonal homage to the ascension / abduction of Ganymede by the Aetos Dios, the eagle of Zeus.” In this Greek myth, Zeus deems Ganymede the most beautiful of all mortals and abducts him to be his personal servant. The tension of the music we’ll hear in Ganymēdēs reflects the contradictions Tiesenga sees in societal interpretations of this myth: “The plot of this myth in particular is particularly interesting to me because the distillation of the horrific violence that’s described – an atrocity, by modern standards – is so starkly contrasted with the deep romanticization of the story.”
Beyond the contrasting elements of the music, the compositional components of the piece add an additional symbolic layer. According to some versions of the myth, Zeus also puts Ganymede in the sky as the constellation Aquarius. In recognition of this, the form, gestural shape, and pitch content of Ganymēdēs are derived from the shape and spatial relationships of the Aquarius constellation.
Bios
- Samuel Carl Adams
- Reena Esmail
- Sérgio Coelho
- Conor Hanick
- Sidney Hopson
- Dylan Mattingly
- Saili Oak
- M.A. Tiesenga
- Zelter Quartet
Samuel Carl Adams

Samuel Carl Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer whose music weaves acoustic and digital sound into “mesmerizing” (New York Times) orchestrations. Sought after by orchestras and contemporary ensembles alike, he has received commissions from a broad range of organizations including San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Spektral Quartet, and has collaborated with performers and conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, MTT, violinists Anthony Marwood, Jennifer Koh, Karen Gomyo, and pianists Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, David Fung, and Joyce Yang.
The 2022-23 season highlights several world premieres including Echo Transcriptions, a new work for electric violin and orchestra commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra for Richard Tognetti. The work will be taken on a national tour of Australia in late 2022 and will receive North American performances in California and Toronto the following Spring. In February, pianist Conor Hanick and the San Francisco Symphony premiere a new work under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the following week, the Cincinnati Symphony premieres Adams’s Variations, a 2020 orchestral work co-commissioned by the CSO and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Other season highlights include a performance of Adams’s 2017 Chamber Concerto with violinist Karen Gomyo and the release of a new record featuring the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet.
Adams was Mead Composer In Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and in the 2021-22 season was the Composer in Residence with Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, IT), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California, USA), Ucross (Wyoming, USA), and Visby International Centre for Composers (Gotland, SE). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and lives and works in Seattle, WA.
Reena Esmail

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces.
Esmail’s life and music was profiled on Season 3 of PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.
Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.
Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.
She currently resides in her hometown of Los Angeles, California.
Visit Reena Ismail’s Website
Sérgio Coelho

Sérgio Coelho was born in Portugal where he started learning clarinet and piano at the age of 9. Later he became a freelance musician and instructor in his native country where he performed regularly with the Orchestra Artave, Orchestra APROARTE and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra. He taught at the Academia da Sociedade Filarmónica Vizelense and Escola das Artes do Alentejo Litoral where he maintained his clarinet studio and conducted youth orchestras.
Presently Coelho is a freelance musician in the Los Angeles area and he is the principal clarinet of the American Youth Symphony Orchestra. He performs regularly with orchestras from Los Angeles area such as Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Downey Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Sinfonietta and the Dream Orchestra. He was selected to be a substitute for the New World Symphony Orchestra and Runner-up for the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. Lead by passion by motion pictures, he recorded for some movies and television shows such as the Netflix show “Chefs Table”. Coelho demonstrates a great passion for new music.
As a member and founder of the woodwind trio “Sirius Trivium”, he won competitions and performed in festivals like the Harmus Festival in Oporto (2013) and the Festival Internacional de Música de Piantón during the summers of 2013 and 2014, where he performed and taught masterclasses.
Coelho made collaborated with the National Repertory Orchestra Festival and the Eastern Sierra Symphony Festival. In 2018 Coelho was invited to collaborate with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (New Zealand) during one month. As a soloist he had the opportunity to perform a solo with the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra and the USC Symphony Orchestra. About Coelho’s performance, Chad Lonski from the “Daily Trojan Newspaper” (Los Angeles, CA) described his interpretation of the Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto stating that, “Coelho’s performance was superb, to say the least, showcasing the heights of clarinet proficiency and taking the clarinet to its limits.” As a winner of the American Youth Symphony Concerto Competition, recently Coelho had the opportunity to perform the Corigliano clarinet concerto with this orchestra.
Coelho won prizes in national and international competitions such as: 1st Prize Winner, American Youth Symphony Concerto Competition (2018, USA), Semifinalist of the Jacques Lancelot International Clarinet Competition (2018, Japan), 1st Prize Winner, University of Southern California Concerto Competition (2015, USA), 2nd Prize Winner, Pasadena Showcase House Instrumental Competition (2014, USA), First Prize Winner, Inatel Prize (soloist prize from the Academia Superior de Orquestra da Metropolitana) (2013, Portugal), 3rd Prize Winner of the 8th Saverio Mercadante International Clarinet Competition (2012, Italy).
Coelho graduated with a Master of Music degree in Clarinet Performance at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, studying with Mr. Yehuda Gilad. During his Masters of Music degree he became a fellow of the Latin Grammy Awards Foundation after being selected for a scholarship from this institution. Coelho received his Bachelor of Music degree in Clarinet and Orchestra Performance in the Metropolitan National Academy of Orchestra, Portugal, where he studied with Mr. Nuno Silva.
Currently, he is pursuing an Artist Diploma Degree at the University of Southern California under the tutelage of Mr. Yehuda Gilad.
Conor Hanick

Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.” (New York Times) Hanick has recently performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, been presented by the Gilmore Festival, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie, De Singel, Caramoor, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Park Avenue Armory, and worked with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ludovic Morlot, Alan Gilbert, and David Robertson.
A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers ranging from Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Samuel Carl Adams, and Anthony Cheung. This season Hanick presents recitals in the US and Europe, including performances with Julia Bullock, Jay Campbell, Joshua Roman, Seth Parker Woods, AMOC (American Modern Opera Company), and the Takt Trio. Hanick also makes his San Francisco Performances debut at Herbst Theater, joins Sandbox Percussion at 92NY, returns to the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and, in Ojai as part of the California Festival, performs a new set of piano etudes by Samuel Carl Adams, whose piano concerto No Such Spring Hanick premiered last year to wide acclaim with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Visit Conor Hanick’s Website
Sidney Hopson

The epitome of the citizen-artist, Sidney Hopson slams out rhythms, articulates the power of the arts, and defines how culture orgs should act, like no one we’ve ever met. Genius of the dad joke, and aspiring curry-ist, Hopson’s mic is never unmuted at the wrong time on a digital meeting. He’s built a music program in Jordan to deter refugee-artists and their communities from joining regional terror organizations (who sought to exploit their economic vulnerability and despair). He’s designed and co-produced shows that challenged archaic notions of legitimacy and power, and actively worked to develop the platform of a political candidate whom he subsequently voted for. He’s failed over and over and (he reports) “often in rapid succession,” but he’s kept going. Hopson has made music with Peter Eötvös, Adele, Stevie Wonder, Ellen Reid, Garrett McQueen, Rhianna, and John Williams. He’s currently authoring a series of essays on the case for – and against – establishing a U.S. Secretary of Culture, Media, & Sport, developing domestic and foreign arts policy platform proposals for the Biden-Harris Administration, and perfecting his panang curry recipe.
Bio from the Wild Up Website
Dylan Mattingly

Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates music which offers ecstatic, transformative experience and provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. Many of Mattingly’s projects exist on a massive scale, the results of a dedication to the pursuit of bringing to life the most meaningful projects in the wild reaches of imagination — wherever that path leads — and building a path for the realization of these dreamworks from the ground up, often across many years. This practice has been informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, which offers a grand celebration of being alive. Stranger Love will see its premiere on May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. At the heart of all of Mattingly’s work is a commitment to joy, and to what Hannah Arendt refers to as amor mundi — an ever-renewing quest to find the capacity to love the world, in the complex totality of its experience.
Mattingly’s music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma). Additionally, Mattingly is the Executive and Co-artistic Director of the NYC-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. With Contemporaneous, much of his work has focused on creating an opportunity for other composers and musical creators to follow their own wildest dreams, dedicating the resources of the organization to the creation of large-scale new work and allowing artists a path to create the work they most want to create, regardless of scale and conventional practical constraints.
Mattingly’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Mattingly has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology, and holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Berkeley, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.
Saili Oak

A native of Mumbai, began studying music at the age of 3. A finalist on the popular reality TV series “Zee Marathi SaReGaMaPa,” Oak is a senior disciple of Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, a leading vocalist of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana. Oak won the All India Classical music competition when she was barely 17. She completed her Sangeet Visharad from the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal and has earned awards including the prestigious Pt.Jasraj Yuva Award, Pt Vasantrao Deshpande Yuva Award, and the Gaanwardhan Award. Her performances have been admired for her meticulous architecture of ‘khayal,’ her systematic and well-crafted raga exploration and impressive command over the ‘laya.’
Oak is also known for her distinguished work in the Indian/Western Classical music crossover space. She has performed with notable western music ensembles including the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Tonality choir, Salastina Music Society. She has been featured on several albums including ‘Beyond’, ‘American Mirror’, ‘Sing about it’ and ‘KALA’.
Oak serves as the Programs Director of a non-profit organization ‘Shastra’, where she co-hosts the “Composing with Indian Voice” annual workshop in the U.S., and “Raga Meets Symphony” in India. She is also a Vocal Mentor for the non-profit organization Street Symphony in Los Angeles.
A passionate educator, Oak maintains a vocal studio ‘SailiMusic’ where she trains the next generation of upcoming artists and is a frequent guest speaker, panelist and workshop participant at conferences and universities across America. She has presented her work at the Composition in Asia Conference at the University of South Florida, taught master classes at the Salem State University, Smith College in Northampton MA, Kaufmann Music Center NY, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Apart from her musical training, Oak also holds a Master’s Degree in Accountancy and has completed the Chartered Financial Analyst Program by the CFA Institute, USA.
Visit Saili Oak’s Website
M.A. Tiesenga

M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors and puzzles, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains.
As a composer, interdisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga seamlessly merges these creative identities, emphasizing the power of connection in their work. Tiesenga ventures beyond conventional score-making and interpretation, embracing the potential of expanded notation systems. Their lifelong passion for collage, maps, and asemic languages fuels an enchantment with encoding and decoding creative territories, allowing lexical approaches to transform into palpable musical expressions. Within their artistic vision, Tiesenga seeks to convey inner worlds where protocols and rules converge with intuition and mystique.
Tiesenga’s creative collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
Tiesenga holds an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and an MFA in Experimental Animation with a Concentration in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Dr. Chien-Kwan Lin.
Visit M.A. Tiesenga’s Website
Zelter Quartet

Praised by LA Opus for their “seemingly effortless precision and blend”, the Zelter String Quartet formed in Los Angeles in 2018. Recently, the quartet was awarded First Prize of the 2023 Plowman Chamber Music Competition, as well as being the Gold Prize Winners of the 2021 Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition. The quartet is comprised of violinists Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violist Carson Rick, and cellist Allan Hon. In 2019, the Zelter String Quartet was awarded a full scholarship to participate in the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar, where they worked with members of the St. Lawrence and Danish String Quartets. They were also invited to participate in the Rencontres Franco-Américaines de Musique de Chambre as part of the USC Thornton School of Music Ofiesh Chamber Music Competition in the Saint-Gildas-des-Bois area of France in 2020. Most recently, they participated in the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar, and the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies at the Aspen Music Festival, where they worked with the Pacifica, Escher, and American String Quartets.
Visit the Zelter Quartet’s Website
From Ara: Music at this Moment


It is often tempting to regard music and the arts as either a balm or an escape from the sorrows of the world around us. In reality, music is one of the truest utterances of simply being human and, as such, reflects the entire range of our experience. In a speech that the stage director (and 2016 Ojai Music Director) Peter Sellars gave many years ago, he observed that our individual response to the arts remains one of the few truly private experiences left to each of us.
And so, in response to the turmoil around us, I found myself listening to one of Mozart’s most personal and inward pieces, a work that seems to contain a deeply private world of sorrow.
Not coincidentally, it is also a reminder of the sublime artistry of pianist Mitsuko Uchida, who will grace the 2024 Ojai Festival as our Music Director.
Another of our 2024 Festival artists, clarinetist Anthony McGill, found solace during the isolation of the pandemic in a work by composer Jessie Montgomery that directly reflected her experience as an artist alone. The result is a meditative, quietly personal work that has the duality of being utterly private yet creates a communicative arc that reaches outward to each of us.
And here is the complete work:
We are so fortunate in the company we keep. In the coming weeks, we will be making the initial announcement of the program highlights for the 2024 Festival. Stay tuned…
The Ojai Festival’s long history of musical discovery and innovation has found its match in the upcoming California Festival – co-created by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Diego, and San Francisco Symphonies – to celebrate new music across the state during two weeks in November. A remarkable 100 organizations are taking part across the state, vivid testimony to vibrant the creativity to be found here. We are delighted to be participating with a special concert in Ojai on November 11, at the Ojai Valley School’s Greenberg Center – a site of numerous special events during the past two summer festivals. The program celebrates four of the freshest voices in a new generation of California composers: Reena Esmail, Dylan Mattingly, M.A. Tiesenga and Samuel Carl Adams, with works composed as recently as this year. Pianist Conor Hanick, fondly remembered from his performances as a member of AMOC* in the 2022 Ojai Festival, will be joined by a group of gifted young Southern California musicians, including composer M.A. Tiesenga playing the electronic hurdy-gurdy (when was the last time you encountered that?). The evening also includes a reception with the composers and performers. Click the button below for more details:

While our response to a work of art may be the ultimate private experience, there is much joy and comfort to be found in our community of people who gather together to experience the arts. I look forward to being in your company in the coming weeks and months.
With renewed gratitude and warm regards,

Ara Guzelimian
Artistic and Executive Director

Meet the 2023 Holiday Home Tour Designers

Annie Mosites, Free Range Interior Design
Designer, Gwynne Cottage

Annie Mosites, founder and principal designer of Free Range Interior Design, was brought up in Pittsburgh, PA in a family that instilled in her a love of art, architecture, and design. Her upbringing nurtured a fervor for designing visually stunning environments that seamlessly blend unique and high-quality elements into a room.

Later, a 10-year stay in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming provided her with a deep understanding of the interplay between nature and design. The rugged beauty of the natural surroundings, the use of organic materials, and the rustic charm of mountain towns all had a significant impact on Annie’s design philosophy.
After her time in the mountains, Annie relocated to Ventura where she founded Free Range Interior Design. Her unique perspective from living in the city, mountains and now the coast is reflected throughout her designs. With projects throughout the country, Free Range’s mission is to create beautiful, timeless, and cohesive designs unique to its clients and the environment in which they are building.
Annie believes that every space should reflect the client’s unique personality and location. She is delighted to have collaborated with the homeowner of Gwynne Cottage to add holiday floral designs to a home that reflects her love of a cozy, eclectic, and calming space, full of warm earthy color and a lifetime collection of unique treasures.
Lila Glasoe Francese, OHI HOME
Designer, Oak Creek Oasis

Lila Glasoe Francese is the co-owner of OHI HOME, LLC an Ojai-based home staging and styling company she founded alongside her husband Dines in 2009. Lila began her career in Los Angeles, as a personal assistant to studio heads and producers. She found inspiration from the notable designers working in their homes.
Lila and her husband Dines began buying, redesigning, and selling homes in 2001. This allowed them to leave Los Angeles in 2006 and purchase a home in Ojai, not far from where Dines was raised. When their daughter began Oak Grove School in 2008, their vision for OHI HOME was set into motion. Almost 15 years later, they continue to create one-of-a-kind interiors.

Lila believes when she acts as a designer, her job is to elevate her client’s vision for their home. Her pleasure is when staging clients become design clients and friends, as occurred with the homeowners of Oak Creek Oasis. After staging their former home for sale, they reconnected with her to assist in the redesign of the kitchen and bathrooms of their current home. Continuing their bond of friendship and design compatibility, they have enjoyed a rich and rewarding experience staging holiday decor for this year’s Home Tour.
Lila’s home staging and interior design work has been featured in the Architectural
Digest, Dwell, Ventana, and other publications. Her work can also be seen on Houzz.com and on her blog ohihomestyle.com. She is also an award-winning author, speaker and founder of Ojai’s non-profit art foundation, The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation and it’s initiative The Ojai Institute.
Kim Barnes
Designer, Maison Ojai

A home is a means of creative expression reflecting the changes that one goes through in life. Designer John Wheatman wrote, “a good house is never done.” Kim Barnes believes this applies to more than houses.
Kim’s life as a San Francisco-based, hard driving publishing and internet executive took a turn when a 1998 one-week vacation evolved into a single-woman idyll revolving around a “castle” near Aix En Provence with French friends. Two years later, resolving to create “Provence in her own backyard,” Kim returned to San Francisco and became immersed in selling luxury property. While there was never a time that Kim wasn’t styling and redoing homes for friends and family, her design talents took flight making her real estate clients’ homes memorable from opening the door to closing the sale.

Kim’s drive to beautify also led her to found and direct the successful “Friends of Lafayette Park” in Pacific Heights for which she was honored in 2009 by then Mayor Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi.
Change happens. In 2018, Kim and her new husband, Clay Creasey who yearned for the farm of his youth, went on a quest that brought them to Ojai where they created Maison Ojai – an homage to beautiful memories. Kim’s highest values of beauty and friendship find expression in her home with its natural setting and outdoor spaces created for welcoming others to enjoy it. John Wheatman would be pleased to know that more surprises are in store at Maison Ojai.
Lynn Malone
Floral Designs, Maison Ojai

The previous owner of Digs, one of Ojai’s favorite floral design studios, and for many years, one of the Holiday Home Tour’s stand-out designers, Lynn is happy to return this year to collaborate with homeowner, Kim Barnes, of Maison Ojai. Together they have designed an organic, yet sophisticated holiday palette inspired by the home’s natural surroundings and it’s stunning interior. So much inspiration abounds in this home and surrounding gardens, you won’t want to leave! When you do, we hope you’ll take some unique Holiday design inspiration home for yourself.
Elizabeth Cohn, Forage Ojai
Designer, Smiley’s House

Elizabeth Cohn is a professional real estate investor, interior designer, and floral designer with over 25 years of experience. She is passionate about creating beautiful and functional spaces that reflect her clients’ unique personalities and styles.
Liz loves to travel the world for inspiration, and her designs often incorporate elements from different cultures and traditions. When she isn’t off exploring the world, or with her family at one of their vacation rentals, she enjoys being at home in Ojai creating florals for weddings and events in her design studio, Forage Ojai.

As a floral designer, Liz has a deep understanding of the power of flowers and botanicals to transform a space and create a mood. Liz is particularly excited to design fall and Thanksgiving arrangements for this home in Ojai. She sees this as an opportunity to create florals that are both inspired by the natural beauty of the area and reflective of the home’s unique style.
2023 Holiday Marketplace

UPDATE: ALL TICKET SALES FOR THE HOME TOUR HAVE NOW CLOSED – 11.11.23

Saturday and Sunday, November 11 & 12, 2023
10am to 4:30pm
Libbey Park in downtown Ojai
Get a head start on your holiday shopping! Enjoy a collection of curated lifestyle and fashion items from local and regional vendors, perfect for gift-giving or your own indulgence. A portion of all proceeds from every vendor at the Marketplace go towards the Ojai Festival and its BRAVO Education and Community Programs. Libbey Park will also have a “Letters to Santa” mailbox, as well as the man himself for kids to meet!
While there is no designated parking for this event, Ojai has several free parking lots, as well as free street parking. The Lower Libbey Parking Lot has the shortest walk to the park!
Marketplace admission is FREE and open to the public.

2023 Annual Ornament
This year, we welcome the new tradition of an annual ornament handmade by a local artist. We are pleased to announce that this inaugural ornament was designed and crafted by Ritual Ceramics. These beautiful ceramic treasures will be available for purchase in Libbey Park at the Marketplace Cashier.
2023 Holiday Marketplace Vendors


Bottom row from left to right: JC Dog Accessories, Ambrosia Long Life Linen, Tierra
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 11 & 12, 2023, from 10am – 4:30 pm. Come join us for gift shopping and holiday fun!
A portion of the sales from vendors benefits the Ojai Festival and BRAVO music education program.
Housewares

Bohemian Bowls
Zero-waste & sustainable global goods vendor: up-cycled & plastic free alternatives to everyday items using natural materials including bowls, utensils, hammoks, and more
Jcooper Ceramics
Functional pottery
Based in Ojai!
Sola Ceramics
Small batch functional pottery
Sweetmello
Reusable fabric products: bowl cozies, wax food wraps, pouches and bags, reusable food bags, and more
T D Rocks
Colorful banded rhyolite rock planters, spheres, slabs, and more
Based in Ojai!
One-of-a-Kind Art and Gifts

Anacapa Ceramics
High fire ceramic goods fired in a gas kiln with a reduction atmosphere: vases, tumblers, mugs, and bowls
Beca Piascik Hand Papermaker
Handmade paper products: notebooks, cards, holiday ornaments, wall hanging pieces, handmade paper mirrors
Desré Resnick
Papier-mâché and knitted works
Gheck Eclectic Art
Paintings, collage, tote bags and Japanese tote bags, bird houses and gourds (collage and painted)
Gifts 2 Have
Journals, notepads candles, tote/handbags and hats
Laura Stitches
Embroidered goods
Based in Ojai!
Marie McKenzie Art
Coastal-minded and earth-friendly artwork, including limited edition prints of oceanic oil paintings
Once Upon a Storybox
Miniature dioramas in cigar/shadow boxes, hurricane lanterns and holiday seasonal ornaments and decor
Poppies Art & Gifts
Local art/gift shop full of artists that sell jewelry, prints, fiber art, ceramics, gourd art, garden art, and more
Based in Ojai!
Sal y Viento
Botanical home decor and wearable art with foraged and gleaned materials from nature
Based in Ojai!
Jewelry and Apparel

Be Bindaas
Hand block printed clothes & textiles in 100% sustainable cotton clothing
Cali Bracelet
Handmade bracelets, blankets, bags
Campiello V
Beaded jewelry created locally using semi-precious stones, murano glass beads and sterling silver
Dale Michele
Women’s clothing & matching accessories: sweaters, jackets, blouses & tops , ultra soft lounge sets, wraps, luxe faux fur trimmed capes
Le Meilleur Luxury
Bespoke fine gold and sterling silver jewelry, authentic designer handbags, and more
Little Muse Designs
Unique handwoven jewelry utilizing tiny Japanese glass beads, gemstones and fine metals
Surf Gems
Hand-crafted up-cycled jewelry made of resin waste from glassing surfboards – products include earrings, necklaces, bolo ties, key chains, and more
Tierra
Handmade grounding earth-clay jewelry
Based in Ojai!
Tiffany’s House
Handmade jewelry that includes earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and pendants
Eats and Treats

Sweet Lorraine’s Cookies
Decorated cookies and cookie decorating kits
Bath and Body

Waning Wax
Handmade candles
Based in Ojai!
If you are interested in becoming a vendor a the Holiday Marketplace, click one of the links below:
OFWC 2024 Walt Disney Hall Trip
A Century of Film
John Williams Spotlight
Sunday, February 4 2024
John Williams guides a journey through cinematic history and the soundtracks that scored Hollywood’s greatest moments
Since talkies first showed music’s power to transform moving images, composers have heightened on-screen action and illuminated unspoken drama with soundtracks as inventive and wide-ranging as the films they scored. Few have a greater appreciation for the history of film music—or a larger impact on its story—than John Williams and the maestro of the movies curates this exploration of cinematic composition featuring landmark Hollywood scores performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by David Newman.
OFWC Walt Disney Hall Trip includes:
- Bus Transportation
- Tiered tickets to the Concert featuring works by John Williams
- $300 – Terrace
- $350 – Orchestra West
- $425 – Front Orchestra
- Dinner at Marcello’s in Thousand Oaks
- Snacks on the returned bus ride
- Contribution to the OFWC
Final instructions will be sent by January 20, 2024. If you have any questions, please contact Barbara Hirsch at 805-570-0160.
Kickoff the Holiday Season!


UPDATE: AS OF 11.11.23 ALL SALES FOR HOLIDAY HOME TOUR HAVE CLOSED.
PRE-PURCHASED TICKETS ARE STILL AVAILABLE FOR PICKUP AT THE BOX OFFICE IN LIBBEY PARK
The Ojai Festival Women’s Committee invites you to celebrate the holidays at the Ojai Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace, on November 11 and 12.
The Ojai Holiday Home Tour and Marketplace is a benefit for the Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education & Community Programs. By supporting this treasured tradition, you ensure that the Festival continues providing free music education in Ojai public elementary schools and presenting the internationally renowned 78th Festival, June 6-9, 2024.
Marketplace
Hours: 10am to 4:30pm daily
The companion event to the home tour, the Ojai Holiday Marketplace, helps kick off the holidays in Ojai’s Libbey Park with 50-plus vendors and artisans to complete the gift-giving season, from fashion and accessories to home and lifestyle items. In addition to shopping get into the holiday spirit with activities for children and parents. The Marketplace is free and open to the public.
A portion of all proceeds from every vendor at the Marketplace go towards the Ojai Festival and its BRAVO Education and Community Programs.
Tour the Homes
Hours: 10am to 4pm daily
Enjoy the experience of walking through the homes, admiring styling, artwork, and holiday decor. We enthusiastically present homes to represent the exceptional and varied architecture and lifestyles of Ojai. From an elegant 1920s-era George Washington Smith home, a beautifully updated and sophisticated home on a beautiful property, to a quaint home with peaceful views and a charming downtown cottage, we know you will be excited with this year’s selections. Check out this year’s four homes!
Home photos courtesy of Logan Hall.
SMILEY’S HOUSE
Two world class architects contribute to the design of one amazing home, and the result is stunning. Edward Drummond Libbey originally commissioned George Washington Smith to design this Arbolada spec house in 1921. Kevin Clark bought it for his dream home nearly a century later, completely renovating and re-envisioning the original house, nearly doubling the footprint. The result is this breathtaking Spanish Colonial Revival masterpiece, with the traditional red tile roofs atop thick white walls, fireplaces, wrought iron embellishments, courtyards, patios, and balconies, all combining to transport the visitor to long-ago rural Spain. The current owners felt little need for further remodeling and have curated the perfect decor to complement the design, working with interior designer Annica Howard. This decision to embrace the former owner’s stylistic elements gave Howard the artistic freedom to take a more playful and creative approach, rather than feeling confined to strict guidelines. The result is a home that weaves a tapestry of history, individuality, and the enchanting character of the location into a cohesive and lively living space Come enjoy an encounter the elegance and beauty!
Holiday Decor by Elizabeth Cohn of Forage Ojai

GWYNNE COTTAGE
As you enter through the rustic gate from the street, into a flower and fruit-filled garden, up to the front door, you know you are in for an extraordinary visit to the past. Gwynne Cottage, built in 1920, exudes an aura of gentility, history, and a loving attention to detail. The owner’s storied life is on full display throughout this charming home. Outside in the backyard, one is guided to a newly restored guest house that is so complete in its comfort and charm, it would be difficult for any guest to want to leave. If ever one wanted to visit a gentler time, visiting this cottage is a way to start.
Holiday Floral Decor by Annie Mosites of Free Range Interior Design

MAISON OJAI
Maison Ojai is an homage to past idylls near Aix En Provence. A cottage exterior belies a contemporary home that harmonizes with abundant natural views over a private valley. Within, find a gallery of 60’s and 70’s period art collected from France. Roam the garden and “the Folly” near a whirling windmill and horse arena. Discover a guest cottage with pool and a shady park embraced by hedges. Wander the field ringed with mountain views. Whether waking to lacy early morning fog rising over San Antonio Creek, a luminous full moon peeking over Black Mountain or toasting Topa Topas’s Pink Moment, there is cause for celebration every day at Maison Ojai.
Holiday Interior Decor by Kim Barnes; Floral Decor by Lynn Malone

OAK CREEK OASIS
Truly nestled in the very heart of the Ojai “nest,” the mountains all around create a gorgeous display of nature’s beauty on all sides of this welcoming and warm downtown home. With its recently streamlined floor plan to reduce the owners’ carbon footprint, Oak Creek Oasis boasts a lovingly curated eclectic art collection with each space adorned with treasures discovered by the owners. The newly remodeled all-electric kitchen is a dream as well as the well-thought new master bathroom suite. Walk outside and enjoy the landscape of a terraced garden with colorful drought-tolerant bushes that delight the eye. It’s a little slice of paradise!
Holiday Decor by Lila Glasoe Francese of OHI HOME

2023 Festival Press Coverage


Thank you for joining us at our 77th Festival, June 8-11, 2023, featuring Music Director Rhiannon Giddens. Our audience, volunteers, and team’s enthusiasm, curiosity, and openness give life to the Festival every year. Take a look at excerpts from the press – from previews to reviews.
…an annual pilgrimage for the musically open-minded. The nearly 80-year-old event, held in the valley city of Ojai in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, has proved chameleonlike, adopting a new tone every year thanks to its tradition of selecting a new music director annually. What remains consistent, however, is the dedication to experimental, boundary-pushing art that challenges listeners’ ears and minds.
Alta Online
“We’re not trying to turn the festival upside down,” says Giddens. “We’re looking to bring many musical threads together under the same umbrella.” “The element of surprise is part of the Ojai Festival’s identity,” says Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian.
SF Classical Voice
“There is an element of uncertainty about a program like this,” she [Rhiannon Giddens] says, “which is the point. There will be years where everything has been written out, and every concert has all pieces programmed, and they’ve been practiced and everything. This is not that year. … I think everybody will have moments of, like, ‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen right now.’ But I think that’s powerful.'”
Los Angeles Times

Ms. Giddens is a boundary breaker, a quality this 77-year-old festival has variously celebrated since its inception.
Wall Street Journal
Rhiannon Giddens’s own multifaceted talents mostly held the floor. She is a remarkably versatile singer, soaking up diverse vocal styles like a highly-absorbent sponge and pouring them out in timbres unmistakably her own
Musical America
[Rhiannon] Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, her partner and musical collaborator — a Sicilian whose specialties are jazz piano and early music — intriguingly mixed genres, happily and sometimes successfully ignoring perceived musical borders.But that kind of thing is usual for Ojai, which prides itself on pushing the musical envelope.
Classical Voice North America
Creative Lab: November 11 Program & Bios


November 11, 7:30pm performance
Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School lower campus
The Ojai Music Festival presents a special concert celebrating the unique musical creativity of a new generation of California composers, produced as part of the statewide California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. Our program brings together a new work for solo piano by Samuel Carl Adams for the brilliant pianist Conor Hanick (fondly remembered for his performances as part of AMOC at the 2022 Ojai Festival) and a kinetic trio for violin, clarinet, and vibes by Dylan Mattingly (whose work featured prominently at the 2021 Ojai Festival). M.A. Tiesenga’s Ganymedes brings together the otherworldly sound of an electronic hurdy-gurdy playing with amplified string quartet. And Reena Esmail’s Ragamala adds the mesmerizing sound of Hindustani vocals to a string quartet, evoking the tradition of sounding the raga as a starting point for elaboration and reflection.
This is an all-ages event. Join us for a drink and mingling with the composers at 6:30pm. Concert begins at 7:30pm.
This concert is produced in conjunction with a Green Umbrella program by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, featuring different, larger-scale works by the same four composers on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Visit CAFestival.Org for more information about the California Festival
VIEW PROGRAM
Reena ESMAIL Ragamala
I. Fantasie – Bihag Overlay
II. Scherzo – Malkauns
III. Recitativo – Basant
IV. Rondo – Jog
Saili Oak vocals | Zelter Quartet
Samuel Carl ADAMS Études
I. Clear, resonant
II. Rippling
III. Steady, quiet
IV. Rippling
V. Steady, with a full sound
VI. Clear, resonant
Conor Hanick piano
Études (vol. 1) was commissioned by Music Academy of the West. The first performance was given by the Piano Fellows of the Music Academy on July 17, 2023 at Hahn Hall, Santa Barbara, CA.
Dylan MATTINGLY After the Rain
Sérgio Coelho clarinet | Gallia Kastner violin | Sidney Hopson vibraphone
M.A. TIESENGA Ganymēdēs
M.A. Tiesenga electronics | Zelter Quartet | hurdy gurdy
Artist & Composer Bios
- Samuel Carl Adams
- Reena Esmail
- Sérgio Coelho
- Conor Hanick
- Sidney Hopson
- Dylan Mattingly
- Saili Oak
- M.A. Tiesenga
- Zelter Quartet
Samuel Carl Adams

Samuel Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer whose music weaves acoustic and digital sound into “mesmerizing” (New York Times) orchestrations. Sought after by orchestras and contemporary ensembles alike, he has received commissions from a broad range of organizations including San Francisco Symphony, Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Spektral Quartet, and has collaborated with performers and conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, MTT, violinists Anthony Marwood, Jennifer Koh, Karen Gomyo, and pianists Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, David Fung, and Joyce Yang.
The 2022-23 season highlights several world premieres including Echo Transcriptions, a new work for electric violin and orchestra commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra for Richard Tognetti. The work will be taken on a national tour of Australia in late 2022 and will receive North American performances in California and Toronto the following Spring. In February, pianist Conor Hanick and the San Francisco Symphony premiere a new work under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the following week, the Cincinnati Symphony premieres Adams’s Variations, a 2020 orchestral work co-commissioned by the CSO and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Other season highlights include a performance of Adams’s 2017 Chamber Concerto with violinist Karen Gomyo and the release of a new record featuring the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet.
Adams was Mead Composer In Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and in the 2021-22 season was the Composer in Residence with Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, IT), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California, USA), Ucross (Wyoming, USA), and Visby International Centre for Composers (Gotland, SE). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and lives and works in Seattle, WA.
Reena Esmail

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces.
Esmail’s life and music was profiled on Season 3 of PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.
Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.
Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.
She currently resides in her hometown of Los Angeles, California.
Visit Reena Ismail’s Website
Sérgio Coelho

Sérgio Coelho was born in Portugal where he started learning clarinet and piano at the age of 9. Later he became a freelance musician and instructor in his native country where he performed regularly with the Orchestra Artave, Orchestra APROARTE and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra. He taught at the Academia da Sociedade Filarmónica Vizelense and Escola das Artes do Alentejo Litoral where he maintained his clarinet studio and conducted youth orchestras.
Presently Coelho is a freelance musician in the Los Angeles area and he is the principal clarinet of the American Youth Symphony Orchestra. He performs regularly with orchestras from Los Angeles area such as Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Downey Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Sinfonietta and the Dream Orchestra. He was selected to be a substitute for the New World Symphony Orchestra and Runner-up for the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. Lead by passion by motion pictures, he recorded for some movies and television shows such as the Netflix show “Chefs Table”. Coelho demonstrates a great passion for new music.
As a member and founder of the woodwind trio “Sirius Trivium”, he won competitions and performed in festivals like the Harmus Festival in Oporto (2013) and the Festival Internacional de Música de Piantón during the summers of 2013 and 2014, where he performed and taught masterclasses.
Coelho made collaborated with the National Repertory Orchestra Festival and the Eastern Sierra Symphony Festival. In 2018 Coelho was invited to collaborate with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (New Zealand) during one month. As a soloist he had the opportunity to perform a solo with the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra and the USC Symphony Orchestra. About Coelho’s performance, Chad Lonski from the “Daily Trojan Newspaper” (Los Angeles, CA) described his interpretation of the Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto stating that, “Coelho’s performance was superb, to say the least, showcasing the heights of clarinet proficiency and taking the clarinet to its limits.” As a winner of the American Youth Symphony Concerto Competition, recently Coelho had the opportunity to perform the Corigliano clarinet concerto with this orchestra.
Coelho won prizes in national and international competitions such as: 1st Prize Winner, American Youth Symphony Concerto Competition (2018, USA), Semifinalist of the Jacques Lancelot International Clarinet Competition (2018, Japan), 1st Prize Winner, University of Southern California Concerto Competition (2015, USA), 2nd Prize Winner, Pasadena Showcase House Instrumental Competition (2014, USA), First Prize Winner, Inatel Prize (soloist prize from the Academia Superior de Orquestra da Metropolitana) (2013, Portugal), 3rd Prize Winner of the 8th Saverio Mercadante International Clarinet Competition (2012, Italy).
Coelho graduated with a Master of Music degree in Clarinet Performance at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, studying with Mr. Yehuda Gilad. During his Masters of Music degree he became a fellow of the Latin Grammy Awards Foundation after being selected for a scholarship from this institution. Coelho received his Bachelor of Music degree in Clarinet and Orchestra Performance in the Metropolitan National Academy of Orchestra, Portugal, where he studied with Mr. Nuno Silva.
Currently, he is pursuing an Artist Diploma Degree at the University of Southern California under the tutelage of Mr. Yehuda Gilad.
Conor Hanick

Pianist Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.” (New York Times) Hanick has recently performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Orchestra Iowa, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, been presented by the Gilmore Festival, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie, De Singel, Caramoor, Cal Performances, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Park Avenue Armory, and worked with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ludovic Morlot, Alan Gilbert, and David Robertson.
A fierce advocate for the music of today, Hanick has premiered over 200 pieces and collaborated with composers ranging from Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, to the leading composers of his generation, including Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Tyshawn Sorey, Samuel Carl Adams, and Anthony Cheung. This season Hanick presents recitals in the US and Europe, including performances with Julia Bullock, Jay Campbell, Joshua Roman, Seth Parker Woods, AMOC (American Modern Opera Company), and the Takt Trio. Hanick also makes his San Francisco Performances debut at Herbst Theater, joins Sandbox Percussion at 92NY, returns to the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and, in Ojai as part of the California Festival, performs a new set of piano etudes by Samuel Carl Adams, whose piano concerto No Such Spring Hanick premiered last year to wide acclaim with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Hanick is the director of Solo Piano at the Music Academy of the West and serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School, Mannes College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Visit Conor Hanick’s Website
Sidney Hopson

The epitome of the citizen-artist, Sidney Hopson slams out rhythms, articulates the power of the arts, and defines how culture orgs should act, like no one we’ve ever met. Genius of the dad joke, and aspiring curry-ist, Hopson’s mic is never unmuted at the wrong time on a digital meeting. He’s built a music program in Jordan to deter refugee-artists and their communities from joining regional terror organizations (who sought to exploit their economic vulnerability and despair). He’s designed and co-produced shows that challenged archaic notions of legitimacy and power, and actively worked to develop the platform of a political candidate whom he subsequently voted for. He’s failed over and over and (he reports) “often in rapid succession,” but he’s kept going. Hopson has made music with Peter Eötvös, Adele, Stevie Wonder, Ellen Reid, Garrett McQueen, Rhianna, and John Williams. He’s currently authoring a series of essays on the case for – and against – establishing a U.S. Secretary of Culture, Media, & Sport, developing domestic and foreign arts policy platform proposals for the Biden-Harris Administration, and perfecting his panang curry recipe.
Bio from the Wild Up Website
Dylan Mattingly

Dylan Mattingly is a composer who creates music which offers ecstatic, transformative experience and provides an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. Many of Mattingly’s projects exist on a massive scale, the results of a dedication to the pursuit of bringing to life the most meaningful projects in the wild reaches of imagination — wherever that path leads — and building a path for the realization of these dreamworks from the ground up, often across many years. This practice has been informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, which offers a grand celebration of being alive. Stranger Love will see its premiere on May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. At the heart of all of Mattingly’s work is a commitment to joy, and to what Hannah Arendt refers to as amor mundi — an ever-renewing quest to find the capacity to love the world, in the complex totality of its experience.
Mattingly’s music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma). Additionally, Mattingly is the Executive and Co-artistic Director of the NYC-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. With Contemporaneous, much of his work has focused on creating an opportunity for other composers and musical creators to follow their own wildest dreams, dedicating the resources of the organization to the creation of large-scale new work and allowing artists a path to create the work they most want to create, regardless of scale and conventional practical constraints.
Mattingly’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Mattingly has held residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology, and holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Berkeley, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.
Saili Oak

A native of Mumbai, began studying music at the age of 3. A finalist on the popular reality TV series “Zee Marathi SaReGaMaPa,” Oak is a senior disciple of Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, a leading vocalist of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana. Oak won the All India Classical music competition when she was barely 17. She completed her Sangeet Visharad from the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal and has earned awards including the prestigious Pt.Jasraj Yuva Award, Pt Vasantrao Deshpande Yuva Award, and the Gaanwardhan Award. Her performances have been admired for her meticulous architecture of ‘khayal,’ her systematic and well-crafted raga exploration and impressive command over the ‘laya.’
Oak is also known for her distinguished work in the Indian/Western Classical music crossover space. She has performed with notable western music ensembles including the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Tonality choir, Salastina Music Society. She has been featured on several albums including ‘Beyond’, ‘American Mirror’, ‘Sing about it’ and ‘KALA’.
Oak serves as the Programs Director of a non-profit organization ‘Shastra’, where she co-hosts the “Composing with Indian Voice” annual workshop in the U.S., and “Raga Meets Symphony” in India. She is also a Vocal Mentor for the non-profit organization Street Symphony in Los Angeles.
A passionate educator, Oak maintains a vocal studio ‘SailiMusic’ where she trains the next generation of upcoming artists and is a frequent guest speaker, panelist and workshop participant at conferences and universities across America. She has presented her work at the Composition in Asia Conference at the University of South Florida, taught master classes at the Salem State University, Smith College in Northampton MA, Kaufmann Music Center NY, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Apart from her musical training, Oak also holds a Master’s Degree in Accountancy and has completed the Chartered Financial Analyst Program by the CFA Institute, USA.
Visit Saili Oak’s Website
M.A. Tiesenga

M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors and puzzles, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains.
As a composer, interdisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga seamlessly merges these creative identities, emphasizing the power of connection in their work. Tiesenga ventures beyond conventional score-making and interpretation, embracing the potential of expanded notation systems. Their lifelong passion for collage, maps, and asemic languages fuels an enchantment with encoding and decoding creative territories, allowing lexical approaches to transform into palpable musical expressions. Within their artistic vision, Tiesenga seeks to convey inner worlds where protocols and rules converge with intuition and mystique.
Tiesenga’s creative collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
Tiesenga holds an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and an MFA in Experimental Animation with a Concentration in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Dr. Chien-Kwan Lin.
Visit M.A. Tiesenga’s Website
Zelter Quartet

Praised by LA Opus for their “seemingly effortless precision and blend”, the Zelter String Quartet formed in Los Angeles in 2018. Recently, the quartet was awarded First Prize of the 2023 Plowman Chamber Music Competition, as well as being the Gold Prize Winners of the 2021 Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition. The quartet is comprised of violinists Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violist Carson Rick, and cellist Allan Hon. In 2019, the Zelter String Quartet was awarded a full scholarship to participate in the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar, where they worked with members of the St. Lawrence and Danish String Quartets. They were also invited to participate in the Rencontres Franco-Américaines de Musique de Chambre as part of the USC Thornton School of Music Ofiesh Chamber Music Competition in the Saint-Gildas-des-Bois area of France in 2020. Most recently, they participated in the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar, and the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies at the Aspen Music Festival, where they worked with the Pacifica, Escher, and American String Quartets.
Visit the Zelter Quartet’s Website
From Ara: Summer Reflections

Dear friends,
I hope this finds you enjoying the pleasures of summer. I have the good fortune to be at the Marlboro Music Festival as I write this, tucked away in a particularly idyllic corner of southern Vermont – which mercifully was spared the worst of the recent torrential rains elsewhere in the state.
I have had the luxury of time to reflect on the recent Festival and find myself immensely grateful for the company we keep, including each one of you who create such a unique and open-hearted community at each Festival.

The 2023 Ojai Festival is now a happy memory to be savored and cherished. We were so fortunate to be in the company of the wondrous Rhiannon Giddens and all the extraordinary artists she brought to create a particularly joyous Festival community. It is next to impossible to single out individual highlights in a Festival full of them. I will only dare mention a few — Rhiannon singing Paul Simon’s American Tune with an eloquence and a to-the-moment timeliness that brought tears to the eyes, the absolutely essential American story of Omar Ibn Said as told in Rhiannon and Michael Abels’ Omar’s Journey, the indelible musical and visual images created by Wu Man, PeiJu Chien-Pott and the Attacca Quartet in a new production of Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera, the encounter with the enormous creativity and fresh voices of the Iranian Female Composers Association, Kayhan Kalhor’s spellbinding artistry, the infectious joy of Seckou Keita, and Francesco Turrisi’s boundless musical imagination in creating the special Early Music program for a Sunday morning. OK, I’ll stop at that as my own list could go on for another 30 or more highlights. If you are so inspired, please write to me with your own list of highlights.

Here at Marlboro, I delight in the company of Mitsuko Uchida, a co-Artistic Director of the Marlboro Music Festival and our Music Director for the 2024 Ojai Festival. Mitsuko, one of the most eloquent and probing musicians of our time, is making a long awaited return next year, joined by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (who themselves are returning to Ojai since their 2018 visit with Patricia Kopatchinskaja). Her close collaboration with this immensely creative and spirited ensemble is central to her work in recent years, as they have embarked on a multi-year exploration of the Mozart piano concertos together. She explains the importance of their partnership in this video:
Mitsuko has long been a champion of and mentor to several generations of young musicians at the Marlboro Festival. We will have the good fortune of being joined in Ojai with some of the most gifted artists on the American musical scene — clarinetist Anthony McGill, Brentano String Quartet, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and violinist Alexi Kenney — all of whom have rich Marlboro history. More about each of them in the months to come.
Prior to coming to Marlboro, I had the pleasure of serving on the jury of the Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. Marina Mahler, the granddaughter of Gustav Mahler, graced the proceedings as patron of the competition. When I first met Marina some years ago, I started a painstaking description of where and what Ojai is — she interrupted me to tell me that she had attended Ojai Valley School during her most formative years! So, there you have it — a direct link between the legacy of Gustav Mahler and Ojai! We became fast friends with this knowledge of our Ojai ties. I also had the deep pleasure of serving on the jury alongside Barbara Hannigan (2019 Music Director), who continues to light up the musical world wherever she goes. While there, I discovered that Barbara had assembled a very personal playlist for Apple Music, which characteristically documents her wide-ranging imagination and generosity of spirit. She has curated a list of performances by favorite musicians who, in her words, “allow audiences into a ‘heart-to-heart’ connection with whatever music they perform.” In a lovely confluence of Ojai artists, her list includes Rhiannon Giddens!
Finally, a reflection of loss. Kaija Saariaho, who died at the age of 70 in early June, made an indelible impression with her music and her presence at the 2016 Ojai Festival with Peter Sellars. Kaija was a singular creative force in our musical world, writing with a voice that was intensely personal and affecting, a sound world unlike any other composer. She was also a cherished friend to so many of the Festival musicians over the years. We can only be grateful for having her and her music in our lives. To bid farewell, here are the final three movements of her choral work Nuits, Adieux (1991) in a recording released just this month:
We are most fortunate in the company we keep.
With thanks and warm greetings,

Ara Guzelimian
Artistic and Executive Director
Meet our 2023 Interns

We are excited to share our stellar team of interns with you. These students represent the next generation of musicians and arts administrators. The Festival depends on them for critical support in a variety of management areas including production, stage management, front of house, operations, box office, marketing, and more. Our impressive roster of interns is ready to bring their passion and experience to the Ojai Music Festival team and make the 77th Ojai Music Festival a year to remember.
Hitesh Benny
Hitesh Benny is a student transferring to the University of California, San Diego to study Music and Economics. He is the Front of House Intern at this year’s Festival. Over the past two years, Hitesh has attained associate degrees in Music and Economics from Moorpark College. He has been a part of various ensembles including the Moorpark College Concert Choir, Symphony Orchestra, and the Come Together Ensemble. In the choir, he served as a student conductor, leading them in their Fall and Winter concerts. In the Symphony Orchestra, he also served as the percussion section leader and had transcriptions performed and recorded by the ensemble. Through the Come Together Ensemble, he premiered his compositions. Hitesh was fortunate to have been mentored by Richard Danielpour, the head of composition at UCLA. Hitesh has a steadfast dedication to helping small businesses in his community. Through these experiences, he earned various entrepreneurial and managerial lessons. He also remains committed to the musical community by serving as a volunteer at the Hear Now Festival, the Music Academy of the West Summer Festival, and the Ojai Music Festival.
Elizabeth (Liz) Callahan is a violinist who grew up in Ventura, California and began playing violin at the age of 10 at a children’s string ensemble at her church. Elizabeth has played violin in numerous ensembles including the Ojai Youth Symphony, Ventura High School Honors String Orchestra, and the Westmont College Orchestra. She thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to perform during the orchestra tour to Austria and Prague as Principal violinist and as a selected soloist. Elizabeth is so grateful to have studied classical violin with fantastic faculty members including Dr. Han Soo Kim and Professor Isaac Kay, and traditional Irish violin technique with Grammy- and Emmy- nominated Celtic violinist, Máiréad Nesbitt. Elizabeth has participated in Westmont College Choir and she has had the opportunity to be an Assistant Conductor for the College Choir and the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony while studying conducting with Dr. Daniel Gee. She has been actively involved in music education in Santa Barbara while being Personnel Manager for the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony. Elizabeth will graduate from Westmont College in May 2023 with a Bachelor of Music Education and will continue to pursue a career in music education.
Eliana Choi is a recent 2023 Westmont College graduate who majored in psychology and minored in kinesiology and music. She utilized her minor in music to become on of the box office interns again at the Ojai Music Festival. Eliana is back in the Ojai intern family because she had a fabulous time with the staff, performers, volunteers, and interns last year (#RunningAMOC2022). Eliana specifically cherished working on Festival mobile app and updating the Festival website while at the box office. In her free time, Eliana enjoys playing video games, working out, and practicing her acoustic guitar and violin. She will pursue a doctoral degree in occupational therapy at Keck Graduate Institute in late August. Eliana is open to answering any questions and hopes that everyone will enjoy their time at the Festival!
Mia Condon has worked as a Stage Manager for the past four years. Throughout her experience, she has sought out positions that allow her to experience new genres of live entertainment and learn new strategies which she can utilize in future endeavors. She has a background in vocal and instrumental music in multiple genres and has a deep love for music, especially that which has a connection to things greater than and deeper than the individuals creating it. She Is incredibly excited to have the opportunity to experience Ojai for the first time and looks forward to engaging with everyone involved! Currently, Mia attends CalArts in Santa Clarita, CA.
William Jae is a composer and pianist raised in Los Angeles, California. William’s music can be described as both chaotic and sublime. His openness to learn new kinds of music allowed him to push the limits of what he can do with his own music. Between 2019 to 2020, he was a fellow at the Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship Program, where he studied with renowned composers such as Andrew Norman, Sarah Gibson, and Thomas Kotcheff. It was during this time that he first experienced the world of contemporary classical music. In 2019, his string trio composition, “Alabaster Wool”, premiered at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and was performed by members of the Lyris Quartet. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, he received the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artists Award and made an appearance at Blanket Fort 2 hosted by Peter Dugan at From The Top. He was also the semi-finalist in the 2020 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award that same year. William is currently a junior at the Eastman School of Music pursuing a dual degree in music composition and psychology at the University of Rochester. Outside of the classroom, he is the artistic director of the Eastman Chamber Orchestra. During his free time, William enjoys spending time with his friends and colleagues as well as exploring various film and video game genres.
Sophie Little is currently pursuing a BA in Theater Technology and a minor in Music Technology at Chapman University, strongly focusing on sound engineering and theater design. Furthering this passion, she hopes to apply her knowledge and love for music by designing and assisting with sound for music festivals and concerts in the future. In the past, Sophie has been involved in countless productions throughout high school and college, most notably being her involvement with various music festivals in her home state of Michigan. Most recently, Sophie worked as the Sound Engineer and Designer for Chapman’s student-run production of It Shoulda Been You by Brian Hargrove. Sophie is very excited to join the Ojai Music Festival team as a sound intern and continue growing her love and knowledge of sound.
Niav Maher is a virtuosic soloist spanning several musical genres, combining personal sensitivity with insightful interpretation. She has been the recipient of many scholarships throughout her career at the Longy School of Music, New England Conservatory Prep, and Manhattan School of Music. Niav received the Michael B. Packer Scholarship of Excellence in Piano Studies at the Longy School of Music. From 2012-2019, Niav studied with Jonathan Bass at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. In 2016, Niav was the first-prize winner of the NEC Preparatory Concerto Competition playing the Mendelssohn Concerto No.1 and went on to perform in Jordan Hall with the NEC YSO. She has participated on scholarship in NEC Prep tours through Germany, Italy, and Norway as a soloist, and orchestra member. In 2019, Niav received the Seth Kimmelman Scholarship given to a NEC Prep student who combines a commitment to the piano with intellectual curiosity. She then received the Piano Department award upon graduation.
Most recently, Niav was a winner of the Lillian Fuchs Chamber Music Competition at Manhattan School of Music. Niav holds a Bachelor of Music Degree in Classical Piano Performance from Manhattan School of Music where she studied with Daniel Epstein on the Glen K. Twiford Piano Department Scholarship. At the recommendation of the faculty, the Provost of MSM selected Niav as the recipient of the Helen Cohn Award, which is given upon graduation to a pianist in recognition of outstanding work in chamber music. Niav will begin her Master of Music Degree this fall, studying with Daniel Shapiro at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Meet Diego Martinez, a talented musician, and audio engineer based in Chula Vista, California. Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in music technology, Diego is dedicated to building a career in music composition and audio engineering. His coursework has given him a deep understanding of the technical aspects of music production, from recording and mixing to mastering and post-production. He is eager to apply his knowledge to real-world scenarios and is excited to learn from experienced professionals in the industry. As an accomplished artist, Diego has released several singles, collaborations, and three albums under his stage name, P-Wave. His hard work has paid off, as two of his albums have even received physical cassette releases – one independently, and the most recent under the popular indie music label, Stratford Ct.
Diego’s dedication to mastering his craft is evident in his constant pursuit of knowledge. He is always on the lookout for opportunities to learn and grow, attending conferences and workshops and seeking out mentorship from industry experts. In addition to his musical talents, Diego has honed his communication and networking skills, which have proven invaluable in his career. With his exceptional talent, dedication, and drive, Diego is sure to make significant contributions to any organization he is a part of, including the Ojai Music Festival sound department.
Mariah Divianne Musni is an undergraduate student pursuing Interdisciplinary Computing for the Arts and Music (ICAM) at the University of California, San Diego. Moving from the Philippines to the United States at 16, she sought new opportunities and personal growth. At UCSD, she combines her love for technology and artistic expression. This program allows Mariah to explore the convergence of computation, art, and music, pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation. Through immersive coursework, she develops technical skills while nurturing her artistic sensibilities to create transformative experiences. As a novice audio intern at KSDT, the campus radio station, Mariah gained valuable hands-on experience in setting up audio equipment for live events, ensuring seamless sound quality.
Mariah’s passion for the arts originated in the Philippines, where she actively participated in dance and choir competitions. These experiences honed her creativity, discipline, and admiration for the performing arts.With a diverse background, unwavering determination, and a passion for innovation, Mariah aims to make a profound impact in ICAM, Speculative Design, and beyond. Mariah is committed to shaping the future of interdisciplinary creativity, pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
As a Junior at the University of California Los Angeles, Dani Nollenberger is currently pursuing a major in Music History and Industry Studies. Passionate about music, Dani has a deep interest in both performing and writing music. In addition to their musical pursuits, Dani is also dedicated to bringing excellent live music experiences to others and sharing the joy of music with those around them. With an unwavering commitment to the world of music, Dani has refined her skills and is working towards a career in the music industry. Dani plans to apply her knowledge and passion to make a meaningful impact in the world of music and her community.
Margaret Rodenburg is a flutist and 2023 Bachelor of Music major graduating with Highest Honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studied Flute Performance with Jill Felber. A native of Seattle WA, Margaret began playing flute at age 9, and has since found immense joy in the musical ensembles and communities throughout her life, including the Seattle Rock Orchestra, Seattle All-City Marching Band, Seattle Collaborative Orchestra, UCSB Wind Ensemble, UCSB Flute Choir, and UCSB Chamber program. While her musical journey began as an instrumentalist, Margaret has both volunteered in and taught private flute lessons to beginners in the greater Seattle and Santa Barbara areas and has worked in a variety of administrative positions in the UCSB Music Department. Throughout her time in undergrad, Margaret has recognized that her passion for playing music will continue to be bolstered by community ensembles and individual experimentation and that her desire for a long-term role in the live music industry is actually one backstage—she hopes to soon enter the industry in a managerial, administrative or organizational capacity.
Baritone and Arts Administration leader, Kevin Spooner, is pursuing a Master of Music in Vocal Performance at the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Kevin received his Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from the Eastman School of Music and has performed a diverse breadth of roles in the operatic repertoire ranging from Mozart to Sondheim. During his time at Eastman, Kevin worked as an Admissions Ambassador, where he was responsible for guiding musicians and their families during their visit to ensure a comfortable and rewarding time at Eastman.
Passionate about non-profit organizations and presenting recitals, in 2018 Kevin organized and produced a recital featuring local musicians and himself to raise money for The Great Swamp Conservancy in Canastota, NY. Kevin is also performing a recital entitled Songs and Arias of Love the week before the Ojai Music Festival in his hometown of Oneida, NY.
During the 2022/2023 season, Kevin made his professional debut as Marchese D’Obigny in Verdi’s La Traviata with Piedmont Opera. Kevin also performed the role of Rodomonte in Joseph Haydn’s Orlando Paladino with the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute in February. Last summer, Kevin performed the role of Schaunard in Puccini’s La Bohème with Opera Steamboat and performed the role of Paul’s Father in Gregory Spears’ Paul’s Case with the Ad Astra Music Festival. Outside of the arts, Kevin enjoys running, tennis, golf, and reading Stephen King novels.
As a pianist, producer, and composer, Mateo Thacher is pursuing a dual degree in Economics and Music at Claremont McKenna College. Throughout college and high school, he has engaged in a number of musical interests including music production and live performances. A member of the Pomona College Choir, Mateo is working on an arrangement for his second original fashion show soundtrack. In the winter of 2018, he began making music with his hometown friend here in Ojai, California and continues to publish music under the name Krandank, which is accessible on all streaming platforms.
Aside from his creative endeavors, Mateo manages a team of student research analysts at the Roberts Environmental Center. We focus on consulting and providing research analytics for clients across all fields of sustainability and environmental education. He hopes to continue his interest in music, economics, and the environment in his career, seeking a life that blends his many passions. In his spare time, Mateo loves to surf, climb, work out, skate, and get together with friends and family.
Landon Wilson is a pianist and arts administrator based in New York City. He is the Artistic Associate of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) and studies at Manhattan School of Music as an undergraduate President’s Award recipient. Landon’s interests in creating interdisciplinary and socially-confrontational work have led him to develop THE RASA PROJECT, an artificially intelligent, generative piece responding to the climate crisis through music by John Cage, Reena Esmail, and inti figgis-vizueta. Uniting a creative team of musicians, software engineers, neuroscientists, and visual artists from Manhattan School of Music, Columbia University, Royal College of Art (London), and Tsinghua University (Beijing), THE RASA PROJECT will premiere in October 2023 at National Sawdust as part of their 2023-24 Emerging Artists Series.
With AMOC*, Landon has worked with venues such as The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The 92nd Street Y, The Clark Art Institute, Tina Kim Gallery, and Baryshnikov Arts Center. In the 2022-23 season, he produced an ‘Up Close’ collaboration between AMOC* and Ensemble Connect at Carnegie Hall featuring the quiescent, evocative work of the Wandelweiser Collective.
Residing at International House New York, Landon received the Thea Petscheck Iervolino Foundation Award and is developing a lecture panel with Peter Sellars about finding hope for the future in a post-pandemic world. He returns to the Ojai Festival as the 2023 Steven Rothenberg Production Fellow after interning in Public Relations and Marketing last summer.
Program Notes
Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 8:00pm
LIQUID BORDERS – Program Notes
Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Steven Schick percussion/director | red fish blue fish percussion | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello
Gabriela ORTIZ (b. 1964)
Liquid Borders (2013)
Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809)
Andante from String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2 Hob. III:82 (1799)
Zakir HUSSAIN (b. 1951)
Pallavi (2017)
Philip GLASS (b. 1937)
First Movement from String Quartet No. 3 (“Mishima”) (1985)
Colin JACOBSEN (b. 1978)
Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged (2008)
Geeshie WILEY
Last Kind Words
Arranged by Jacob Garchik
Rhiannon GIDDENS (b. 1977)
Lullaby
David CROSBY (1941-2023)/ Nathan SCHRAM (b. 1987)
Where We Are Not (2020)
Caroline SHAW (b. 1977)
Stem and Root from The Evergreen (2022)
John ADAMS (b. 1947)
Judah to Ocean and Rag the Bone from John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1994)
SQUAREPUSHER (Tom Jenkinson, b. 1975)
Xetaka 1 (2021)
No Boundaries
Liquid Borders: Both the title and the premise of the percussion quartet by Gabriela Ortiz that opens this edition of the Ojai Music Festival could not be better suited to Rhiannon Giddens’s curatorial vision. The Mexico City–based Ortiz has created a body of boundlessly imaginative work animated by adventurous border crossings between strikingly different realms: folk and avant-garde, Latin American and European, acoustic and electronic.
Ortiz comes from an influential musical family. Her parents were among the earliest members of the still-active group Los Folkloristas, founded in 1966, which transformed the understanding of Latin American folk music. A composer who asserts that “sounds have souls,” she has developed a special connection to California ensembles, producing works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet.
Explorations of folklore and folk music, pre- and post-colonial, play a prominent role in Ortiz’s music. She combines these sources with contemporary techniques to generate unprecedented yet somehow inevitable sounding and extraordinarily evocative musical spaces.
Liquid Borders originated as a commission from Steven Schick for his University of California at San Diego–based percussion ensemble red fish blue fish and was premiered at the Banff Centre in Canada in August 2014. The title refers not only to dissolving aesthetic barriers but to Ortiz’s utopian reflection on what it might be like to overcome the artificial divisions she believes are put in place for political and economic reasons.
But because those divisions are in place, they exacerbate injustices caused by changes in the economy, society, and climate, which Ortiz illustrates in the varied soundscapes corresponding to each of the work’s three movements. The metallic and glass percussion of “Liquid City” conjures an urban landscape that, according to the composer, refers to the problem of impoverished immigrants from Mexico’s countryside facing desperate conditions when they seek economic improvement in the cities. In “Liquid Desert,” the soundscape changes dramatically to ghostly, dry, dark, rattling sounds. The social context here involves the problem in the north of Mexico caused by cheap maquila factories that exploit impoverished women. The players are instructed to whisper the word maquila to represent “these lost voices of women who have disappeared or been killed.” “Liquid Jungle” uses the timbres of marimbas, bongos, and woodblocks to evoke the scene at Mexico’s southern border, with driving rhythms derived from Caribbean and African music. The life force itself pulses with irresistible energy and cannot be contained.
Liquefying the borders between genres and disciplines is a signature of the Attacca Quartet. The playlist they’ve put together to launch their Ojai residency presents a self-portrait of the ensemble and their voracious appetite for trying new things. But rather than a straightforward, realist style, it’s a portrait painted in wildly abstract colors, “where our past and our future are simultaneously reflected in some form,” as cellist Andrew Yee puts it. “Asking what our artistic vision adds to this already rich art form has freed us up to experiment with the framework of our programming.”
The “Haydn 68” project — a cycle of all of the composer’s quartets, which Attacca performed from 2010 to 2016 — left a lasting mark on the quartet’s sound. They play the Andante from Haydn’s last completed work in the medium, composed in 1799 and deemed by the composer himself as his “most beautiful string quartet.” Beginning with an almost folklike duet for just violin and cello, Haydn varies the main idea in profoundly surprising ways.
Zakir Hussain composed Pallavi in 2017 as part of Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future project to create repertory for a new generation of music lovers; Reena Esmail prepared this arrangement. The composer has provided this commentary: “Pallavi is the ancient Carnatic word for ‘composition.’ Each raga would have at least 100 traditional compositions of this type. The piece as written follows the prescribed format of the ancient Pallavi in which there is first Pallavi, then Anu Pallavi followed by Charnam…..Unlike the traditional Pallavi based in one raga, I have used four different ragas and tried to find a way to give each instrument its own personality with a raga assigned just for it. By doing so I hoped to address the Western system, which employs counterpoint and harmony, through the multi-tonal play of the four ragas working in tandem in certain passages. There is also interplay between different rhythm cycles (Tala) using 4, 6, 9, and 16 beats, each assigned to an instrument in the quartet.”
As with the Haydn piece, economy of means is at the fore in Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3. It derives from his score for Paul Schrader’s biographical film about the Japanese writer Mishima (1985). The Attaccas recorded the work on their 2021 album Of All Joys, which juxtaposes music of the Renaissance with the Minimalist aesthetic. Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged began as a collaboration between Kayhan Kalhor and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. Working on a production with the Silkroad Ensemble, the violinist Colin Jacobsen had become fascinated by Layla and Majnun, the story of star-crossed lovers immensely popular in the Middle East (whose Western counterpart is often said to be Romeo and Juliet). Knowledge of the rich tradition of Persian music is no prerequisite to being swept away by Kalhor’s depiction of the state of love-madness central to the telling of the story, with its anticipation of medieval European troubadours.
To embark on their collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival, the musicians have chosen two especially characteristic songs: Last Kind Words, which Giddens covers on her debut solo album from 2015 (Tomorrow Is My Turn), was written and recorded by Geeshie Wiley in 1930 and condenses an evocative drama into the country blues idiom. Giddens’s Lullaby, from her 2017 album Folk Songs with the Kronos Quartet, only hints at the underlying situation, endured by countless enslaved women, that makes it so heartbreaking: “such a shame now, little baby, that you are not my own.”
In memory of the late David Crosby, who died at his ranch in nearby Santa Ynez in January, the Attacca Quartet performs a piece that violist Nathan Schram wrote with the legendary songwriter called Where We Are Not. Schram transformed the song I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here from Crosby’s debut solo album of 1970 (If I Could Only Remember My Name) into a haunting new composition on his solo record Nearsided, which he arranged for Attacca. “It’s about people we had both lost in the past but now has taken on a new meaning,” says Schram.
The Attaccas also pay tribute to their close collaboration with composer Caroline Shaw, offering selections from their most recent recording, which won a Grammy Award this year. Shaw’s quartet writing is often inspired by gardens and trees — as is the case with The Evergreen, a four-movement work she has described as “an offering” to a tree in a coniferous forest on one of the islands in the Salish Sea separating Canada and the U.S. Shaw’s vivid, gestural writing for the strings reclaims the Romantic aspiration toward “organically” inspired art for our climate- anxious time.
A decade ago, on their Fellow Traveler album devoted to the string quartet music John Adams had written up to that point, Attacca Quartet put their own stamp on his 1994 collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, John’s Book of Alleged Dances. They play two of the 10 dances — whose “general tone is dry, droll, sardonic,” according to the composer — that call for a pre-recorded percussion track played by prepared piano.
One of the Attacca Quartet’s most experimental projects to date in crossing borders is their 2021 album Real Life, which gave them a platform to repaint the musical canvases of leading artists and producers in electronica and avant hip-hop, including Squarepusher. Their blending of the string quartet — historically, a benchmark of acoustic intimacy — with the contemporary dance floor’s amplified reverberations can sound by turns thrillingly chaotic and serenely surreal.
—THOMAS MAY
Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00am
OJAI DAWNS – Program Notes
Emi Ferguson flute | Ross Karre percussion | Tara Khozein soprano | Niloufar Shiri kamancheh | Aida Shirazi electronics | Steven Schick percussion | red fish blue fish percussion
Golfam KHAYAM (b. 1983)
Lost Wind (2018)
co-composed by Aida Shirazi and Niloufar Shiri
Yearning, Every Dawn (2023)
Edgard VARÈSE (1883-1965)
Density 21.5 (1936)
CHOU Wen-Chung (1923-2019)
Echoes from the Gorge (1989)
Calligraphies of Sound
For all its antiquity, the flute has taken a lead, liberating role in the transition to modernism. Pierre Boulez cited Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as the “origin” point of modern music. Georges Barrère, who played the epochal flute solo that begins Debussy’s trailblazing score at its premiere in 1894, asked Edgard Varèse to write Density 21.5 for him 42 years later. In Lost Wind, Golfam Khayam similarly uses the flute to imagine a new sound world. But the reference point in her case is the rich and diverse Persian classical music tradition.
Like many composers of her generation, Khayam ventured outside her native Iran to continue her studies. After immersing herself in contemporary experimental music in Cincinnati and Geneva, she returned to Iran and now teaches in Tehran. Lost Wind is a written score but breathes the spirit of improvisation that is central to Persian music and offers the flute soloist ample opportunity to make individual choices about phrasing and rhythmic articulation. Extended techniques calling for breathing in and out of the instrument, bending pitch, “aeolian sound,” and the like suggest a wordless poetry being communicated. Khayam’s accompaniment with the deeper-rimmed heng gong (a favorite of sound healers) seems to extend the flute’s own voice, often playing in its low range but ascending to the heights at the climax.
Aida Shirazi also refracts Persian traditions through a contemporary and experimental perspective, combining layers of live and processed electronics with onstage improvisation by the kamancheh virtuoso Niloufar Shiri in her new work Yearning, Every Dawn. While growing up in Iran, Shirazi was trained classically in both Persian and Western music and went on to study in Turkey and at the University of California at Davis, where she recently completed her doctorate. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48), Shirazi was able to realize her desire to collaborate with two admired colleagues for her Ojai Music Festival commission (one in live performance and the other through a pre-recorded tape).
In addition to performing and improvising live, Shiri provided Shirazi with recordings of her work to be incorporated into the processed and pre-recorded electronics. The Iranian American soprano Tara Khozein contributed another layer by recording a short improvisatory song based on a text (see p. 48) by the 19th-century poet Táhirih Qurrat al-’Ayn, which was also processed. Shirazi, who spent a period training at IRCAM in Paris, has woven these recorded materials into Yearning, Every Dawn, thus combining sources that are acoustic and electronic, live and recorded, played and sung, improvised and fixed. Rather than merely juxtapose traditions and sound worlds, she aims to create “a hybrid that will sound as natural and organic as possible — so that it’s all of them, and at the same time none of them, but with my voice.”
Edgard Varèse is often cited as a tutelary spirit to colorful figures of the Western avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen, Frank Zappa), but his influence extended to non-Western composers. He left an indelible mark on Chou Wen-Chung (see sidebar on p. 64), who became his student and copyist when they met in 1949 and, following the death of Varèse, his literary executor. Density 21.5 dates from the previous decade (1936) and was composed for the above-mentioned Georges Barrère, who planned to inaugurate a newly engineered platinum flute at the upcoming New York World’s Fair. The title refers to the density or specific mass of this rare metal, which is 21.5. (Cocktail party conversation point: The new flute was in fact a platinum-iridium alloy with an estimated specific mass of 21.6.) Varèse crafts a novel language from alterations in timbre, use of the extreme high and low ends of the register, and percussive effects.
Varèse mentored the young Chou Wen- Chung, who in turn had a profound influence on the generation of composers emigrating from China after the Cultural Revolution (including Ge Gan-Ru, Lei Liang, and Tan Dun). Chou Wen-Chung anticipated their quest to synthesize Asian and Western idioms in his own integration of classical Chinese aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Also a prominent scholar, Chou Wen-Chung described Varèse’s concept of sound as “living matter” as “a modern Western parallel of a pervasive Chinese concept: that each single tone is a musical entity in itself, that musical meaning lies intrinsically in the tones themselves, and that one must investigate sound to know tones and investigate tones to know music.”
This overarching idea pervades the subtly fluctuating soundscape of Echoes from the Gorge, completed in 1989 after a lengthy break from composition during which Chou Wen-Chung had worked on his edition of Varèse’s scores. Among Chou Wen-Chung’s most substantial works, Echoes is regarded as on one level a tribute to his former mentor as well.
Chou Wen-Chung organizes his quartet of percussionists to preside over a vast panoply of instruments. These are divided into various family groups based on timbre (wood, metal, skin, and various other kinds of drums), articulation, and even where and how the instruments are struck.
Chou Wen-Chung’s devotion to Chinese calligraphy and its philosophy also informs the shaping of sounds in a delicate balance between predetermination and seeming spontaneity. In the view of Steven Schick, Echoes from the Gorge ranks with the most significant yet overlooked works for percussion written in the 20th century. Comprising an introduction and 12 sections labeled with nature imagery (“echoes from the gorge,” “falling rocks and flying spray,” etc.), the piece reflects what Chou Wen-Chung described as “the preeminent musical form in East Asia, wherein all sections of a composition are elaborations or reductions of one and the same nuclear idea.”
—THOMAS MAY
Friday, June 9, 2023 | 10:00am
VIS-À-VIS – Program Notes
Lara Downes piano | Gloria Cheng piano | Emi Ferguson flute | Mario Gotoh viola | Leonard Hayes piano | Karen Ouzounian cello | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Steven Schick percussion | Michi Wiancko violin | Wu Man pipa
Due to injury, pianist Leonard Hayes has had to reduce his playing commitments and has withdrawn from this concert. We are deeply grateful to Lara Downes for agreeing to step in on short notice. Please note the revised program:
Shawn OKPEBHOLO (b. 1981)
Amazing Grace
H.T. BURLEIGH (1866-1949)
On Bended Knees (1910)
Margaret BONDS (1913-72) Troubled Water (Wade in the Water) (c. 1930s-40s)
Michael ABELS (b. 1962)
Iconoclasm (2017)
Jessie MONTGOMERY (b. 1981)
Rhapsody No. 2
Nasim KHORASSANI (b. 1987)
Growth (2017)
Nina BARZEGAR (b. 1984)
Inexorable Passage (2020)
Lei LIANG (b. 1972)
vis-à-vis (2018)
Face to Face
The face of American concert music has been changing dramatically in our time, immeasurably enriched by the acknowledgment and celebration of voices that, not long ago, were largely excluded. Contributions by woefully undervalued Black American composers of the past are finding eager new audiences, and young artists of color are galvanizing the scene by bringing their own perspectives to classical traditions. This morning’s program spans three generations of composers active today, with a nod to a rediscovered elder from the last century.
Commissioned as part of a project inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, Shawn Okpebholo’s mi sueño: afro-flamenco responds to the Spanish-flavored fourth movement, “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”), from Ravel’s original piano suite. The title (“my dream: afro-flamenco”) combines his “pre- pandemic nostalgia” with “post-pandemic dreams” to travel again and revisit Spain and Africa. References to flamenco as well as rhythms and idioms inspired by his Nigerian musical heritage and African American music convey the composer’s longing to reconnect to these sources.
American Tableau (Tableau XI) is one of a larger cycle of a dozen pieces, each for a different solo instrument, by Tyson Gholston Davis, the youngest composer on Leonard Hayes’s opening set for solo piano. Davis interrogates the straightforward assurance of the melody known as “America the Beautiful” — and the betrayal of the values it signifies — by weaving it into a chromatically ambivalent context.
A student of Florence Price who later collaborated with her and with the poet Langston Hughes, the composer and pianist Margaret Bonds in 1933 became the first Black musician to perform with the Chicago Symphony. Troubled Water originated as the finale of a three-movement suite Bonds composed to bring her solo recitals to a rousing close. Rather than a mere “arrangement” of a famous spiritual, Bonds offers a multifaceted pianistic fantasy infused with idioms from jazz and European Romanticism. The words to “Wade in the Water,” her source, originally encoded lifesaving information for fugitives following the Underground Railroad to freedom.
For her album marking the Leonard Bernstein centennial in 2018, the pianist Lara Downes asked an array of composers to write short pieces honoring his legacy. Michael Abels explains that he sought to convey his impressions of “the personality and not the sage” in his witty Iconoclasm. Bouncy rhythms and restlessly shifting meters echoing Bernstein’s own style evoke how he embodied “the puckish life of the party.”
Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2023, Jessie Montgomery grew up amid the rebelliously creative experimental scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. Both her parents led active careers in the performing arts, and their home became a meeting place for boundary-crossing musicians from free jazz; their prodigy daughter meanwhile pursued training in classical violin and began composing as a child. Rhapsody No. 2 is part of set of in-progress solo violin works, each dedicated to a particular contemporary violinist. Citing Béla Bartók as one of her inspirations, Montgomery wrote No. 2 for Michi Wiancko, who included it on her Planetary Candidate album (released in 2020).
Both Nasim Khorassani and Nina Barzegar are members of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48). Khorassani began composing at the age of 8 and spent time in Germany and the U.K. before coming to San Diego, where she is a doctoral composition student at the University of California. In her single-movement string trio Growth, she restricts herself to just four pitches that are closely adjacent (B, C, D, and E-flat). But changes in texture, dynamics, and rhythmic articulation produce a sense of restless pressure to metamorphose.
Both a composer and an actor, Nina Barzegar studied in Tehran before enrolling in the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and combines interests in film music, improvisation, and the Iranian classical tradition. The New York Times singled out the world premiere of her quintet Inexorable Passage at a concert last October, noting that the work was “thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.” Barzegar introduces the piece as a depiction of “the stages of life”: “We enter this world with hope, we learn, we strive, fall in love, we fight, we fail and triumph. Despite all our wishes, we eventually surrender, accept, and get off the train of life. This is the miracle of being in this world.”
Our morning program concludes with an innovative reconsideration of the principle of musical dialogue and virtuosity. Lei Liang composed vis-à-vis for Wu Man and Steven Schick — fellow San Diego–based colleagues who, he notes, share a “magnetic stage presence and unparalleled virtuosity on their instruments.”
This substantial duo for pipa and percussion goes far beyond simple confrontations of East with West or the traditional with the experimental. Lei Liang uses the paradoxical formula “new music that is old” to depict his aesthetic, adding that he prefers writing “music that has layers of memories underneath.”
Although he grew up in Beijing, Lei Liang has observed that he didn’t discover China until he was living in America. The process of using instrumentation outside one’s own culture, he says, resembles constructing a “mirror that makes us look at ourselves with a kind of X-ray vision. It allows us to penetrate the surface.” The part that Schick plays alone in vis-à-vis accomplishes this by inhabiting three states of mind or three very different spaces simultaneously: “looking inward, looking outward, and resting in a state of motionlessness.”
Juxtaposing the ancient pipa, an instrument with thousands of years of history, versus modern percussion, which began to come into its own in Western classical music only over the last century, is intentionally extreme. Lei Liang points out the jarring humor inherent as well in pitting the pipa’s image as a silk-string instrument of refined delicacy against the brute strength of the sonorities percussionists can produce. “I imagine the piece to be at times serious, challenging, probing, and even contentious; and at other times, relaxed, playful, and humorous,” writes the composer. “This is what a contentious friendship between kindred spirits would be like!”
—THOMAS MAY
Friday, June 9, 2023 | 3:30pm & Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 3:30pm
GHOST OPERA – Program Notes
Wu Man pipa | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | PeiJu Chien-Pott dancer/choreographer Jon Reimer director | Nicholas Houfek lighting designer
TAN Dun (b. 1957)
Ghost Opera (1994)
We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on
During his youth in Hunan Province, Tan Dun became fascinated by local lore associated with shamans and sorcerers, listening eagerly to the ghost stories his grandmother told him as a boy. But he had to rediscover the folk traditions of his own culture following the upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which banned not only Western composition but Chinese music as well — unless it had the “revolutionary” seal of approval.
Since he came from a family of “intellectuals” — his mother was a doctor and his father a researcher — Tan Dun was forcibly separated from them as a teenager and sent to an agricultural commune to be “re-educated” by toiling in the rice fields. Mao’s death in 1976 put an end to these policies, and Tan Dun was allowed to gain experience playing violin with a Beijing Opera troupe and to hear Western classical music on the radio. He was accepted to the newly reopened Central Conservatory in Beijing to study composition and eventually found his way in the mid-1980s to Columbia University — where Chou Wen-Chung numbered among his mentors. New York City has since remained home base for Tan Dun’s tirelessly peripatetic career, which keeps him internationally in demand as both a composer and a conductor.
Even when Chinese folk traditions were still forbidden during his period on the collective farm, Tan Dun found a way to experience these sources by offering to set texts of Maoist propaganda to the folk tunes he persuaded the farmers to share with him. The impulse to reconnect with aspects of Chinese culture was later intensified by his encounters with John Cage and similar figures in New York’s experimental downtown scene, which provided an enlightening counterpart to what he was learning more formally uptown. As with so many émigré composers, the stimulation of distance encouraged a fresh perspective on his native culture.
Ghost Opera is an early breakthrough work in which Tan Dun comes to terms with these formative influences by forging them into a strikingly original musical language. The result, as in this composer’s oeuvre overall, transcends reductive (and bland) formulas such as “East meets West” or “ancient juxtaposed with avant-garde.”
Indeed, Tan Dun relishes the creative tension generated by combining perspectives often assumed to stand in contradiction — whether Buddhist and Christian traditions (in his Water Passion and Buddha Passion, both modeled on J.S. Bach) or the spontaneous music of nature and “composed” music (a fusion integral to his vocabulary, which plays a key role in the soundscape of Ghost Opera).
Originally created for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, Ghost Opera is also characteristic of Tan Dun’s artistic practice in its engrossing theatrical sensibility. The scenario alludes to a tradition of shamanistic performance that is believed to reach back thousands of years, which later became integrated with Buddhist philosophy. In its traditional format, according to Tan Dun, the performer “has a dialogue with his past and future life — a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature.”
For his version of this long tradition, Tan Dun created a sequence of five acts or movements. Among the departed who are invoked by the performers are the spirits of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach, who join the proceedings through references to their work — via quotations from The Tempest and the C-sharp minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. In addition to their usual instruments, all five musicians are called on to play percussion and “natural” instruments
(water, metal, stone, and paper) that allude to the classical Chinese philosophy of the elements. In the Ojai Music Festival’s new production, a dancer mediates between the spheres of the living and those who have passed on.
Although Tan Dun’s treatment of the pipa itself, according to Wu Man, involves no avant-garde extended techniques, the idea of a dialogue between pipa and string quartet is unprecedented — and a novel kind of music theater. Tan Dun never merely evokes the past. His “ghosts” join together in a dialogue whose surprising twists are spellbinding. The “exhalations of a ghostly monk” in the first movement, for example, underline the porousness of the borders between sound and silence, the motions of breathing that mark the passage of time against eternity.
Ghost Opera is also, for Wu Man, “a very personal piece” because of her close involvement in the process while Tan Dun was composing it. When Tan Dun was searching for a folk tune, she suggested “Little Cabbage,” which is played on the pipa in the third act and which she sings in the fifth. During this final movement, the song’s significance is revealed as the lament of “a little girl who has lost her parents,” explains Tan Dun. “Such an odd, sad song. It’s the essence of ghostliness. You can talk to the past, the stone can talk to the violin, and the cabbage can sing of her sorrowful life.”
Tan Dun’s use of the visual aspects of the performers interacting with their instruments — and, in the final scene, with the paper installation — is further enhanced in this production, specially designed for the Ojai Music Festival, with new choreography, lighting, and stage direction.
Through the strands that he weaves together in Ghost Opera’s unique counterpoint of cultures, eras, and instruments, Tan Dun himself becomes a contemporary shaman able to communicate between realms thought to be inseparably divided.
—THOMAS MAY
Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00pm
EVENING WITH RHIANNON GIDDENS AND FRANCESCO TURRISI – Program Notes
Rhiannon Giddens vocals and banjo | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist
The program will be announced from the stage.
Hybrid Spaces
Songs are the most versatile of musical artifacts. As a medium of communication, song isn’t even confined to the human species. The impulse to sing accompanies the relationships that define our lives, from the intimate and familial to the spiritual to the political: whether it’s a soothing lullaby to calm a child, a heartfelt moment of prayer, or a defiant chant of protest.
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi make this versatility itself into an art in their song programs. The notion of songs as “repertory” items to be temporarily retrieved from the shelf, dusted off, and ritually performed — as if the singer were merely ventriloquizing the past — couldn’t be more antithetical to the experience Giddens and Turrisi seek to convey in their performances.
Part of what makes this approach possible is their shared conviction that the categories we’ve been trained to assign to songs are artificial — above all, the categories that reinforce hierarchies of “high” and “low,” “classical” and “popular.” “Art songs” written by privileged composers in the Western classical tradition or folk songs that originated with enslaved African Americans and have been passed down over the generations: the distinctions cued by labels reinforce preconceived ideas about what to expect and even how we should respond to a musical experience.
Giddens refers to the “hybrid spaces” that emerge when we break down these boundaries — spaces where new contexts can be created through boldly original juxtapositions that freshly illuminate the familiar with a haunting, at times surprising, relevance.
One of Giddens’s models for this approach is Nina Simone — whose birthday she happens to share and to whom she paid tribute by making Tomorrow Is My Turn the title song of her debut solo album (2015), adding her own layer to Simone’s unforgettable version of the Charles Aznavour hit.
“The idea is that a recital for piano and voice doesn’t have to be attached to any concept of a ‘classical’ recital — even when we’re also doing some classical pieces,” says Turrisi. “We’re exploring the fluidity between the classical and popular sound.” For example, surprising crosscurrents can emerge between a madrigal by Monteverdi and an Italian pop song from the 1960s. Even within the realm of what we generally consider “vernacular” music, hidden and suppressed histories are brought to light — such as the unacknowledged origins of country music from African American sources. (To explore more of this topic, Giddens’s contributions to the 2019 Ken Burns Country Music series are highly recommended.)
Giddens and Turrisi show how timeless folk tunes can take on a burning relevance for today, as with the songs about final things that they interpret on their recent Grammy Award–winning They’re Calling Me Home album, produced in isolation during the pandemic.
On the other hand, Giddens’s original song Build a House, which she premiered online with Yo-Yo Ma on Juneteenth 2020 — and recently transformed into a children’s book (see p. 83) — works back from frustration over contemporary racial injustice to condense a history of the African American experience into a song that seems to have always been part of the folk tradition.
“It’s the song that matters, not what category it is, not where it originally appeared,” says Giddens. “If the song is compelling, what’s to keep it from being done as an art song?”
—THOMAS MAY
Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 10:00am
THE WILLOWS ARE NEW – Program Notes
Gloria Cheng piano | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Nathan Schram viola | Wu Man pipa
Niloufar NOURBAKHSH (b. 1992)
Veiled for cello and electronics (2019)
Lei LIANG (b. 1972)
Mother’s Songs (2020)
GE Gan-Ru (b. 1954)
Gong (1985)
CHOU Wen-Chung (1923-2019)
The Willows Are New (1957)
Kayhan KALHOR (b. 1963)
Solo improvisation
Next month marks the official centennial of the birth of Chou Wen-Chung, who left us only four years ago. Along with his remarkable but woefully underrecognized oeuvre, his legacy extends to his influence on several generations of Chinese composers and performers he mentored over a long, productive career. Many of them, like Chou Wen-Chung, settled in the U.S., where they have explored innovative ways of synthesizing various aspects of Chinese culture with currents in contemporary Western music.
Framing this morning’s focus on that legacy is music representing two generations of Iranian artists. We begin with Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a young composer and pianist born in Karaj and now based in the U.S. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see p. 48), she wrote Veiled in response to the Iranian protests in 2017. Nourbakhsh points to the anger she carries within as a result of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.” The cello’s eloquence, pitched high in the register, mixes with an electronically processed track of a woman singing, transforming her anger “into a collective force that is both beautiful and resilient.” She describes Veiled as a “tribute to the Iranian women who made such transformations possible.”
Lei Liang (see p. 53), a featured composer at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival who is based at the University of California San Diego, was appointed artistic director of the Chou Wen-Chung Research Center at the Xinghai Conservatory in 2018. Mother’s Songs, which he wrote for Wu Man, gives voice to a tension that accompanies the experience of being “between worlds” — the power of musical memory sharpened by distance.
Lei Liang recalls the deep impression left on him by the Mongolian scholar Wulalji, his teacher since childhood. A friend of his musicologist parents, Wulalji taught Lei Liang traditional folk music against the backdrop of 1970s Beijing, when the music officially approved by the authorities centered around “happy propaganda songs.” Wulalji instead shared his traditional “long songs” from Mongolia, which deal with themes of solitude and homesickness — a sadness that acquired a deeper resonance after Lei Liang came to America. Both Mother’s Songs and the more recent Mongolian Suite for solo cello (which was premiered this past February) tap into this source.
When Lei Liang visited China in 2019, he again met up with Wulalji, who sang for him songs that he had learned from his mother. “These songs are of a traveler’s longing for home and a daughter’s desire to be reunited with her mother,” Lei Liang explains. “At age 83, my teacher is the only one in Inner Mongolia who still remembers these ancient melodies, and he sang them with deep emotion. I, too, am away from home. My teacher’s singing evoked a strong sense of longing even as it offered profound solace.” The result is a moving meditation on memory and on music’s role in creating a sense of home.
Ge Gan-Ru studied at the conservatory of his native Shanghai following the Cultural Revolution. Even after the reopening of exchange with the West, Ge Gan-Ru’s avant-garde inclinations made him an outsider in China. His controversial landmark Lost Style for solo cello (1983) has staked a claim as “the first avant- garde work in China.” Ge Gan-Ru left his homeland to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1983 with Chou Wen-Chung.
He also captured the attention of avant- garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. She commissioned him to compose a work simultaneously inspired by the songs of the qin (ancient Chinese zither) and the Western piano.
Ge Gan-Ru, who refrains from using actual Chinese instruments, responded with Gu Yue (“Ancient Music”). Each movement of this four-movement suite for prepared piano conjures the sonority and spirit of a different traditional Chinese instrument. We hear the first movement, devoted to the gong (the other movements imitate the qin, pipa, and drum, respectively). Ge Gan-Ru also has the performer actively manipulate the prepared piano’s innards, evoking not only timbres but traditions, such as the “morning ringing of bells.”
Writing about Ge Gan-Ru’s music, the scholar Yiming Zhang notes that Gu Yue “has many similarities with ancient Chinese visual arts … particularly painting and calligraphy” through the balance of shape, emotion, and abstraction. Chou Wen-Chung similarly draws a connection to ancient Chinese calligraphy with The Willows Are New, comparing his process to how, in calligraphy, “the controlled flow of the ink — through the interaction of rhythm and density, the modulation of line and texture — creates a continuum of motion and tension in spatial equilibrium.”
Chou Wen-Chung evokes ancient music and poetry from Chinese tradition, taking as his source a composition for qin attributed to the Tang Dynasty musician, poet, painter, and politician Wang Wei (689-759). His title occurs as a line in Wang’s poem associated with this ancient music, which Chou Wen-Chung translates:
In this town by the river,
morning rain has cleared the light dust.
Green, green around the tavern,
the willows are new.
Let us empty another cup of wine —
For, once west of Yang Kuai
There will be no more friends.
(Sprigs of willow, he notes, were “used in farewell ceremonies and regarded as a symbol of parting.”)
“Mutations of the original material are woven over the entire range of the piano and embroidered with sonorities that are the magnified reflexes of brushstroke-like movements,” Chou Wen-Chung writes. Through his calligraphy-inspired musical treatment, he amplifies “the restrained emotion of the poem and the subtle nuances of the qin technique.”
Working with sources from ancient tradition to create something new, unrepeatable, belonging to the present moment: this is an art that Kayhan Kalhor has perfected over decades. The great tradition of Persian classical music, which flourished in the court, draws on a repertoire of melodic figures and songs that have been passed on orally over many generations, from teacher to student. These were eventually gathered into a collection known as the Radif.
Kalhor describes how these melodies, long since memorized, are metamorphosed into unexpected larger constructions through the process of improvisation — a process that lies at the heart of all classical traditions, though it became separated from composition in the Western tradition with the development of written music and increasing specialization.
The kamancheh, the main bowed instrument in Persian music, traveled both east and west, Kalhor explains, and became responsible for many different bowed instruments in Europe. When playing a solo improvisation, Kalhor says that the focus is mostly on melody. “Before we had a way to write music, this was the only way people had to memorize a melody and interpret it according to their own ideas and playing skills.”
The challenge for an improviser is “to expand the melody beyond recognition,” so that it becomes something completely different from what he began with, illuminated by nuances and angles — much like the transformative process of working with themes and variations.
Is Kalhor able to replicate an improvisation that he has found particularly beautiful? “I should be able to start from the same place if I want to, but it will probably go elsewhere in terms of direction and development,” he responds. “It depends on the audience, yourself, what kind of day you are having. You’re human and have emotions, and those emotions are heavily reflected in what you produce.”
—THOMAS MAY
Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 8:00pm
OMAR’S JOURNEY – Program Notes
Limmie Pulliam tenor (Omar) | Rhiannon Giddens soprano (Julie) | Cheryse McLeod Lewis mezzo-soprano (Fatima)
Michael Preacely bass-baritone (Abdul/Abe) | Andy Papas bass-baritone (Owen/Johnson) | Emi Ferguson flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Leonard Hayes piano | Ross Karre, Francesco Turrisi percussion | Justin Robinson fiddle | Seckou Keita kora
Rhiannon GIDDENS (b. 1979) Michael ABELS (b. 1962)
Omar’s Journey (2023)
Necessary Stories
In 2019, Spoleto Festival USA asked Rhiannon Giddens whether she would consider writing an opera based on Omar Ibn Said (see sidebar p. 70). Giddens was shocked that she had not previously known of this remarkable figure. The fact that his story had been eclipsed by the standard historical narrative of enslavement in America made Giddens all the more determined to use the resources of her art to bring Omar Ibn Said to the attention of contemporary audiences.
To transform all this material into an opera, Giddens adopted an unconventional collaborative strategy that would remain true to her own identity as a singer: She reached out to Michael Abels as her composing partner, impressed by his score for the Academy Award–winning Jordan Peele film Get Out. According to Abels, he and Giddens share a clear sense “of what a good and effective opera sounds like” as well as a passion for folk music — an ideal match to undertake what was for both the formidable task of writing their first opera.
The result, Omar, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music (see sidebar on p. 71). Originally to have premiered in 2020, Omar finally reached the stage, to rapturous reviews, at the opening of the 2022 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina — less than a mile from the dock where some 40% of enslaved Africans brought into the U.S. passed through, including Omar in a pivotal scene in the opera. Omar has since been presented by Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera and will return to California in November as part of San Francisco Opera’s season.
While the scope and implications of Omar’s story called for the large-scale, multidimensional treatment for which opera is so well-suited, Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian shared Giddens’s conviction that this story needs to be as widely told as possible. He therefore commissioned Omar’s Journey as a concert piece to capture the arc of the full-length opera — without the demands of a full-scale stage production.
When she was deciding whether to accept the original opera commission, Giddens found herself deeply moved by what she discovered in her research and realized that she could not turn away from the challenge. Omar recovers multiple historical perspectives that have been unjustly overlooked: the perspective of enslaved persons coerced to immigrate to the “New World” as well as the perspective of Muslims in the African diaspora (about 30% of Africans captured to be enslaved in the U.S. are estimated to have been Muslim).
The libretto, also by Giddens, interweaves what she learned of Omar’s real-life story with fictional threads to give fuller context to his experience as an enslaved person during a certain period of American history. She invented the character of Julie, for example: an enslaved woman whom Omar reminds of the father she was separated from long ago. (Giddens sings this role for the first time in tonight’s performance.) In an interview she gave shortly before the Spoleto premiere, Giddens explained that she aimed to allow Omar’s own words to speak as much as possible — including the Qur’anic quotations that were so central to his identity: The themes of Arabic versus English and the sacred texts corresponding to the faiths of the enslaved and their enslavers are a defining thread in the original production design.
Giddens composed whole scenes by singing her way through them, accompanying herself with banjo, piano, or guitar. She then sent recordings of the work-in-progress to the Los Angeles– based Abels via WhatsApp. Giddens found her way into the story from her
perspective as an expert in American roots music and the deep history of American vernaculars. She complemented this with research into the music Omar Ibn Said would have known from his West African upbringing as well as the modal music that accompanied the Muslim African diaspora — idioms that come to the fore, for example, when Omar is conversing internally with the spirit of his mother. Instrumental selections from Senegal and the folk music of the Carolinas provide a general context for the sources that influenced Giddens.
Abels went beyond merely transcribing and orchestrating this material. He describes serving as a “sounding board” for Giddens, allowing her to focus on her melody-centered process and then “bringing that into a world that is operatic.” This involved enhancing the music with transitions and harmonic context, as well as ensuring that the musical narrative would be effectively paced as an unfolding drama — a skill that Abels has fine-tuned through his career in film music.
Abels emphasizes that he and Giddens both intend Omar “to be written in one artistic voice” that preserves the identities of each. By eschewing a clear-cut division of labor with compartmentalized tasks assigned to each party, their collaborative process might be said to embody another sense of “liquid borders.”
A new stage has been added to their collaboration with the creation of Omar’s Journey. According to Abels, the biggest challenge has not been scaling down the orchestration but rather selecting what needs to be retained in order to preserve a sense of the journey at the opera’s core. It’s a journey in two senses, he adds: both Omar’s physical journey — during his prime, from his life as a flourishing scholar to a foreign land where he was subjected to unimaginable dehumanization — and his inner emotional and spiritual journey. The second of the opera’s two acts focuses on the spirituality that sustains Omar and gives him a sense of purpose, despite the attempts of the enslavers to suppress and replace it with their own worldview.
While the chorus has a significant presence in the opera, the concert version relies on five singers to tell the story; they sometimes join forces to form an intimate chorus. Replacing an orchestra hidden in the pit with an onstage ensemble contributes to the music making “in a way that you might not be as conscious of in an operatic format,” as Abels puts it, with the instrumentalists becoming “equally as important as the singers.” (This involves not so much a reduction as a return to the small ensemble he and Giddens used while workshopping the opera.)
Omar and Omar’s Journey convey the pain and trauma carried by the African people — by people “descended from these stories,” as Giddens puts it. But essential to her retelling is Omar’s triumph in overcoming these impossible circumstances and finding the strength to remain true to his identity. That triumph resounds in the music that has in turn nourished America’s cultural identity.
—THOMAS MAY
Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 10:00am
EARLY MUSIC – Program Notes
Francesco Turrisi curator and keyboards | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Wu Man pipa | Joshua Stauffer theorbo
On this program, you might hear Monteverdi on the Persian kamancheh, Luca Marenzio’s madrigals performed by a modern string quartet, Dowland sung as a jazz ballad, or a Baroque theorbo
playing folk-inspired original music.
This concert challenges the idea of late Renaissance and early Baroque music and reinterprets it as a universal language that can connect the 17th century to today through an imagined historical and geographical journey.
—FRANCESCO TURRISI
Early, Not Old
This summer’s Festival seeks to cross borders not only in the geographical sense but across time as well. The area generally known as “early music” has in fact turned out to have remarkably liquid borders. The antiquarian preoccupations that once underscored the alienness of early music are increasingly giving way to engagement by contemporary composers and performers who sense an affinity of values.
“Early music didn’t sound ‘old’ to me,” says Francesco Turrisi, recalling his discovery of parallels between early music and jazz in their attitude toward improvisation. His dual grounding in folk and early music further deepened this sense of the ongoing relevance of music from centuries ago.
Turrisi points to the connections between Renaissance and early Baroque music, especially from Italy, and folk sources: “There was much less of a distinction between classical and folk music, especially in the dance rhythms, the melodic quality of that music, and a certain type of improvisation. But things changed very dramatically after those times, and early music speaks to me in a different way,” he adds. This was roughly around the time that the concept of a “standard repertoire” started taking shape in Western music — a powerful tool for reinforcing musical borders.
Turrisi is interested in exploring the idea of early music from several angles on this program — during the “very magical time” of Sunday morning on the final day of the Festival, as Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian puts it. There will also be new music Turrisi has written, which is inspired by early music. The use of period instruments became a signature of the early music revival in the last century. We will hear various mixes of old and modern instruments as well as instruments that are not part of the tradition of Western music.
Wu Man, for example, presents the oldest music on the program, sharing her research into the music scrolls from the caves in Dunhuang — an important crossroads on the ancient Silk Road, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China — which date back some 900 years. “This will give the audience a sense of what early Chinese music sounded like,” she says. “These are very simple melodies in the low register, not pentatonic and very different from the Chinese music we think of today.”
“We both have a very similar way of looking at these things,” says Rhiannon Giddens of her collaboration with Turrisi. “Both of us want to tear down false notions that you can only do a certain kind of music in a concert.”
The versatility of weaving in early music from different eras and cultures is the point — and that includes sharing the musical material itself among instruments from different contexts, whether cello, pipa, or kamancheh. The path from ancient Persia to modern jazz is shorter than we imagined…
—THOMAS MAY
Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 2:30pm
BETWEEN WORLDS – Program Notes
Mazz Swift violin | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Ross Karre projection designer
Carlos SIMON (b. 1986)
Between Worlds (2019)
Deceptive Simplicity
An increasingly prominent presence in the new music world, Carlos Simon is a versatile composer who writes solo and chamber pieces, orchestral works, and music theater works with equal fluency. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of a family who encouraged his love of music as a way to participate in church services at the African American Pentecostal church founded by his father, who comes from a line of preachers stretching back several generations.
Much of Simon’s work conveys his conviction that art can serve as a powerful platform to bring attention to suppressed and marginalized voices. Elegy: A Cry from the Grave for string quartet (2015), one of his most-performed pieces, uses music to reflect on “those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.” Requiem for the Enslaved is a rap opera featuring spoken word and hip-hop artist Marco Pavé and appears on Simon’s debut album for the Decca label (released last summer); it was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Now based in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at Georgetown University as a member of the performing arts faculty, Simon was deeply moved when he attended a landmark exhibition devoted to the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (see sidebar on p. 80), which was presented from September 2018 to April 2019 by the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art. Titled Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, this comprehensive retrospective — the fruit of seven years of intense curation by Leslie Umberger — marked the first major exhibition devoted to an artist who had been born into slavery.
In 1939, at the age of 84, Traylor suddenly began to express himself in an outpouring of paintings and drawings. By the time of his death in 1949, he had produced a remarkable series of untitled works. Many were lost, but around 1,200 survived.
They range from drawings of single human or animal figures to more complex compositions. Silhouette shapes or abstractions are characteristic of Traylor’s vocabulary and are painted using a palette often limited to brown and black, with an occasional eruption of red or deep blue.
The deceptively simple style cultivated by the entirely self-taught Traylor “has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paintings, and something spanking new,” wrote the late Peter Schjeldahl in a review of the Smithsonian exhibition. “Songlike rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images.”
Recognition by the white-dominated art establishment was belated, despite the efforts of fellow artist Charles Shannon, who befriended Traylor and attempted to champion his work. The reception history of Traylor is a textbook case of how curation in the visual arts, just as in music, can also be used to reinforce reductive, tone-policing labels and boundaries — or to dismantle them. Once the word about Traylor began to spread in the 1980s, when his work appeared as part of a larger show at the Corcoran Gallery, it tended to get categorized as “primitive” or “folk art.”
But we are now more attuned to the multifaceted implications of what Traylor created. His art truly exists between worlds. As the critic Alana Shilling-Janoff puts it, his images portray “nothing less than the predicament of a man caught between past enslavement he cannot forget and present liberty he struggles to accept.” In addition to his achievement as an artist, Traylor is “an eloquent annalist of a nation’s history: its brutality.”
Simon recalls that, before attending the exhibition, he had not been aware of Traylor’s life or work. But the encounter caused him to feel an immediate sense of connection to Traylor. An eyewitness to the social and political turbulence of this crucial period in American history, Traylor fascinated Simon as a creative figure who moved between the worlds of slavery and freedom, wealth and poverty, rural and urban life, white and Black culture, the traditional and the modern.
Between Worlds originated as a series commissioned for the young artists of the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. Simon created a series of solo pieces — one each for violin, viola, cello, and double bass — that can be played separately or as a kind of suite. Each lasts about four minutes and is marked “sorrowful” at the beginning.
Simon moves between worlds stylistically to evoke the kind of music he imagines Traylor would have heard. He spans such vernacular idioms as the blues with phrasings reminiscent of Bach to cast new light on the “themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion [that] pervade Traylor’s work” — he doesn’t limit himself to interacting with a particular drawing or painting. “In many ways, the simplified forms in Traylor’s artwork tell of the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture,” explains Simon. “I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study, hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.”
—THOMAS MAY
Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 5:30pm
STRINGS ATTACHED – Program Notes
Amy Schroeder violin | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Seckou Keita kora | Rhiannon Giddens vocals/multi-instrumentalist | Wu Man pipa | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Joshua Stauffer theorbo
Michael ABELS
Nassim KHORASSANI
Isolation Variation
Amy Schroeder violin
Duo Improvisation
Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Seckou Keita kora
INTERMISSION
Lullaby
Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Karen Ouzounian cello
Francesco Turrisi piano
Selections to be announced from the stage
The Company
Connection Variations
Throughout this edition of the Ojai Music Festival, Rhiannon Giddens and her colleagues have been celebrating the extraordinary creative boost that happens when artists — and audiences — venture into the hybrid spaces between worlds. Music is by its nature uncontainable and resists the boundaries and borders into which we are pressured to compartmentalize our experiences.
One of the side effects of the recent years of pandemic closure was to underscore how diminished we become when compelled to adapt to artificial constraints — and how essential it is to break free from whatever isolates us. The impossibility of live performance fueled a desire to reestablish connections through our technological Silk Road, the internet, and thus share musical discoveries with a global audience.
Michael Abels, whose collaboration with Giddens on the concert piece Omar’s Journey has been a centerpiece of the Festival, captures this phenomenon in the Isolation Variation he wrote in 2020 for violinist Hilary Hahn. Conceived as a solo encore piece, it “commemorates and validates the experience of being a musician in a time of constant change and uncertainty,” Hahn observes, “the hypnotic, repetitive, yet unpredictable nature of working indefinitely on something you love, a metamorphosis in progress.”
Defying racism, classism, political rivalries, and similarly divisive influences, music around the world has always thrived on exchange between cultures or between people across the hierarchies of a particular society.
Instruments cross borders, too. We have the actual Silk Road to thank for the diffusion of instruments across borders that helped shape Europe’s string culture, for example, which in turn became a hallmark of Western classical music.
“It may well have been along the Silk Road that some of the first ‘world music’ jam sessions took place,” says the ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin. “Innovative musicians and luthiers adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques.”
Our closing musical celebration replicates that process by staging encounters among the diverse kinds of string instruments from the cultures represented throughout the Festival: whether it’s Kayhan Kalhor and Seckou Keita improvising as a kamancheh-kora duo or Rhiannon Giddens and Wu Man bringing the banjo and pipa into dialogue. The stories of each of these instruments, as Giddens has so eloquently shown in her work, embody complex histories of social and political as well as artistic interaction.
“Humans came out of Africa and spread all over the world and changed along the way. That’s what instruments do as well,” observes Giddens. “The massive migration of instruments is connected to the migration of people. The banjo and the pipa have a common ancestor, just like we do.” Her hope is that the 2023 Ojai Music Festival encourages us to ignore artificial boundaries and see that “we’re really not that far apart.”
The spontaneity of the program is also grounded in Giddens’s philosophy. “Everybody brings something from what has been created over the course of the weekend, as we’ve been interacting through the concerts. These opportunities that we have to get to be together and play together are blessings. We need more collaboration in these worlds of music and more open-endedness, not less.”
—THOMAS MAY
Media


Live Stream
The Ojai Music Festival offers the world the experience of Libbey Bowl through free, high-quality live streaming. To watch the Live Streams of the 2023 concerts, click the following link:
Podcast
Welcome to OJAICast, where we pull back the curtain to take a sneak-peek at the upcoming Ojai Music Festival, June 8 to 11, 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 Emily Praetorius.
Virtual Talks
Get an inside look at the creative process with our free Virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music and ideas with the 2023 Festival artists, composers, innovators, and thinkers. Virtual Talks are free and open to the musically curious!
2023 Live Stream Replays
Seven of the 2023 concerts are available at no cost via live streaming… [continue reading]
Podcast Series: OJAICast 2023

SEASON 3
Welcome to OJAICAST, where we pull back the curtain to take a sneak-peek at the upcoming Ojai Music Festival, June 8 to 11, 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 Emily Praetorius.
Episode 1
Our first episode gives an in-depth look into the 77th Ojai Music Festival (June 8 – 11, 2023), curated by Music Director Rhiannon Giddens. Special guest Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian will give us some insights into the creation of this year’s festival programming and background on some of pieces being played.
Ojai Virtual Talks, Rhiannon Giddens
Uncovering the History of the Banjo with Rhiannon Giddens
Emily Praetorius, host and producer
Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICast theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music Excerpts in this Episode:
I’m on My Way – Rhiannon Giddens
Performed by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi
Liquid Borders – Gabriela Ortiz
Performed by red fish blue fish
Clock Catcher – Flying Lotus
Performed by Attacca Quartet
Ghost Opera – Tan Dun
Performed by Kronos Quartet
Episode 2
Our second episode takes a look at the idea of composing across boundaries with 2023 Festival composers Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Carlos Simon.
Shawn Okpebholo
Ojai Virtual Talks: Lei Liang and Steve Schick
Niloufar Nourbakhsh and IFCA
Carlos Simon, Requiem for the Enslaved
Bill Traylor
Emily Praetorius, host and producer
Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICast theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music Excerpts in this Episode:
mi sueño: afro-flamenco – Shawn Okpebholo
Performed by Clare Longendyke
The Willows are New – Chou Wen-Chung
Performed by Gloria Cheng
Veiled – Niloufar Nourbakhsh
Performed by Amanda Gookin
Between Worlds – Carlos Simon
Performed by Julia Mirzoev
Episode 3
Our final episode welcomes kamancheh player Niloufar Shiri, pipa player Wu Man, and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi to the podcast, where they discuss the history of their instruments, how they are played in contemporary music today, and what we can look forward to in this year’s Festival programming.
Niloufar Shiri Performs at Ojai Meadows Preserve
Niloufar Shiri
Pop Up Pipa with Wu Man
Francesco Turrisi: Playlist & Ojai Talk
Francesco Turrisi
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi Met Museum Concert
Emily Praetorius, host and producer
Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICast theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music Excerpts in this Episode:
Niloufar Shiri Improvisation
Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi Met Museum Concert
Also available on SPOTIFY and APPLE PODCASTS
OJAICast SEASON 2
OJAICast SEASON 1
ABOUT OUR OJAICAST HOST
Emily Praetorius, former Ojai Music Festival intern and Rothenberg Intern Fellow, is a current Composition DMA candidate at Columbia University. She previously studied composition and clarinet performance at the University of Redlands (BM) and composition at Manhattan School of Music (MM). She has studied with Kathryn Nevin (clarinet), Susan Botti, Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, and Anthony Suter. Emily is from Ojai, CA and lives in New York City where she is a proud co-owner of Kuro Kirin Espresso & Coffee.
Thank you for your interest in the 2023 Ojai Music Festival!

A hallmark of groundbreaking musical experiences in idyllic Ojai, we welcome Grammy-winning Rhiannon Giddens to lead the 77th edition of our annual Festival. The four-day event includes Omar’s Journey based on Gidden’s new opera Omar and Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds inspired by the works of painter Bill Traylor. Get 15% off tickets when you enter the code CAAM15 at checkout.
DISCOUNT INFORMATION AND LIMITATIONS:
The CAAM15 discount code has a 2-ticket minimum and only applies to 2023 Ojai Music Festival tickets. The code will expire on June 12, 2023. Discount codes cannot be applied to ticket orders that have already been purchased. All ticket orders are non-refundable. If you can’t attend a concert, contact the Box Office at least 24 hours prior to the concert start time to turn your tickets into a donation. Contact the Box Office for any other questions or concerns.
Box Ofice:
Open 10 am – 5 pm, Monday – Friday
[email protected]
805 646 2053
Music Sounds Better in Ojai Winner Announced!


And the winner is Jules Weismann for our Design Challenge!
Thanks to the participants for submitting their artwork to our design challenge and to the panelists for helping us select the winning design.
We appreciated the heartfelt and imaginative spirit of all the designers, and we landed with our favorite by Ojai artist Jules Weismann.
About Jules Weismann
Jules Weissman works with digital and multimedia mediums to explore themes of identity and connection. With a background in graphic design and a love for experimentation, she often finds her inspiration in Ojai, where she lives with the oldest cat in the world.
View some of our honorable mentions from other designers:
Look for new limited edition merchandise with some of these designs at the upcoming June Festival!
2023 Music Director Rhiannon Giddens and Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian Share Updates to the 77th Ojai Music Festival
“I am so excited to get to work with the Ojai Music Festival as Music Director for 2023. With Ojai, I am able to sit at the crossroads of all that I am artistically and feel fully supported by the Festival team and by Ojai’s audiences. With the artists that we’re bringing out next June, the future is in celebration of how we come together as humans – despite boxes, boundaries, and borders thrown up with the intent to keep us apart.” – Rhiannon Giddens, 2023 Ojai Festival Music Director
Ojai welcomes guest artists to the 2023 Festival, including Wu Man (pipa), Kayhan Kalhor (kamancheh/composer), 2015 Ojai Music Director Steven Schick (conductor/percussion), Francesco Turrisi (multi-instrumentalist), Seckou Keita (kora), Gloria Cheng (piano), Emi Ferguson (flute), Justin Robinson (fiddle), Michi Wiancko (violin), and Leonard Hayes (piano); featured singers Cheryse McLeod Lewis (mezzo-soprano), Limmie Pulliam (tenor), and Michael Preacely (bass-baritone); guest ensembles Attacca Quartet, red fish blue fish (percussion), and members of the Silkroad Ensemble: Mazz Swift (violin), Mario Gotoh (violin/viola), Karen Ouzounian (cello), and Shawn Conley (double bass)
Highlights of the 2023 Festival programming:
• The Festival opens with Gabriela Ortiz’s Liquid Borders performed by red fish blue fish directed by Steven Schick alongside the Attacca Quartet in works of John Adams, Flying Lotus, Rhiannon Giddens, Philip Glass, Haydn, Kayhan Kalhor, and Squarepusher
• World Premiere of Omar’s Journey, an Ojai commissioned suite for voices and chamber ensemble drawn from the opera Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels with Giddens (soprano) singing the role of Julie. The new work, placed in the context of the journey of Omar Ibn Said (1770-1864), is contextualized by the music of Senegal and the Carolinas
• World Premiere of an Ojai Music Festival commission by Aida Shirazi, founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA), for kamancheh and electronics; and Festival-wide programming in honor of the IFCA with works by Niloufar Nourbaksh, Nina Barzegar, Nasim Khorassani, and Golfam Khayam
• A reimagining of Tan Dun’s pioneering Ghost Opera for pipa and string quartet with Wu Man, Attacca Quartet, PeiJu Chien-Pott (dancer/choreographer), and Jon Reimer (director)
• An acoustic concert with Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi with music ranging from the Baroque to Appalachian ballads and traditional Black American songs as well as excerpts from Songs of Flight by Shawn Okpebholo
• Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds, four solo string works placed in visual context by their source of inspiration: the paintings of self-taught artist Bill Traylor (1853-1949) whose lived experience spanned the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration
• An “Early Music” concert curated by Francesco Turrisi with music spanning from ancient pipa music to works of Dowland and Monteverdi
• “Strings Attached” concert – a festive finale of string instruments from cultures across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East
• Activities designed to welcome and engage the community throughout the Festival include four free events – two early morning concerts with Niloufar Shiri (kamancheh) and Mario Gotoh (violin), and with Seckou Keita (kora); an interactive community concert performance of Elliot Cole’s Flowerpot Music led by Steven Schick; and a reading/musical performance by Rhiannon Giddens of her new children’s book Build a House
Additional works featured throughout the Festival by Margaret Bonds, Chou Wen-chung, Tyson Gholston Davis, Ge Gan-Ru, Lei Liang, Jessie Montgomery, Shawn Okpebholo, and Edgard Varèse
OJAI, California — March 15, 2023— The 77th Ojai Music Festival, June 8 to 11, 2023, welcomes acclaimed musician and composer Rhiannon Gidden as Music Director. Along with Festival Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian, Giddens shares additional details for the upcoming Festival which will include more than 20 music events in the beautiful setting of the Ojai Valley.
“Rhiannon Giddens has an extraordinarily wide embrace of music, history, and culture. She uses her art to tell essential stories, to illuminate, and to create deeper understanding, dissolving false boundaries between people and cultures,” adds Guzelimian. “Rhiannon’s programs for the 2023 Ojai Festival touch on so many of her interests across musical genres, from Baroque music to Black traditions in American roots music, from classical music from China and Persia to the influence of non-Western music on American contemporary works. This is a Festival that celebrates liquid borders between cultures and musics, so we appropriately begin the programming with Gabriela Ortiz’s work of the same name. I am thrilled to be working with all our 2023 Festival artists and with Rhiannon as we bring her range of musical interests to Ojai audiences.”
One of the 2023 Festival program anchors will be Omar’s Journey, an Ojai-commissioned suite for voices and small chamber ensemble drawn from the recently premiered and widely acclaimed opera Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels. For Ojai, this intimate concert version of Omar will be placed in the context of the journey of Omar Ibn Said (1770-1864), a Muslim scholar who was captured from his native Senegal and enslaved in North and South Carolina. Omar’s Journey will pair the new Giddens/Abels suite with the musical traditions of Senegal and the Carolinas of his lifetime. This world premiere features Giddens, soprano, singing the role of Julie for the first time, joined by Cheryse McLeod-Lewis (mezzo-soprano), Limmie Pulliam (tenor), and Michael Preacely (bass-baritone).
During this 77th edition of the Ojai Festival, additional music centerpieces include a reimagining of Tan Dun’s pioneering Ghost Opera performed by Wu Man and Attacca Quartet. Written in 1994, Tan’s Ghost Opera evokes the spirits of Bach and Shakespeare, standing with the ancient folk traditions of traditional shamanistic Chinese music. Ojai’s reimagined performance of Tan’s work is directed by Jon Reimer with dancer/choreographer PeiJu Chien-Pott.
Gabriela Ortiz’s Liquid Borders performed by red fish blue fish directed by Steven Schick opens the Festival. Liquid Borders will be followed by works of John Adams, Flying Lotus, Rhiannon Giddens, Philip Glass, Haydn, Kayhan Kalhor, and Squarepusher curated and performed by the Attacca Quartet.
A complete performance of Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds, a quartet of string works placed directly in the visual context of the art of Bill Traylor (1853-1949), will be performed by members of the Silkroad Ensemble – Mazz Swift, Mario Gotoh, Karen Ouzounian, and Shawn Conley – with projection mapping by Ross Karre. Traylor’s lived experience spanned the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Great Migration. Carlos Simon wrote, “Themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion pervade Traylor’s work. I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study; hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.”
The Saturday morning concert, “The Willows are New,” celebrates a range of works by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, one of the founding members of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA), Lei Liang, Ge Gan-Ru, and Chou Wen-chung followed by solo improvisations by renowned kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor.
Ojai’s “Early Music” concert on Sunday, June 11, curated by Francesco Turrisi, plays on the idea of “old music and on music for the first hours of the day.” Turrisi’s program celebrates thousand-year-old works for solo pipa, to Renaissance consort music, from ancient Persian melodies to modal jazz improvisations.
The 2023 Festival concludes with an exuberant musical summit performed by Rhiannon Giddens, Wu Man, Kayhan Kalhor, Seckou Keita, Justin Robinson, Francesco Turrisi, Michi Wiancko, and members of the Silkroad Ensemble – Mario Gotoh, Karen Ouzounian, Mazz Swift, and Shawn Conley. This family jam session “Strings Attached” features solos and collaborations among the bowed and plucked string instruments from cultures across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
In honor of what would have been his 100th birthday, the Festival will feature works of Chinese American composer Chou Wen-chung coupled with the music of Edgard Varèse who was Chou’s mentor. The Festival will also present music by Michael Abels, John Adams, Nina Barzegar, Margaret Bonds, Tyson Gholston Davis, Flying Lotus, Ge Gan-Ru, Rhiannon Giddens, Philip Glass, Kayhan Kalhor, Golfam Khayam, Nasim Khorassani, Lei Liang, Jessie Montgomery, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Shawn Okpebholo, and Caroline Shaw.
2023 Featured Artists
Rhiannon Giddens’ 2023 collaborators include a mix of Festival debuts and returning artists. Audiences will be introduced to Leonard Hayes (piano), Kayhan Kalhor (kamancheh/composer), Seckou Keita (kora), Justin Robinson (fiddle), Michi Wiancko (violin), members of the Silkroad Ensemble including Mazz Swift (violin), Mario Gotoh (violin/viola), Karen Ouzounian (cello), and Shawn Conley (double bass), and singers Cheryse McLeod-Lewis (mezzo-soprano), Limmie Pulliam (tenor), and Michael Preacely (bass-baritone).
Making welcome returns to Ojai will be percussionist/conductor Steven Schick, Music Director for the 2015 Festival, and pipa player Wu Man who last appeared with Schick. From the 2021 Festival will be multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, Emi Ferguson (flute), and the Attacca Quartet (violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee), as well as Gloria Cheng (piano) and red fish blue fish (percussion ensemble), both last seen at the 2015 Festival.
Community Offerings
An integral part of the immersive Ojai Festival experience are the free community activities that occur in the Libbey Park and throughout Ojai. The 2023 Festival will include two morning Meditations at Chaparral Auditorium, the first begins Saturday, June 10 with Niloufar Shiri, kamancheh and Mario Gotoh, violin. On Sunday, June 11 the Morning Meditation features Seckou Keita, kora.
Percussionist/conductor Steven Schick welcomes everyone to make music together in the Libbey Park on Sunday afternoon. Led by Schick, the Ojai community and patrons will be invited to participate in an interactive performance of Elliot Cole’s Flowerpot Music.
On the same Sunday afternoon at Libbey Park, Rhiannon Giddens offers a special family event for children of all ages. Giddens will do a reading and musical performance of her debut book Build a House. The picture book, published by Candlewick Press, was inspired by a song that Giddens wrote and recorded with Yo-Yo Ma to commemorate Juneteenth 2020.
Beyond Ojai: Online Offerings
The Ojai Music Festival lives beyond the flagship four-day festival in June, allowing further engagement with audiences worldwide. These include the Festival’s state-of-the-art live streaming and archived library of concerts; Virtual Ojai Talks with featured Festival artists and alum leading up to the Festival; and OjaiCAST, the podcast series that provides insights on upcoming programming. The Festival’s digital projects are available at OjaiFestival.org.
Ojai on the Air with WQXR/New Sounds with host John Schaefer continues this year. The series of programs connects audiences and artists who engage deeply with adventurous new music. The first program, which debuted in October 2022 and is archived and available at NewSounds.org (episodes 4668-4671) featured discipline colliding collective AMOC, Ojai’s 2022 Music Director. Details of the second installment with 2023 Music Director Rhiannon Giddens will be announced soon. Sign up for the New Sounds newsletter to be informed of dates and about other musical adventures also at NewSounds.org.
Single Tickets for the 2023 Ojai Music Festival
Single Tickets are available and may be purchased at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. Single tickets range from $150 to $50 for reserved seating in the Libbey Bowl. General admission for the Lawn in Libbey Bowl is $20. Add-on event prices range from $35 to $50. Student discounts, OjaiNEXT young professional discounts, and group sales are available by inquiring with our Box Office.
RHIANNON GIDDENS, MUSIC DIRECTOR OF THE 2023 OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL
The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. She most recently won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for They’re Calling Me Home and was also nominated for Best American Roots Song for “Avalon” from They’re Calling Me Home, which she made with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Giddens is now a two-time winner and eight-time Grammy nominee for her work as a soloist and collaborator.
They’re Calling Me Home was released by Nonesuch last April and has been widely celebrated by the NY Times, NPR Music, NPR, Rolling Stone, People, Associated Press and far beyond, with No Depression deeming it “a near perfect album…her finest work to date.” Recorded over six days in the early phase of the pandemic in a small studio outside of Dublin, Ireland – where both Giddens and Turrisi live – They’re Calling Me Home manages to effortlessly blend the music of their native and adoptive countries: America, Italy, and Ireland. The album speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death.
Giddens’ lifelong mission is to lift people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”
Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.
Giddens was featured in Ken Burns’ Country Music series, which aired on PBS, where she spoke about the African-American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co- produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival.
Giddens is in the midst of a tremendous 2022. She recently announced the publication of her first book, Build a House (October 2022). Lucy Negro Redux, the ballet Giddens wrote the music for, had its premiere at the Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019 and toured in 2022), and the libretto and music for Giddens’ original opera, Omar, in collaboration with Michael Abels, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said, premiered at the Spoleto USA Festival in May. Giddens is also curating a four-concert Perspectives series as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2022–2023 season. Named Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble in 2020, Giddens is developing new programs for that ensemble, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders. As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.
Rhiannon Giddens made her debut at the Ojai Music Festival in September 2021 with Music Director John Adams.
ARA GUZELIMIAN, ARTISTIC AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Ara Guzelimian is Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival, having begun in that position in July 2020. The appointment culminates many years of association with the Festival including tenures as director of the Ojai Talks and as Artistic Director from 1992–97. Guzelimian stepped down as Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School in New York City in June 2020, having served in that position since 2007. At Juilliard, he worked closely with the president in overseeing the faculty, curriculum, and artistic planning of the distinguished performing arts conservatory in all three of its divisions: dance, drama, and music. He continues at Juilliard as Special Advisor, Office of the President.
Prior to the Juilliard appointment, he was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. Guzelimian serves as artistic consultant for the Marlboro Music Festival and School in Vermont. He is a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Music Awards, the artistic committee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in London, and a board member of the Amphion and Pacific Harmony Foundations. He is also a member of the music visiting committee of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. In 2020, Guzelimian was appointed to the advisory panel of the Birgit Nilsson Foundation in Sweden.
Previously, Guzelimian held the position of Artistic Administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, and he was long associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the beginning of his career, first as producer for the orchestra’s national radio broadcasts and, subsequently, as Artistic Administrator. Guzelimian is editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, he was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL
The Ojai Music Festival represents an ideal of adventurous, openminded, and openhearted programming in the most beautiful and welcoming of settings, with audiences and artists to match its aspirations. Marking its 75th anniversary season last year, the Festival remains a creative laboratory for thought-provoking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic outdoor setting. Each Festival’s narrative is guided by a different Music Director, whose distinctive perspectives shape programming — ensuring energized festivals year after year.
Throughout each year, the Ojai Music Festival contributes to Southern California’s cultural landscape with in-person and online Festival-related programming as well as robust educational offerings that serve thousands of public-school students and seniors. The organization’s apex is the world-renowned four-day Festival, which takes place in Ojai, a breathtaking valley 75 miles from Los Angeles, which is a perennial platform for the fresh and unexpected. During the immersive experience, a mingling of the most curious take part in concerts, symposia, free community events, and social gatherings. During the intimate Festival weekend, considered a highlight of the international music summer season, Ojai welcomes up to 5,000 patrons and reaches 35 times more audiences worldwide through live and on- demand streaming of concerts and discussions throughout the year.
Since its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has presented broad-ranging programs in unusual ways with an eclectic mix of new and rarely performed music, as well as refreshing juxtapositions of musical styles. Through its signature structure of the Artistic Director appointing a different Music Director each year, Ojai has presented a “who’s who” of music including the multi-disciplinary colliding collective AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Vijay Iyer, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Barbara Hannigan in recent years; throughout its history, featured artists have included Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, David Robertson, Eighth Blackbird, George Benjamin, Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, Jeremy Denk, Steven Schick, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Sellars.
Press contacts:
Ojai Music Festival: Gina Gutierrez, [email protected] (805) 646-2181 National/International: Nikki Scandalios, [email protected] (704) 340-4094
In the Life of an Intern
by Landon Wilson, Manhattan School of Music, Ojai Alumnus 2022

The Ojai Music Festival’s Arts Management Internship Program is entering its 15th year of providing career opportunities for young stewards of boundary-bending music. Our internship program supports college students from a variety of fields and interests. From production, to the box office, to marketing, to technology, interns have become a vital part of what makes the Festival happen each year, finding themselves deeply entwined in every department.
This article follows Landon Wilson’s story of his time as one of our 15 Arts Management Interns for the 2022 Festival. Landon was Managing Director Gina Gutierrez’s right-hand-intern working in areas of social media, marketing and press relations, but as you will read, this role involves much more! Since the internship in June 2022, Landon has been able to utilize the skills developed at the Ojai Music Festival as the Artistic Associate for AMOC*, while completing a degree at the Manhattan School of Music.
Introduction by Madeline Grass Doss, Patron Services & Office Administrator, Ojai Alumna 2021
Arriving in Ojai
It was day one in SoCal! After touching down at LAX, a few other interns and I made our way up the Pacific Coast Highway to meet the Festival’s Intern Coordinator, Laura Walter, who showed us around palm-lined Ojai Ave upon arriving in town.

We settled into our homestays at the Taormina Theosophical Institute and met up with the other interns for a welcome dinner at Jim and Rob’s Fresh Grill. This was a wonderful moment for us to get to know one another. Like me, many interns had traveled across the country to spend a few weeks working in picturesque Ojai!
Getting Acquainted
The next day, the internship program kicked off with a breakfast hosted by Festival leadership and staff. This included meeting my fabulous mentor, Gina Gutierrez. (the Festival’s Managing Director), who would guide my time in Ojai as the Marketing and Social Media Intern. We immediately jumped into preparing a social media and communications calendar and discussing creative ways to promote the Festival’s 18 events with Music Director AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company). Gina encouraged me to explore Ojai and use the liminal time to capture content.
In this spirit, many of the interns and I took advantage of this short opportunity for downtime before the Festival to discover greater Ojai. This included locals taking us on thoughtful guided tours of the Ojai Valley Museum, hiking trails, and even the Ojai Olive Oil Company, where we had a delicious afternoon tasting their 50+ varieties. A personal highlight was spending some time browsing a quintessential Ojai spot—Bart’s Books.
The energy in the Festival office was palpable as more staff arrived. The iconic green lanterns began to appear across the street in Libbey Park, signifying the town’s overnight transformation from an idyllic bohemian getaway to the center of the classical music world! Much to my delight, it soon became apparent that I would be able to diversify my experience and work across departments, often with Mary Ann Makee with the Front of House staff, and with Producer Fiona Digney with the production team.
It was during this time that I also met AMOC* whose 17 members could be found in the Libbey Bowl and across Ojai in rehearsals. They would occasionally pop their heads into the office, adding to the kinetic energy in the air that made me all the more excited to develop the marketing materials with Gina. The start of the Festival was rapidly approaching!
“Unique mentorship experiences with the Festival’s staff allowed me to explore different facets of the industry and deepen my commitment to further developing as a well-rounded arts administrator.”
—LANDON WILSON, Manhattan School of Music, Ojai Alumnus 2022
Ojai Runs AMOC*: the 76th Festival Weekend

The Festival was finally here! Being used to navigating my home base NYC on foot, I loved starting the day with an early-morning walk to the office with an avocado toast and pistachio rose latte (shoutout to Café BōKU!) before beginning the busy work day ahead. Upon arriving at the office, I got a call from Fiona asking me to turn pages for a rehearsal in Libbey Bowl, which led to me sitting on stage with AMOC* for three performances! Gina and I regrouped at lunch and developed a plan for the rest of the day, which included meeting with the Festival’s publicist to prepare press packets for the visiting media and attending several performances and world premieres.
As the weekend progressed, Ojai seemed to be teeming with increasing anticipation for each concert. The Festival featured many afternoon performances in the Libbey Bowl, where I worked with the unflappable Front of House staff and interns as an usher, getting to welcome the loyal and enthusiastic patrons of the Ojai Music Festival. I was always surprised to see who was mingling between concerts, whether it be composer John Adams or architect Frank Gehry, everyone brought an appetite for curiosity to discover new musical ideas.

The Festival culminated with a rousing finale concert, featuring all of AMOC* and a particularly catchy Julius Eastman tune that embodied the mood of the Festival and my experience as an intern. Rewatch that last concert here, and you’ll know what I mean!
Host Family
The internship ended as quickly as it began. It was time to say goodbye to the Festival team, my new intern friends, and my lovely hosts. The Dierdre Daly connected me with a wonderful couple from NYC that had relocated to Ojai during the pandemic. Carol, Anan, and their sweet dog Anbu were incredibly welcoming hosts that attended many of the performances, making for stirring evening conversations and my time in Ojai all the more enjoyable.
Looking Forward
I don’t think a day has passed since last June that I haven’t reminisced on my time in Ojai. Interning with the Festival was a whirlwind two weeks of immersive learning opportunities that helped shape my professional aspirations. Unique mentorship experiences with the Festival’s staff allowed me to explore different facets of the industry and deepen my commitment to further developing as a well-rounded arts administrator. I can’t wait to return this June for the 77th Ojai Music Festival!
More content captured by Landon









Music Sounds Better in Ojai

Calling all artists, illustrators and music enthusiasts:
Enter our Design Challenge!
The Ojai Valley is known to be a special place that inspires the arts to flourish like music! The Festival is asking you to show us how music sounds better in Ojai by submitting your original artwork incorporating the words “Music Sounds Better in Ojai” to our 2023 Festival Design Challenge. The winning design will be shared on limited edition merchandise like stickers and t-shirts, plus on our website and social media platforms.
Ignite your imagination!
Your design should reflect creative innovation, the spirit of adventure, and surprise, as these are synonymous with the Ojai Music Festival for the last 77 years!
How it works:
Submission Guidelines and Deadlines
February 17: Call for artists is announced
March 10 PST by midnight: Submissions due
March 17: Winner announced
The final winners from each age category will be announced March 16 and receive two free 4-day series passes to this year’s Festival, plus limited-edition merchandise, and your work featured on our website, Instagram, and newsletter. Our second and third prize winners will receive a pair of lawn tickets and their designs will also be listed on our Instagram and Website.
Guidelines
- All entries must be submitted on or before midnight March 10 PST
- All entries must include the phrase “Music Sounds Better in Ojai”
- There is no fee to submit
- The winning design will receive two series passes to the 2023 Festival, merchandise with design
- There are two categories: middle school to high school and adults 18+ (Entrants under the age of 18 must have a parent or guardian sign the application)
- Submission must be accompanied by the completed form (see link below)
- Incomplete entry forms will be deemed invalid, and artwork will not be judged
- All submitted designs and source images must be the original work of the person submitting the application. Third-party artwork or images, including clipart or copyrighted graphics, may not be used
- By submitting an entry, the person agrees that the Ojai Music Festival will become the rightful owner of the image and may alter and or reproduce the image at its discretion
- All entries will be judged on the artwork’s creative ideas that reflect the uniqueness of the Ojai Music Festival
- Judging decisions are final and may not be appealed
- Entries may be shared by the Ojai Music Festival included but not limited to the Festival’s website, email communications, and its social media platforms
- To participate, please complete form and artwork below: