Ojai has been a creative laboratory for today’s pathbreaking artists featuring refreshing new works to open our hearts and minds.
Dear Friends,
As all of us are hunkered down during these challenging times, we invite you to stay connected through the music that inspires, challenges and delights us in Ojai. Here are a few concerts archived of Ojai Music Festival performances featuring the likes of Julia Bullock, Claire Chase, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
You can access more concerts on our YouTube channel, too. Click here >
Happy viewing! The Ojai Music Festival staff
Josephine Baker: A Portrait – World Premiere Arrangements and new music by Tyshawn Sorey ICE Julia Bullock, soprano Tyshawn Sorey, piano and drums
Density 2036
EDGARD VARÉSE: Density 21.5 Claire Chase, flute SUZANNE FARRIN: The Stimulus of Loss for glissando headjoint and recorded ondes martenot Claire Chase, flute TYSHAWN SOREY: Bertha’s Lair Claire Chase, contrabass flute | Tyshawn Sorey, drums VIJAY IYER: Flute Goals (Five Empty Chambers) for tape Claire Chase, improvised flute PAUCHI SASAKI: Gama XV Claire Chase, bass flute/vocals/speaker dress | Pauchi Sasaki, violin/electronics/vocals/speaker dress MARCOS BALTER: Pan (excerpt) Claire Chase, flute | International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
Charles Ives: Unanswered Question Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 45 Farewell (arr. Angel Hernandez-Lovera)
John Cage: Once Upon a Time from Living Room Music Johann Sebastian Bach: Es ist genug György Kurtag: The Answered Unanswered Question Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin | Maria Ursprung, stage director | Mahler Chamber Orchestra
William Byrd – Fantasy in C Major Henry Purcell – Fairest Isle from King Arthur (arr. Anthony Romaniuk) Johann Sebastian Bach – Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – Fantasy in F# Dmitri Shostakovich – Prelude in A minor Dmitri Shostakovich – Fugue in C Major Bela Bartok – First Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm from Mikrokosmos, Book VI George Crumb – Twin Suns from Makrokosmos, Book II Gyorgy Ligeti – White on White from Etudes, Book III Henry Purcell – Fantasia No. 10 in C minor
Anthony Romaniuk, piano and harpsichord Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin | JACK Quartet
Program Notes by Christopher Hailey
We improvise with what is in our grasp, by shaping that which is; we mourn with empty hands, reaching out for that which was. This concert in two parts explores presence and absence, the self-sufficient ‘kingdom of the mind’ and the exile of grief.
The fantasy, prelude, fugue, and etude all have roots in improvisation, the capacity to elaborate, ex tempore, on an idea, a theme or motif. William Byrd created the template for the keyboard fantasy in late Renaissance England, a form described by Thomas Morley as a piece in which “a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit.” Henry Purcell, without a doubt the finest English composer of his era, influenced Benjamin Britten, among others, with his operas, including King Arthur; his fantasias for viol consort, on the other hand, look back to Byrd and Morley and were among the last of their kind. Less than half a century later J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue represents a significant expansion upon Byrd’s and Purcell’s model, combining elements of both toccata and recitative in the fantasy and improvisatory freedom in a three-voice fugue on an extended and highly chromatic subject.
The emotional intensity of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue is unusual for Bach, but wholly characteristic of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who, like his father, was renowned for his keyboard improvisations. Charles Burney, after a visit with the younger Bach, described an impromptu after-dinner concert during which Bach “grew so animated and possessed, that he not only played, but looked like one inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance.” The Fantasy in F minor is a late work, whose remarkable expressive range inspired tonight’s free adaption for keyboard and violin.
Dimitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues pay homage to the 48 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier through numerous direct and indirect allusions.
In the etudes that follow, the instrument at hand is both subject and medium, the musical idea cloaked as a technical challenge. Béla Bartók’s six books of Mikrokosmos, composed between 1926 and 1939, are pedagogical in intent. The first number of book VI, “Free Variations,” features mixed meter rhythms derived from Bulgarian folk music. “Two Suns,” from the second book of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos (another act of homage), explores piano resonance through direct manipulation of its strings. In György Ligeti’s White on White, from his unfinished third book of etudes, a tranquil opening canon is followed by a frenzy of polyrhythms; only at the end do black keys intrude upon the white-key expanses.
May 12
70th Ojai Music Festival
KAIJA SAARIAHO’S La Passion De Simone
Julia Bullock, soprano Joana Carneiro, conductor Peter Sellars, director ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) Roomful of Teeth
Program Notes by Christopher Hailey
That may depend on which Simone. Simone Weil was many things: a brilliant philosopher, a wayward Marxist theoretician (and sparring partner with Trotsky), trade union activist and factory worker, dedicated teacher, linguist, controversial cultural historian, Jewish anti-Semite, pacifist, altruist, anarchist, front-line soldier for the Spanish Republic, ascetic Catholic mystic, member of the French Resistance … “I envied her,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “for having a heart which could beat right across the world,” adding elsewhere:
Her intelligence, her asceticism, her total commitment, and her sheer courage – all these filled me with admiration; though I knew that, had she met me, she would have been very far from reciprocating my attitude. I could not absorb her into my universe, and this seemed to constitute a vague threat to me.
The threat is real because Simone Weil was a woman of radical consequence. Throughout her short life every cause, every revelation entailed a course of action; her intellectual, emotional, and spiritual convictions were inscribed in the fiber of her physical being, leading, in the end, to the extinction of that very self.
Simone Weil (1909–43), born in Paris into a loving, well-to-do agnostic Jewish family, had all the benefits of culture and education. She was a brilliant student of philosophy and embarked on a teaching career, which she interrupted to spend a year working in a factory to experience firsthand the workers’ plight. With the rise of Hitler she engaged more directly in contemporary politics, writing essays, leading demonstrations, and joining a fighting brigade against fascism in Spain. While recuperating from a serious accident, a mystical experience led her to embrace Catholicism (without, however, joining the church), after which issues of moral and ethical philosophy began to dominate her thinking. With France, and in particular its Jewish citizens, under threat she accompanied her parents to safety in America, before returning to Britain to serve the French government in exile. Already weakened by tuberculosis, she died, it is said, from self-starvation born of her deep empathy for the suffering of the French people under German occupation. Amin Maalouf has written:
At the age of 34, between the ages of Jesus and Mozart, a young woman decided to leave this world. The time was August 1943, and humanity had just reached a summit of barbarity. Simone Weil passed away without a sound, as if by silent protest, in the anonymity of a small English hospital. Her choice to die speaks to us of her rejection of any form of submission – to violence and hate, to Nazism and Stalinism, but also to a dehumanising industrial society that deprives individuals of their substance and leads them into nothingness. Simone’s writings, most of which were published after her death, are an attempt to find a way out of this nothingness. Her passion is a discreet but powerful signpost in our misguided world.
La Passion de Simone is the result of a collaborative interchange between Maalouf, Kaija Saariaho, and Peter Sellars, who first suggested Weil as a subject for what would become a “Musical Journey in Fifteen Stations.” These collaborators each brought to the project his or her Simone Weil. Saariaho recalls:
… together we chose the different parts of Weil’s work and life for the libretto before I began composing. Whereas I have always been fascinated by Simone’s striving for abstract (mathematical) and spiritual-intellectual goals, Peter is interested in her social awareness and political activities. Amin brought out the gaping discrepancy between her philosophy and her life, showing the fate of the frail human being amongst great ideas. In addition to Simone Weil’s life and ideas, many general questions of human existence are presented in Amin’s text.
Each of the text’s fifteen stations – a structure that recalls the Stations of the Cross of the medieval passion play – presents an aspect of Weil’s life and thinking, though largely seen from the perspective of a narrator, a soprano who represents an imaginary sister – older? younger? we are never sure. In any event this narrator is rooted in a sensibility closer to our own, as she considers Weil from perspectives that are now critical, now puzzled, here accusatory, there awed.
The original version of La Passion de Simone, premiered in Vienna in 2006, is scored for full chorus and orchestra with electronics. In the chamber version, created in 2013 and heard here in its US premiere, the orchestra is reduced to 19 players without electronics and the chorus has become four solo voices. This reduction of forces serves to accentuate the exquisite delicacy of Saariaho’s score, while at the same time introducing an element of astringency to its rich colors and textures. The effect is of a slowly turning cushion of sound that supports both the sinuous line of the narrator’s voice, as well as the dry precision of Weil’s own words, which are interspersed as spoken text.
La Passion de Simone is a work that both lures and cautions. Saariaho’s score is sensuous and enticing – a striking contrast to the prickly sensibility of a woman known for her limitless capacity for compassion, but notoriously averse to physical contact. Maalouf’s narrator invites us to engage with the life of this remarkable woman, but makes clear that she is ultimately unknowable. We approach the unapproachable through a music of crystalline beauty, a text of hesitant astonishment. Simone Weil rushed into possession only to relinquish her hold; we can only follow at a distance.
May 5
72nd Ojai Music Festival Friday Late Night
JOHN LUTHER ADAMS Everything That Rises
JACK Quartet
Program Notes by Christopher Hailey
Rise Above
John Luther Adams has a special relationship with Ojai. Since 2009 eight of his works have been performed here, including three West Coast premieres (Inuksuit in 2012, and Sila: The Breath of the World and Become River in 2015). Ojai is a natural fit for a composer so sensitive to pulse of nature. From the icy expanses of the Alaskan tundra to the naked clarity of the Sonoran Desert, Adams has set out to find “a new music drawn from the light, the air, the landscapes, and the weather” of the environments in which he has lived. These environments in turn have shaped the language and syntax of the music he makes.
Adams is perhaps best known for works written for orchestra or larger ensembles that are characterized by prismatic colors and complex, interlacing lines. “I never imagined I would write a string quartet. Then I heard the JACK Quartet, and I understood how I might be able to make the medium my own.” His first two string quartets, The Wind in High Places (2011) and untouched (2015) featured natural harmonics and open strings. In the third, Canticles of the Sky (2015), adapted from the choir work Canticles of the Holy Wind, “the musicians finally touch the fingerboards of their instruments.” These three works, roughly twenty minutes each, were followed by Everything That Rises, of which Adams writes:
This fourth quartet is more expansive, both in time and in space. It grows out of Sila: The Breath of the World − a performance-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds.
Over the course of an hour, the lines spin out − always rising − in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward . . . until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.
The quartet consists of two principal elements, a fundamental tone in the cello and, in the upper strings, arrayed across the overtone spectrum, gently ascending gestures inflected by trills. Over the course of the piece these elements gradually rise from the deepest to the highest registers, each instrument seemingly independent, the intervals, drawn from ever higher partials of that fundamental tone, becoming ever smaller, a rainbow unfolding, growing ever brighter in tranquil, invisible radiance.
Adams shares with Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, HoraţiuRădulescu, and Georg Friedrich Haas a fascination with the natural harmonic series, both for its inherent beauty and as a way out of the constrictions of languages—whether tonal or serial—based on twelve-note equal-temperament. Theirs is music as a natural phenomenon in which dissonance and consonance, tension and release, departure and arrival are redefined or even abandoned to move beyond polar dichotomies, away from linear narrative toward a new kind of motion, a different sense of time, space, and scale. In Everything That Rises John Luther Adams brings that new sensibility to Ojai at a time of healing and reflection.
APRIL 28
73rd Ojai Music Festival Friday Night, Part II
CLAUDE VIVIER Lonely Child
Aphrodite Patoulidou soprano | LUDWIG | Barbara Hannigan conductor
Program notes excerpt By Christopher Hailey
There can be no question that much of Claude Vivier’s music is intensely autobiographical and that is especially true of Lonely Child. Vivier was adopted from an orphanage and never learned the identity of his birth parents or the circumstances of his own conception and birth. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Montreal and was sent as a teenager to Catholic boarding schools to prepare him for the priesthood, though he was eventually told that he was temperamentally unsuited to religious orders. It may have been his homosexuality, which he never sought to hide, or his all-consuming passion for music that would lead into composition. The two were thereafter intertwined in a life that was lived recklessly, dangerously, fully. He was murdered at 44 by a young man he had picked up at a Paris bar.
At the time of his death Vivier, whose Ritual Opera Kopernikus was performed at the 2016 Ojai Festival, had already created a body of work that assured his legacy as one of the most distinctive voices of the 20th century. Although that legacy has been slow to reach a wider audience, several works, including Lonely Child, have now earned a firm place in performance and recording. Vivier’s formative influences included the European avant garde of the 1960s, studies with Stockhausen (“the true beginning of my life as a composer”), travel to the Near and Far East (Iran, Japan, Thailand, Bali), and friendship with the pioneers of French spectralism, Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. His music often has a ritualistic quality and centers on universal themes of death and transcendence. Vivier has described Lonely Child as “a long song of solitude” composed “without using chords, harmony, or counterpoint,” a homophonic texture that becomes one single, “intervalized” melody:
Thus, there are no longer any chords, and the entire orchestra is then transformed into a timbre. The roughness and the intensity of this timbre depends on the base interval. Musically speaking, there was only one thing I needed to control, which automatically, somehow, would create the rest of the music, that is great beams of color!
The work begins softly, the texture spare, gradually adding layer upon layer before returning to the peace of the opening. The French text, a soothing lullaby, speaks of maternal love, guardian fairies, magic, visions of paradise, and eternal peace in the afterlife. There are also lines in Vivier’s own invented language – phonetic sounds he developed from various real and imagined sources – that can be traced back to the unanswered questions of his birth: “Not knowing my parents enabled me to create a magnificent dream world,” Vivier said shortly before his death. “I shaped my origins exactly as I wished.”
APRIL 21
73rd Ojai Music Festival SCHOENBERG String Quartet No. 2 in F# minor, op. 10 (1908)
Mässig Sehr rasch “Litanei” langsam “Entrückung” sehr langsam
Barbara Hannigan soprano | JACK Quartet
The Schoenberg String Quartet was the last part of the Friday, June 7 concert that paired the work with Debussy, Debussy, and Ravel.
The latter two movements of the Second String Quartet are set to poems from Stefan George‘s collection Der siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring), which was published in 1907. The translated poems can be viewed here.
PROGRAM NOTES By Christopher Hailey
Poetic imagery, painting, and nature served to stimulate Debussy’s imagination, as did his encounter with non-Western music. In Et la lune descend sur le temple quifut (And the moon descends on the temple that was), a title suggested by the sinologist Louis Laloy, one hears in its suspended stillness elements of the music of Bali, which Debussy first heard in the 1889 Paris Exhibition Universelle. Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan (A boat on the ocean), the third of his five-movement Miroirs, is a study of motion, captured in surging arpeggiated currents. Un reflet dans le vent (A reflection in the wind) is the last of Messiaen’s eight Préludes, a set written while he was still a student of Paul Dukas. Their descriptive titles may suggest Debussy, their crisp textures Ravel, but these preludes already bear the hallmarks of Messiaen’s distinctive harmonic and rhythmic language.
It was the pestilence of 1579 that got dear old Augustin. Or so it seemed. Actually, Vienna’s beloved ballad singer was stone drunk when he was mistaken for a plague victim and tossed into an open pit. When he awoke the next morning, he had a song to sing: “Augustin, Augustin, lie down in your grave! O, you dear Augustin, it’s all over!” It’s a catchy tune and when it popped up uninvited in the second movement of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet the audience took note. The uproar – it was December 21, 1908 – seemed to confirm Augustin’s dire prognostication: Alles ist hin, this really is the end.
At a century’s remove it may be difficult to understand the fuss. The quartet is relatively short, its textures and formal layout clear and transparent. The impassioned first movement is an abbreviated sonata form; the second, a fidgety scherzo, interrupted, of course, by the sudden appearance of the sweet triviality of Augustin’s refrain. But the third movement delivers an unprecedented shock: a soprano voice. This setting of Stefan George’s “Litanei” (Litany) does double duty as a series of variations that act as a kind of delayed development section for the truncated opening movement. It has the feel of a single arching line reaching its gripping climax with the words “Kill the longing, close the wound! Take my love away, take from me love” – here the soloist takes a dramatic downward leap – followed by this hushed appeal: “and give me your joy!”
Release comes in “Entrückung” (Rapture), which begins “I feel air from another planet.” Schoenberg’s ethereal introduction is so exquisitely inviting that even today many are unaware that this movement marks Schoenberg’s own radical leap into atonality – the original velvet revolution. It is doubtful that the first audience had any clue one way or the other because by this point in the evening the music was being drowned out by a phalanx of vociferous rowdies convinced that they were witnessing a catastrophe only slightly less calamitous than that long-ago plague. Most critics were ready to toss the work into a mass grave for failed experiments, but the quartet, like Augustin, proved remarkably resilient and soon found more congenial company in the standard repertory.
The myth of Syrinx is the story of a chaste nymph transformed into river reeds to escape Pan’s pursuit. Pan, in turn, creates from these reeds the pipes with which he laments his loss. Debussy’s piece for solo flute, scarcely three minutes long, serves as the prelude to another work of transformation: Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night).
APRIL 14
73rd Ojai Music Festival Terry Riley IN C LUDWIG | Steven Schick, Percussion
PROGRAM NOTES By Christopher Hailey
There you have it, In C, the first minimalist piece. Its gradually shifting repetitive patterns influenced generations of minimalist and process composers, including Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. In fact, Reich (along with Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick) was among the performers at the work’s premiere at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (it was Reich that had suggested the steady pulse of C’s). Riley never thought of this music as “minimalist”; to him it was psychedelic (this was San Francisco after all), not repetition and process, but mind expansion. Oliveras has described the experience as “a cloud of birds tacking the sky with unplanned unanimity” and Michael Tilson Thomas, who did it a few years later at Tanglewood, said it was like being “inside some kind of big improvisation”. The loose, improvisational feel of In C comes from jazz, a major influence on Riley’s music, and, as in jazz, freedom and improvisation are based on listening, on fitting your piece into the larger puzzle. Performing In C requires what Riley called “developing a group dynamic.”
Back in 1964, Riley originally called In C “The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces.” Not a great title, you’ll admit, but the “global” and “village” bits suggest why this piece has had such wide resonance. Riley has recalled that the first performances of In C were “big communal events where a lot of people would come out and sometimes listen or dance to the music because the music would get quite ecstatic with all these repeated patterns.” This is what John Adams was getting at when he said that with In C “the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience.”
Each performance of In C creates its own blissful global village. It’s a festive ritual, a celebratory group experience. This was perhaps the newest, most radical aspect of Riley’s piece, not its repetitions or its “in C-ness,” which many read as a slap in face of all doctrinaire serialists. Tonality forever! In fact, the piece isn’t really in C at all, since its open-ended modal patterns hint at E and G, as well. But that tonal transparency, those interlocking patterns, were something identifiable, something we could follow, and something that re-imagined both composition and the concert experience. Riley, incidentally, also upset all notions of creative ownership when he published the In C score and its instructions on the first LP recording. So much for copyright. But why not? It’s perfectly in keeping with what Riley calls the “community idea” of music.
APRIL 7
73rd Ojai Music Festival RACHMANINOFF & MARK ANTHONY TURNAGE RACHMANINOFF – The Isle of the Dead (arr. Thomas Beijer) LUDWIG | Edo Frenkel conductor
MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE – Twice Through the Heart Part One 1. No Way Out 2. Inside (part 1) 3. Love Part Two 4. By the Sea 5. Inside (part 2) 6. Four Walls Part Three 7. Interlude 8. Landslide 9. China Cup Kate Howden mezzo-soprano | Stephen Gosling piano and celeste | LUDWIG | Edo Frenkel conductor
PROGRAM NOTES By Christopher Hailey
This is a concert Oliver Knussen would have loved. He was a champion of new music, including that of his student and close friend Mark-Anthony Turnage, but he also loved the delectable harmonies and rich orchestral textures of such late Romantics as Sergei Rachmaninoff. A third passion was the art of transcription, be it the overblown glory of Stokowski’s Bach or the ascetic chamber reductions by Schoenberg and his circle.
Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead was inspired by a hauntingly evocative painting of the same name by the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, which the composer had gotten to know in a black and white reproduction. This may account for the somber cast of the orchestration because as the composer later wrote: “If I had seen first the original, I probably would have not written my Isle of the Dead. I like it in black and white.” The work is both pictorial – from the outset one hears the heavy strokes of the oarsmen making their way, their cargo a coffin, toward the looming island – and fraught with musical symbolism, including quotations of the 13th-century chant Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) associated with the Latin requiem mass. This is Rachmaninoff at his most Wagnerian – the Wagner, that is, of Tristan and Parsifal. Thomas Beijer’s arrangement reduces the original concert orchestra – triple winds (and six horns!), expanded percussion, and a full string complement – to 15 players. What is lost in Rachmaninoff’s heavy orchestral mass is gained in transparency and finely balanced colors.
Death is also the central theme of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Twice Through the Heart – but whereas with Böcklin and Rachmaninoff it is veiled in symbolic mists, with Turnage it is raw and graphic, literally “ripped from the headlines.” Turnage’s source was a real-life incident involving a woman who murdered her abusive husband, stabbing him twice through the heart with a kitchen knife. In the trial that followed she resists her lawyer’s advice to bring up the subject of her abuse (out of misplaced loyalty to her dead husband) and is given a lengthy prison sentence. The libretto by Scottish poet Jackie Kay is based on her 1992 television documentary on the trial. Turnage writes of his goals for his musical adaptation:
I wanted to write a simple voice that was not poetic, literary or polemical. I wanted the voice to be so every day it would be banal: the language to be flat and ordinary. I wanted to contrast the heightened drama of such domestic violence with plain, unpoetic speech. I was captivated with the idea that both the home and the prison were forms of incarceration for the battered wife. That there was no place she could be free. That the battered wife received a double sentence: the first from the husband and the second from the judge.
Such subject matter is characteristic of Turnage’s penchant for gritty topics (he made his 2001 Ojai debut with the chamber work Blood on the Floor). Twice Through the Heart is a monodrama whose three parts explore the wife’s memories and reflections upon her abusive husband, her trial, and her present incarceration. The instrumental texture, now harsh and aggressive, now tender, occasionally inflected with jazz idioms, is transparent throughout. The vocal writing, often reminiscent of Alban Berg, is direct and affecting. Twice Through the Heart is a bleak work, but also a work of profound compassion for those whose voices are so often hidden or silenced. Amelia Rossiter, on whose trial this story is based, was eventually freed after her conviction was reduced to manslaughter with a plea of provocation.
MARCH 31
73rd Ojai Music Festival – Grand Finale
STRAVINSKY Pulcinella (complete) HAYDN Symphony No. 49 “La Passione” GERSHWIN Girl Crazy Suite (arranged by Bill Elliott)
Kate Howden, mezzo soprano James Way, tenor Antoin Herrera-Lopez Kessel, bass LUDWIG Barbara Hannigan, conductor and soprano
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Pulcinella (1920)
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Symphony No. 49 “La Passione” (1768)
George Gershwin (1898-1937) Girl Crazy (1930); suite arr. Bill Elliott (2016)
I GOT MUSIC Program notes by Christopher Hailey
Haydn never contested his paternity. “Papa” planted seeds aplenty, but in ground he tilled, toiled, and harvested himself. Moreover, he provided the offspring of his fecund creative imagination with generous child support, annuities he called the sonata, symphony, and string quartet.
Haydn’s DNA is embedded in the musical language of the later 18th century, a language, as Charles Rosen has written, of extraordinary “coherence, power, and richness of allusion.” It was nothing short of a revolution, a new way of hearing and organizing musical material. But revolutions don’t happen overnight. They are gradual, prepared by ideas and practices that slowly coalesce around a body of work that is rarely, if ever, that of a single individual. Nonetheless, in the course of one long life, Haydn witnessed and contributed to virtually every stage of forming what we know as the Classical Style.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, composed in 1768, exemplifies that process in which old and new huddle together at the threshold of change. The orchestration is conventional and the structure, with its opening slow movement, harkens back to the 17th-century church sonata. The content, however, is new. Its tonality – F minor throughout – establishes an ominous tone that is combined with unprecedented emotional turbulence: dynamic extremes, dramatic melodic leaps, unexpected accents and silences, agitated string tremolandi. One is tempted to regard this as Romanticism avant la lettre, but it was very much a phenomenon of the 1760s and ’70s, as evident in literature as in music (Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774 comes to mind). Indeed, this period took its name from a 1777 play by Maximilian Klinger: Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). In “La Passione” (the title was given much later) these aspects are most evident in the brooding Adagio and the tempestuous Allegro and Presto finale (the minuet, though somber, is more traditional, its trio downright genial). The Sturm und Drang moment passed, but what remained, at least in music, was a new capacity for channeling such unruly passion into a balanced style. Charles Rosen again:
“Not until Haydn and Mozart, separately and together, created a style in which a dramatic effect seemed at once surprising and logically motivated, in which the expressive and the elegant could join hands, did the classical style come into being.”
Vienna’s Classical Style and its attendant forms persisted into the 20th century but its legacies had become attenuated, first through cliché, later by distension. Haydn’s inheritance was threatened by an inflation of scale, means, and meaning. Ever-larger orchestras, ever-longer works freighted with literary and philosophical ballast, and tonality – the foundation of the style – stretched to the breaking point by chromaticism. It is easy to regard the eruptions of the early 20th century, atonality, rhythmic ferocity – Pierrot lunaire, Le Sacre du Printemps – as attempts to break the logjam, just as many hailed the Great War as the necessary end of an oppressive peace. The reaction that followed this ghastly carnage likewise has its logical – or at least psychologically plausible – explanation: away with Wagner, hothouse Romanticism, and the excrescences of the long 19th century. Back to 18th century, to balance and clarity.
Neoclassicism, like Haydn’s Classical Style, was not an overnight phenomenon. The gavottes and minuets of the 19th century are legion, but that was costume-ball nostalgia. Neoclassicism was something else, a new way of hearing that filtered flirtation with the past through the prism of contemporary idioms.
Pulcinella is a commedia dell’arte ballet interspersed with songs. It is not, of course, an homage to Viennese Classicism; its models are not Haydn and Mozart, but Pergolesi (or at least what Stravinsky believed was Pergolesi):
“I knew that I could not produce a “forgery” of Pergolesi because my motor habits are so different; at best, I could repeat him in my own accent. That the result was to some extent a satire was probably inevitable – who could have treated that material in 1919 without satire? – but even this observation is hindsight…. A stylish orchestration was what Diaghilev wanted, and nothing more; my music so shocked him that he went about for a long time with a look that suggests ‘The Offended Eighteenth Century’.”
What Stravinsky achieved in this collision with 18th century was in some senses a continuation of the witty and lucid textures of his recent works, including L’Histoire du soldat. He certainly didn’t intend to reinstate the past, but rather to create in its echo new perspectives for the present. The music is not Stravinsky’s, but its freshness and vigor are, qualities that would nourish his musical imagination for the next three decades.
Neoclassicism was an international phenomenon, as popular in America as it was in Europe. But when Stravinsky arrived on these shores, he was confronted by another musical culture that had its roots not in 18th-century Austria or Italy but in the rich mélange of contemporary American experience – new energies of jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway theater; in short, the world of George Gershwin. Girl Crazy, premiered in 1930, featured an all-star cast that included Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers, and a pit orchestra teeming with such luminaries as Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, and Jack Teagarden. Bill Elliott’s Girl Crazy Suite enfolds the show’s hits – “But Not for Me,” “Embraceable You,” and “I Got Rhythm” – in a series of droll arrangements that extend from gauzy impressionism to brassy Broadway swagger.
Stravinsky admired Gershwin, as did Schoenberg. They recognized a colleague who knew as well as they how to make the present exist. As Schoenberg once wrote of his friend: “He is a composer – that is, a man who lives in music and expresses everything, serious or not, sound or superficial, by means of music, because it is his native language.” Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and for that matter Haydn, all lived long enough to know that style is mutable, that language evolves. That music, like Heraclitus’ river, is in constant flux, a medium for ever-widening arcs of creative expression that both reflect and challenge existing modes of perception. And with their colleague George Gershwin, they knew, too, that music, to thrive, must always be about the joyous urgency of now.
I hope you are staying well during this challenging time. This letter is an extremely difficult one to share, but I am writing to let you know that we have made the heartbreaking decision to cancel the 74th Ojai Music Festival, June 11 to 14, 2020, brilliantly imagined by Music Director Matthias Pintscher in collaboration with 2020 Artistic Director Chad Smith.
On behalf of my Board colleagues, CEO Jamie Bennett, and the artistic and administrative teams, we are deeply saddened that during this unprecedented uncertainty, this decision is not just a necessary and right step, it is the only step. As we were monitoring the COVID-19 crisis over these last several weeks, we considered the unpredictability of travel as well as the safety and comfort of our artists and patrons. It has also become clear that the institution cannot shoulder the projected financial burden due to the forecasted drop in Festival revenue and increase in Festival expenses. This unfortunate immediate cancellation is necessitated by our ultimate goal to ensure that the Ojai Music Festival continues to inspire audiences and artists for generations to come.
Chad Smith shared his thoughts with us, “I’m gutted that this extraordinary festival will go silent this June for the first time in its history. Matthias’ vision for his Festival embodied Ojai’s commitment to adventurous music making and to introducing virtuosic artists to our community. On behalf of all of us, we share a common feeling of profound disappointment about this necessary cancellation. Ojai’s next Artistic Director, my friend Ara Guzelimian is already hard at work with 2021 Music Director John Adams. Difficult as this is now, I know the Festival will emerge from this challenging moment, and I am eager to see you all in Ojai in June 2021 when we will celebrate 75 years of the world’s most adventurous music-making in this uniquely idyllic place.”
We have communicated our decision to our collaborators, including artists and the production team. We will ensure that the many volunteers whose contributions are incalculable – from ushers to those who provide housing – are contacted directly in the coming days. Our administrative team will reach out to Ojai business partners who are a critical part of the fabric of our Festival experience each year.
To date and to reduce the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus), the Ojai Music Festival postponed a scheduled March 22 event in Los Angeles. We also suspended our BRAVO education residencies in the schools due to the Ojai Unified School District closures. Following the shelter in place order as per Governor Newsom’s office, staff is now working from home.
The Ojai Music Festival is often cited as a creative laboratory for artists and audiences, and our famously engaged and adventurous patrons are key to each Festival experience. For those who have purchased series tickets to the 2020 Festival, we ask you to consider a tax-deductible donation of the value of your tickets to the Ojai Music Festival, which will empower us to continue to keep the Festival moving forward. Alternatively, you may use the value of 2020 tickets toward 2021 Festival ticket purchases, or we will issue refunds. Please call anyone of our staff members (see contact numbers below) for assistance. We expect some volume of calls, and thank you for your patience as we navigate this challenging time.
You are essential to the success of this jewel that is the Ojai Music Festival. Thank you and know that your Ojai family is thinking of you during this difficult time. We have begun to implement efforts to stay more connected with our Festival community, including sharing Festival concert archives released on our Facebook channel and website. For families, we are creating digital content through our BRAVO music education program. We will keep you posted as we offer additional online content.
We are beyond grateful to each and every person who comprises our Festival family – those who join with us onsite in Ojai and those who access our Festival concert broadcasts. Planning for the 2021 Festival is well underway, and we will keep you posted as Ara Guzelimian and John Adams’ programming takes shape. We look forward to reuniting with you at the 75th Ojai Music Festival in June 2021. Until then, please stay well.
With deep gratitude,
Jerry Eberhardt Chairman of the Board
STAFF CONTACT LIST: Jamie Bennett: 323.481.2750 jbennett@ojaifestival.org Gina Gutierrez: 805.646.2181 ggutierrez@ojaifestival.org Nick Svorinich: 805.646.2053 nsvorinich@ojaifestival.org Anna Wagner: 805.646.3178 awagner@ojaifestival.org
Though we are united in Ojai for a short time each June, Festival artists, interns, and the production team remain family through the years. Join us as we explore and celebrate current projects by Ojai alumni. We’ll be updating each week for you to enjoy and share with others.
UPCOMING EVENTS Festival alum Steven Schick, Claire Chase, Maya Beiser, Vijay Iyer, and George Lewis participate in the upcoming Bang on a Can Marathon on Sunday, May 3. Click for details >
VIJAY IYER
Catch the video of 2017 Music Director Vijay Iyer’s performance for the San Jose Jazz’s “Live from Home” series.
CLAIRE CHASE/ICE
IONE and Claire Chase (2016, 2015 alum) led a global performance of The World-Wide Tuning Meditation by Pauline Oliveros: a sonic gathering with a legacy of bringing communities together through meditative singing. Hosted by International Contemporary Ensemble.
JENNIFER KOH
In response to the coronavirus pandemic and the financial hardship it has placed on many in the arts community, violinist Jennifer Koh (2017 Festival alum) launches Alone Together, an online commissioning project that brings composers together in support of the many freelancers among them. Twenty-one composers, most of whom have salaried positions or other forms of institutional support to carry them through this challenging time, have each agreed to donate a new, 30-second micro-work for solo violin, while also recommending a fellow freelance composer to write their own 30-second solo violin work on paid commission from the artist-driven nonprofit ARCO Collaborative.
JULIA BULLOCK
Soprano Julia Bullock, who performed at the 2011 and 2016 Festivals and will return in 2022 with music director AMOC, and her husband, conductor Christian Reif shared this video of the beautiful song “One by One” by Connie Converse.
BARBARA HANNIGAN and EQUILIBRIUM YOUNG ARTISTS
2019 Music Director Barbara Hannigan and her Equilibrium Young Artists present musical offerings on their new YouTube channel, EQ4U.
The Festival’s BRAVO music education and community proudly presents Song & Play Thursday, led by Laura Walter, the Festival’s education coordinator.
Based on the nationally well-regarded curriculum of Education Through Music, the short videos will provide children and families a language based music program in which song, movement and interactive play promote emotional, social, cognitive and musical development. Each week, the videos and curriculum notes will be available for free on the Festival’s website.
These song experience games are designed to improve listening skills, memory, and critical thinking. Singing releases endorphins. Play increases intelligence. These video sessions are an extension of what the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO program offers in all of the Ojai classrooms with Transitional Kindergarten through 3rd grade during the school year.
BENEFITS OF SONG & PLAY
Develop eye contact
Enrich functional vocabulary and language skills
Interpret the written symbols in music helps with reading skills
Activities are designed to be so fun that children are not only excited to get a turn, but equally excited when someone else gets a turn
Work our memory and our visual and movement centers
Connects brain centers — imagination, sequencing, and spatial memory
Ours is a program based on play, defined as the psychological state of flow or creativity. We get absorbed in what we are doing, and can’t wait to try it again. Our failures are seen as part of the fun. We sing partner songs and in canon, creating beautiful sounds ourselves. The children always ask if we can do that again! Community is so important for emotional growth, and these activities, help us stay connected.
Special Thanks to
Meet Ms. Laura!
My name is Laura Walter and I am the Bravo Coordinator for the Ojai Music Festival. We are excited about our new, online videos. We’ll explore some secret songs, solfegge using hand signs, rhythmic patterns, and ideas for you to play with your own family. These song experience games of Education Through Music improve listening skills, memory, and critical thinking. Singing releases endorphins. Play increases intelligence.
These video sessions are an extension of what I have played in all of the Ojai classrooms with Transitional Kindergarten through 3rd grade. We use a lot of eye contact. Giggling happens. And then it’s so interesting; our singing becomes stronger!
We move a lot. Our learning is active. We sing folk songs, which enrich functional vocabulary and language skills. Interpreting the written symbols in music helps children with reading skills.
Community is so important for emotional growth. When we make music together, we improve self-regulation. Activities are designed to be so fun that children are not only excited to get a turn, but equally excited when someone else gets a turn!
When we puzzle over a secret song, our brains are looking for an auditory match, working our memory and our visual and movement centers. You will notice how good it feels to try to hear a secret song, after you know the answer. That’s because the activity connects brain centers—imagination, sequencing and spatial memory.
Ours is a program based on play, defined as the psychological state of flow or creativity. We get absorbed in what we are doing, and can’t wait to try it again. Our failures are seen as part of the fun. We sing partner songs and in canon, creating beautiful sounds ourselves. The children always ask if we can do that again!
Lesson 1, 4/16/20
Study the rhyming structure of this song and then make up your own. For instance, notice the underlined rhyming words below: There’s a penny in my hand It will travel through the land Is it here, is it there? It will travel everywhere.
To keep this rhyming scheme you might sing: There’s a penny on this pier It will travel without fear Is it slim, can it swim? It will travel on a whim.
If you email your own verses to us, I will sing them! Send your verses to: Lwalter@ojaifestival.org
These are some great student verses of Kitty Casket that we have sung and played in class. I appreciate the rhyming ideas! In class we looked at the difference between rhyming (end of the words sounding alike) and alliteration (words starting with like sounds). These are critical tools in fluency of reading.
Kitty Casket—the game. Pure delight! See how many you can get to join in!
Special Thanks To
Lesson 2, 4/23/20
We start with connecting and gathering our attention. The secret song represents the rhythm to a song the children have sung and played many times. By having the rhythm prompt, and then adding clues, we are causing the auditory system to look for a match in our memory. Penny is such a great song for playfulness, and being okay with not getting everything correct, which is so important for life success. Grab a penny and play! Feel free to print the rhythm page and follow, or add the words.
This childhood staple by Mozart is great fun to sing and play. Notice the clues that I give are concrete and words that they know; words that will spark a picture in their minds. This increases memory retrieval skills. When we play in the classroom, all eyes are closed while one child hides the star, leaving just one part visible. We must keep hope alive! They then choose a classmate to go look for it while we sing the song. They must be back by the end of the song. This skill of predicting when the song will end, (while being busy looking for it), is vital to reading fluency. They then pick a friend to go with them. This continues until the star is found. Some days the whole class has gone to look and they all have to be back by the end of the song. The song informs their behavior in this way, and they are completely self-monitoring without need of adults telling them what to do. The failure to find the star is never seen as a failure by the child, but rather as further effort, approached through play, and adding their friends. It’s really wonderful to see.
Local 3rd graders have been learning this cup song, and pairing it with the song of Uncle Joe. We have played the game of Uncle Joe for 4 months or so before I bring the cups out. The game is so enjoyable in itself, that to add the cups definitely has a *wow* factor!
Want to see a group of children engaged and happy to play cooperatively? Want to see the importance of movement in learning? Want to hear a group of 6 year-olds all singing in tune? Here they are! Every one of them has a sense of belonging and purpose in this class. Playing I Wrote a Letter encourages them to grow the social skill of being happy for someone else to get a turn. This is directly responsible for the strength of their singing, and their eventual synchronization of sound without any specific instruction about singing together from the teacher. “I wrote a letter to my love and on the way I lost it. A little doggie picked it up and put it in his pocket. Oh, he won’t bite me and he won’t bite you, he’ll bite the one who’s got it. So drop it, so drop it, it must be dropped by now.”
Lesson 3, 4/30/20
Children often know this song from singing around the campfire. The notes of the scale have corresponding hand signs: do, re, mi, fa, so, la and ti. These hand signs were developed by Sarah Glover in the 1700’s in England to help her choir members learn to read music. John Curwen popularized them, and Kodaly also integrated them into his teaching method. Often when we sing the songs, we use the hand signs to indicate the notes. We are learning about pitch relationships.
If you have family members at home, have them sit in a circle and if you want more, use some stuffed animals also! You can jump or skip together. This game has been around for generations. It’s a hoot to have a whole group skipping together. It gets the whole class excited. Because the song chooses their partner (when we sing the word “partner”), the students are always surprised with who they get. We are making our social circle bigger. When we sing this at the Gables of Ojai Senior Living, the residents remember this from their own childhoods, saying, “We are so happy that children still sing this song.” The proprioceptive experience gained from skipping with a partner aids in brain development, and crossing the midline aids in the bi-hemispheric learning of the brain.
This song is often the first experience children have playing on an instrument. We approach this folk song through a story. Why did people not make signs to advertise what they were selling? How did people sweeten their food 1,000 years ago? What was the importance of singing in the streets? We also add the hand signs for the music notes.
In our classrooms, we use children to stand in for the sun, the moon, and the chimney pot. We challenge ourselves to skip around them. Sometimes they are sneaky and change positions. We also try to get back to our spot by the end of the song; the “boom”. As our actions and movements line up with the beginning and ending of the song, we are practicing the reading skill of paying attention to the points of enclosure. Actions and sounds coincide and lead us to meaning.
Lesson 4, 5/7/20
This week we take a look at learning to read notes, singing our names to study rhythm, and looking at some children’s maps. We also include a video showing the engagement of children from Day 1.
Our first music class of the year. This is how I meet the children, by finding out their names and asking for their ideas. Listen to the enthusiasm of their singing right from the first day! Notice the kindness used as guidance for self-control.
Knowing each other’s names is one of the most honoring actions that we can take. We sing about our names! We study the rhythm and accents of the names. This is a musical skill, as well as a reading skill. Having a strong auditory system is important for reading, music, and listening.
Once we have played the game and gotten our bodies moving and involved, we take a look at the Tracks for Reading which includes different verses. The melody stays the same. This helps immensely in reading, because the beginning reader can still follow along on the map. New words overlay the same tune, making it familiar. The grammar also retains the same structure and helps with comprehension. It’s a wonderful way to boost reading skills! These books can be found online at the Richards Institute of Education and Research.
We really enjoy making our own maps of the songs. The children create their own abstract representation of the song. We notice patterns together. We practice drawing in the air first. Any pattern is correct because it is that person’s version of the song. This toggling back and forth between abstract and concrete is not only healthy for the brain, the students are delighted and completely absorbed in doing it. Singing the song is concrete, drawing in the air is abstract, putting it on paper makes it concrete with abstract ideas, singing it from their map makes it concrete again, following someone else’s map is abstract until it is concrete again. This is the process of reading music, which is, after all, an abstract representation of sound.
We love matching our note of the day to the scale above and trying to find the note’s name. We pretend it’s an amazing secret, which cracks us all up while everyone wants to make a guess, so they whisper it!
Lesson 5, 5/14/20
This week we take a look at play and imagination and how music adds to that. We make up some verses with rhymes. And we put the call out for pretend haircuts!
Sally Tracks for Reading
Having a robust auditory system is so important for reading, and communication. We study the rhyme structure and make up our own verses. We keep changing key, or moving the starting pitch for the songs, and then our voices adjust. It’s ear training with no stress! Just joy. The book can be ordered from the Richards Institute of Education and Research.
Letter Rhythm
Playing this game is one of our favorites. We sit in a circle and one child drops a letter while we hide our eyes. The chosen child gets up and chases the letter dropper. What this song game does for children is pretty incredible—we start to enjoy another’s turn just as much as getting one ourselves. Here we learn empathy through play. We often turn to a rhythmic representation of the song (find here), and discover the different sounds by adding body movements for distinct rhythmic notes.
Haircut Stuffies
To the brain, intelligence is the same as imagination, which is the same as play. We can make pretend scissors with our own body, or as a group. Once the ideas get flowing, the children don’t want to stop. Play keeps internal motivation going. Notice the use of expansive vocabulary. If you send us a video of your child giving a pretend haircut, we would love it!
Note of the Day–E
Today we can match our note, or figure it out using our “shortcut”—the standard Every Good Boy Does Fine for the notes on lines, and F-A-C-E for the notes on the spaces.
Lesson 6, 5/21/20
Today we look at the importance of memory in learning, and the importance of play in building intelligence.
Secret song Haircut + Rhythm Page
After the students have sung and played this game, so much that it is internalized and accessed automatically, we present it as a secret song. We don’t want to ask the brain to do this too soon, but only after lots of play and sensory experience. Then the secret part of puzzling over it is enjoyable, and do-able. The brain starts searching its memory banks for a match. When the memory is engaged, learning is happening. We easily translate the song into its rhythms. Since we have the melody, we can now learn the solfegge syllables (do, re, mi, etc.) as well. Going back and forth between words, rhythm, and solfegge keeps the brain hopping and the kids love doing this!
Haircut Videos
In music, we want to build 3 habits in children: cooperation, participation, and the habit of singing. Here are some at-home examples of families playing Johnny Get Your Haircut.
Bluebird
We have birds and windows all over the place. We can have windows made out of our legs, and birds trying to navigate through and under. This sensory experience of the song is stored in more brain areas for easier retrieval. We want our learning to be multi-modal: auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and tactile. A robust memory aids in the development of intelligence.
Note of the Day—C
The challenge grows as we rely on our shortcut and don’t have the “scale” up for reference anymore!
Lesson 7, 5/28/20
There are many different methods of symbolizing sound. The process of interpreting symbols, semiotic function, is important for reading, math, and music. This week we also notice how we build resiliency—the balance between challenge and skill, always with an eye towards pro-social behaviors of inclusivity, kindness, taking turns, and the opportunity to be moved by shared experience instead of external rewards.
Video 4:53 One Little Elephant
Here we have elephants balancing on a spider web. We symbolize the song by representing elephants ourselves. When the children join me, it’s pretty exciting! We build the spider web together, and then gather our elephants by asking the person closest to us at the end of the song to join. Socially, this promotes children choosing new friends and being inclusive. We also have to stay on the web and balance. Spatial awareness lives mostly in the right brain hemisphere. Keeping track of the sequence and number of elephants lives mostly in the left. By playing and moving, we are integrating brain function. And then, of course, the math gets so complex, and the students love this part! The joy of resiliency!
Bluebird Form and Map
It is quite enjoyable to match up a written symbol with a corresponding sound. Noticing patterns is what the brain loves to do! Here we take a look at the beat and the various ways to explore that. We can have a slow, medium, or fast beat while the tempo of the song stays the same. These form books are available through the Richards Institute of Education and Research.
Frog
When I have the room set up for Frog’s in the Meadow, the children walk in and instantly know what song game we are going to play. I hear squeals of delight! One child becomes the frog and does the hiding while everyone sings. I change the starting pitches often, which provides ear training without stress. Their voices automatically adjust to singing in tune this way. In older grades we have up to 5 frogs hiding at once. Finding the frogs relies on deductive reasoning and memory. As guesses are made, we get to keep track of where there are no frogs. The play here is many-faceted. The brain is wired to explore playing with object permanence in both sound (music) and vision (art). Having a shared puzzle, trying to find the frogs, increases bonding, attachment, and belonging.
Secret Song Letter
Another way to play with the symbols of a song is to put some notes into our hands and sing the solfege, but the rest of the words in English. This great challenge is enjoyable because it is almost achievable—this is the aspect of play called perceived competency; I think I can get it if I try one more time. We then have internal motivation and participation that comes from inside the person. No rewards are used other than the experience itself. We are symbolizing the sound in two distinct languages by toggling back and forth quickly!
Note of the Day
One reason music education is so important to the brain is that learning to read music adds a layer of abstract symbolization. In learning to read the printed word in a language, the brain is required to connect what it sees with a sound it has heard before. And in order to have meaning, this sound must represent something concrete that has been experienced (the letters, c, a , t, how they sound when combined, and what a cat is). In learning to read music, we see the note “D”, we know what it is called and perhaps can play it on an instrument, but it doesn’t represent a concrete thing besides the sounding of itself. It gains meaning when combined with notes that surround it, making a melody.
Lesson 8, 6/5/20
Bombalalom
Our Bombalalom place is where we feel peaceful. As we sing this song, we reflect on how important it is to listen to each other, that we cooperate with each other, that we accept each other. There are times when we feel bad, and it’s okay to feel that way. We ask each other “how can we help?” We want to use our voice to make the future, and the present, better. Let us listen deeply.
Elephant in 3s
Aesthetics show up in many forms—visual art, sounds in music, the beauty of communication, or joy of movement. Here we have the aesthetic of thinking. Students brighten up when faced with this challenge. By providing a variety of aesthetic experiences, we really do reach all children through including them by invitation.
Mozart Canon
Here are some fun facts about Mozart! We have been learning this Canon (a piece of music that is repeated at different intervals to create harmony) all year long. Bravo students love coming up to try their hands at leading this. I ask them if they want it with me or without me. They get very brave! Then they want it harder, and I start on a different part. It just gets better and better!
Secret Song
One way the brain builds the ability to empathize, is through mirror neurons. These are activated when we are united in song, or moving together. What looks from the outside to be a minor challenge, is actually doing some deeper tissue work in helping children become more empathetic and therefore, compassionate.
Oats Peas Beans-nouns and verbs
We take a look at language through singing, exploring nouns and verbs in a playful way. The children love discovering a secret song, so I thought I would give them this added challenge—where is that song? Feel free to print it out and try to follow it yourself! This is a song about planting, and the summer is a wonderful time to get outside and plant things. Get your hands in the dirt. It’s very nurturing.
The Ojai Music Festival is often cited as a creative laboratory for artists and audiences, and our famously engaged and adventurous patrons are key to each Festival experience. After the cancellation of the 74th Festival, we appreciated the wonderful messages of support from our patrons. Now, we will honor the unrealized Festival, June 11 to 14, 2020, with virtual offerings on our website, OjaiFestival.org. In addition to joining us online for these events, purchase a commemorative shirt to add to your collection! We are beyond grateful to each and every person who comprises our Festival family. Thank you for your support! (Deadline to order is June 15, 2020.)
How do we listen to music now? That question might at first prompt a quick checklist of our tech gear — the tools of mechanical reproduction and propagation that have become ever more refined over the 143 years since Thomas Edison first introduced the wax cylinder. But several months into the coronavirus pandemic — with our experience of live performances at best limited to streaming — many of us have been forced to rethink our relationship to music itself.
How we listen now comes with a fresh awareness of the fragility, the vulnerability of this art — the very traits that make it so transformative. For music exists most fully as a live, present-tense exchange among what Benjamin Britten famously termed the “Holy Trinity” of audience, performer, and composer. Music is an art of transitions. It travels between these vertices in unrepeatable ways, tracing interactive pathways that are unique to each performance. And, in the process, music moves from the material to the immaterial. By definition bound to time, it exists through ephemeral sounds that reverberate in a specific space. Yet music simultaneously occupies a realm, inscribed in memory, that defies time and physical distance.
All of these topics come into play in the program that Matthias Pintscher planned for the 2020 Ojai Festival. Against the backdrop of the current crisis, his vision has an added resonance that is uncanny, since Pintscher’s core approach to music is to shake away facile assumptions, inviting the audience to question again the very basis of how they listen, and to listen with heightened awareness — to intriguing discoveries from contemporary composers and familiar repertoire alike. The metaphor of a landscape appears frequently in his discussions of music:
“Landscapes are mostly diverse. Landscapes hold surprises and are deeply human in the end. Music somehow has the same vulnerability and sensitivity as a landscape. You have to care deeply when you put together a program or cultivate a landscape. These are all works that have been part of my life for a long time. As music director, you bring works and flavors and personalities that people have never heard of, and you present pieces they know in a new light.”
Landscapes, like music, are also about transitions. Various kinds of transitions emerge from the underlying threads that link Pintscher’s intricately designed sequence of programs. Take the transition from his own mentor, Pierre Boulez, to himself and other peers who have navigated paths unforeseen by the postwar Modernists. Pintscher stands as a prime exemplar of these, combining formidable gifts as a composer, conductor, curator, and teacher. A self-described wanderer who was led by curiosity to leave his native Germany as a teenager and who lived in England and Israel in his 20s, Pintscher now divides his time, when not on the road, between Paris and Manhattan. His compositions often explore the transition from indistinct noise to the most refined timbral combinations. They draw on his love of visual art, poetry, and theater, transitioning among these different artistic media without betraying music’s inherent self-referentiality. The 2020 program encompasses a de facto retrospective of Pintscher’s instrumental writing, from an early string quartet that responds to Gesualdo’s late-Renaissance spiritual strife to his recent piano concerto Nur (the Hebrew word for fire), in which impulses from today’s young American avant-garde are discernible.
As a conductor educated in the fine details of Boulezian aesthetics, Pintscher fondly recalls the first score he studied with the Frenchman Debussy’s exquisite late ballet Jeux. Boulez’s simultaneous command of surface and structure, detail and design, “informed my insight into sound production, into what it means to tackle a style to conduct an orchestra.” Boulez himself proved to be a master of the “art of transition” in the sense in which Wagner used the phrase: with reference to Tristan und Isolde, where he described his ability to shift gradually from one extreme state to another as perhaps his “finest and deepest art.”
Pintscher ascribes Boulez’s outlook to a “consciousness of detail” that he associates with French culture (and with cooking, another passion). But this also coexists for Pintscher with a love of surprises, with unexpected juxtapositions. Olga Neuwirth’s music could hardly be more different, yet Pintscher, who has long felt a close rapport with his Austrian peer, is one of her most steadfast champions. He recently conducted the world premiere of her Virginia Woolf–inspired opera Orlando — the first opera commissioned from a female composer by the storied Vienna Staatsoper. The moment he began thinking up his ideal programming choices for Ojai, Pintscher says, he knew he wanted to spotlight Neuwirth. Before the pandemic, the plan was for himto conduct the U.S. premiere of Le encantadas, her immersive response to Herman Melville, in Los Angeles — a prelude to set the stage for the Ojai Festival.
A fiercely original and independent musical thinker, Neuwirth is well represented here in works that respond, variously, to Billie Holiday, the ascetic outsider artist Henry Darger, and J.S. Bach. She relishes theatrically animated hybrids of style, genre, and mood, always showing an urge to reinvent herself and her inspirations. As a young student, Neuwirth spent formative years in San Francisco and developed an abiding fascination with American culture — especially its subversive trends in film and music. Yet she is also a “deeply Austrian” artist Pintscher notes, sharing the obsessions of Schubert and Alban Berg and rebellious in her critiques of philistine conformity by her fellow Austrians. For this she was often marginalized early in her career, when Boulez became one of the few in power to offer his support.
What was intended as the long-overdue Ojai debut of the Ensemble intercontemporain (EIC) further underscores the complexity of the Boulezian-Pintscher lineage and brings to mind key moments of transition in Ojai’s history as well. As the embodiment of Boulezian values in practice today, EIC would have given the 2020 Festival a striking historical footprint — even though the ensemble had never previously appeared here. Starting in 1967, Boulez served as music director for seven summers at various points in the Festival’s history up to 2003.
photo by Robert Millard
Boulez’s repeated attraction to this special place — over a period spanning some 36 years — is a remarkable phenomenon, according to Chad Smith, artistic director of the 2020 edition. “Southern California might seem an unlikely place for a Parisian intellectual who brought such a sense of rigorousness to music.” Yet Ojai provided a kind of freedom to breathe that the French master lacked elsewhere. Ojai, a place of natural perfection that conjures paradise for so many, beckoned to Boulez with his own concepts of musical perfectibility, as Smith points out. It was here that he could make an attempt at “perfecting paradise.” In this sense, Pintscher’s Ojai programs posit another transition — an invisible bridge — between concepts of new music in Europe and in the US, from the linearity of discarded notions of “progress” to the riotous, chaotic crazy quilt of diverse possibilities that are a young composer’s to choose from today. The chance to encounter sur Incises, arguably the French master’s most satisfying composition, in the beautiful setting of the Bowl promised to spark a very different understanding of this music, its dazzlingly planned intricacies of texture coming closer to the complex freedoms of jazz — or of the skeins of melody Steve Reich liberates from amplified voices and tuned percussion in Tehillim. The presence of Reich and other American composers, incidentally, helps to right a notable shortcoming of Boulez’s Ojai programming, which notoriously skipped over the work being done by Americans in those years, particularly those animated by the energy of Minimalism.
The Reich title is one of several Hebrew words that pop up in Pintscher’s programs, beginning with The Beginning — bereshit, the name of Pintscher’s fascinating meditation inspired by the first word of Genesis — and continuing with an entire program built around the biblical Creation story, including a new Ojai commission from Toshio Hosokawa treating the Flood, which sets the whole process back in motion again. Pintscher’s own catalogue is replete with Hebrew titles. Those chosen for the Festival programs in turn suggest a thread of spirituality — in counterpoint to Boulez’s resolutely materialist secularism — that subtly emerges alongside references to J.S. Bach’s divinely inspired quest for compositional perfection, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Gospel-based calls for justice (Olga Neuwirth), and American Transcendentalism (Charles Ives). Steve Reich’s Tehillimitself implicitly asserts the ancient link between words and music as an organized ritual of praise.
As an art of transitions, music is blessed/condemned to be an art of transience: the notes, colors, combinations which it comprises are destined to fade into nonexistence. Like immortality, music that did not die would rob us of any sense of meaning. This is the paradox Mahler, another traveler between worlds (Old and New, Jewish and Christian, composer and performer) explores so movingly in his late Das Lied von der Erde. The longing for eternity, given voice in the final, longest movement, is at its most acute in a scene of leave-taking.
—THOMAS MAY
Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator. He has written for The New York Times and regularly contributes to the program books of the Lucerne Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and Juilliard School. His books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader. Visit Thomas May’s website at https://memeteria.com/
Click the links below to watch host Ara Guzelimian for virtual offerings that featured insightful conversations with special guests, interspersed with video and music excerpts. Following each segment, enjoy selected concerts for your enjoyment.
THURSDAY, JUNE 11 | 7pm (PT) Conversation with Matthias Pintscher Musical excerpts of Ensemble intercontemporain’s performance of Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises and Matthias Pintscher’s bereshit.
FRIDAY, JUNE 12 | 7pm (PT) Conversation with Matthias Pintscher and Olga Neuwirth Musical excerpts of Ensemble intercontemporain’s performance of Olga Neuwirth’s Eleanor.
SATURDAY, JUNE 13 | 7pm (PT) Conversation with the Calder Quartet With new quarantine-style performance produced by Calder Quartet exclusively for the 2020 Virtual Festival.
SUNDAY, JUNE 14 | 7pm (PT) Conversation with Steve Reich Musical excerpts of Steve Reich’s Drumming and Tehillim.
Imagine Concert on March 1 at the Ojai Valley School featuring the UCSB Middle East Music Ensemble – Music Van brings instruments to Ojai Valley school students
For over 30 years, the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO Program has been bringing music to the Ojai community. Through music education to Ojai Valley Public School students, engagement at senior living centers, and free concerts throughout the year, BRAVO makes music an integral, enjoyable, and exciting part of the everyday learning process at any age.
To celebrate Music in the Schools month in March, the BRAVO program will feature two of their signature programs for both students and the community starting with the Imagine concert on Friday, March 1 at the Ojai Valley School.
Thanks to a special grant from the Ojai Valley School-Barbara Barnard Smith Fund of the Ventura County Community Foundation, the Imagine concert will present the UC-Santa Barbara Middle East Ensemble in two school performances at the Greenberg Center on the OVS campus. Fourth, fifth and six graders will enjoy world music with a program that will emphasize Middle Eastern music and dance. All are welcome to enjoy the ensemble at a free concert from 4:00pm to 5:00pm Friday, March 1. It is completely open to the general public with no reservations required and seats will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. These programs provide a lasting legacy of enduring support for Ojai Valley School’s continued education in world music. Along with related arts, it is intended to engender a broad perspective and appreciation of music from all world cultures. This occurs primarily through live performances of traditional music in major non-Western cultural regions. When possible and suitable, the ancestral cultural heritage of the Ojai community and its students are also focused upon. Thanks to Professor Smith, these funds annually open the doors to an engaging multicultural experience for students, teachers, parents and the community, embodying true world view of music. Ojai Valley School is indebted to Professor Smith for her foresight and generosity.
Also in March, BRAVO’s Music Van will set out to demonstrate the instruments of the orchestra to elementary students. This year, 50 volunteers will visit 10 public and private schools with a selection of instruments that more than 400 fourth and fifth graders are invited to try out
Coordinated by Ojai longtime resident and 2018 Ojai Treasure Lynne Doherty has spearheaded the Music Van for more than 25 years, “The look of delight on a kid who makes a mighty racket on the trombone or coaxes a sweet note from the violin is wonderful to see,” she said. “Music instruction in the schools has suffered from years of budget cuts to the arts, and we are continuing to fill that gap.”
You can’t learn to play the violin without first holding one in your hand and awkwardly finding a note.
For more information on the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO programs visit OjaiFestival.org or call 805 646 2094.
In an effort to evoke some of the experience we all love and are missing at this moment, we are sharing a few recipes from wonderful Ojai restaurants and chefs. Click the tabs below.
Stone Fruit and Tomato Gazpacho By Scott Daigre and JennGarbee
Ingredients
1 pound peaches or nectarines, peeled and cut into small chunks
1 large slicing cucumber or 3 small Persian cucumbers, peeled and cut into small chunks
½ medium red onion, roughly chopped
1 small jalapeno pepper, seeded and roughly chopped to taste
2 pounds juicy tomatoes, cut into chunks, plus 1 medium ripe tomato for serving
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1-1/2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice, more to taste
Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper
6 lime wedges, for serving
2 tablespoons chopped basil or parsley, both if you have them
Directions
Place ¼ cup each of chopped peaches and cucumbers, 2 tablespoons red onion, and 1 teaspoon of jalapeno in a small bowl. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.
Place the 2 pounds of tomatoes, remaining peaches, cucumber, red onion, and jalapeno in a blender and puree until the gazpacho is as smooth as you’d like. (If you have a small blender, you may need to do this in batches.) Pour the gazpacho into a large bowl and add the olive oil, cider vinegar, lime juice, and a ¾ tsp. each of salt and pepper. Chill for at least two hours or overnight. Taste again after chilling and add additional lime juice, salt and pepper to taste.
To serve, finely dice the reserved peaches, cucumbers, red onion, jalapeno, and remaining tomato. Add the basil or parsley (or both), mix to combine, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Ladle the chilled gazpacho into bowl, top with tomato-peach salsa, and drizzle with olive oil.
Prime pick: use juicy tomatoes such as JauneFlamme, Red Boar, Missouri Pink Love Apple, or Chocolate Stripes!
About Azu Azu was incorporated in November 2000 by Laurel Moore. She bought Bill Bakers bakery at the same time. Azu opened its doors in early 2001.
Laurel was inspired by her many trips to Spain and Italy. Azu started small, the original idea was fresh baked bread, panini and gelato. Soon after opening for just breakfast and lunch, Laurel was asked repeatedly to be open for dinner. She converted some old baking space into the dining room.
Executive Chef and Owner Laurel Moore is the driving force behind Azurestaurant and a style of food critics have called lively, inventive, and comfortable all at once. A veteran of Hollywood, Chef Moore travelled the world as a still photographer, working on such films as Pretty in Pink and The Big Red One. Establishing Azu in 2001 Chef Moore undertook a singular vision, to take the best of what the world has to offer, and translate it through a locally sourced, regionally relevant palate.
Daughter of Laurel and General Manager, Elizabeth Haffner, joined Azu in 2006. Having worked as a costume designer for film in Los Angeles and abroad, Elizabeth journeyed to Ojai, CA to join her mother in creating a unique destination restaurant, on par with her adventurous tastes, and at home in the magical valley of Ojai. Elizabeth tirelessly executes her vision of quality and service on a daily basis, making Azu a true experience in simple elegance.
Jeremy Haffner, Husband to Elizabeth, in a joint venture with Laurel founded Ojai Valley Brewery in 2015. Previous to becoming the Brewmaster and building a nano brewery Jeremy toured the world with his rock band, Oedipus. Jeremy was also the gelato master and a chef at Azu restaurant throughout the years in between touring. He has brought his incredible palate and artistic vision to the Brewery which focuses on local foraged and farmed ingredients with beers designed to enjoy in the hot Ojai climate.
Recently fed sourdough starter (Get it free from Ojai Rotie!)
For the Bread
250 grams mature leaven (from above)
800 grams organic bread flour or all-purpose flour
150 grams organic whole-wheat flour or whole spelt flour
50 grams organic dark rye flour
25 grams fine sea salt
50/50 rice flour/bread flour mix for sprinkling in baskets, as needed
Filtered water, as needed
Small digital scale (you will get more consistent results measuring by weight rather than using volume measures)
Large and medium mixing bowls
Clean tea towels (not terrycloth)
Bench knife, AKA dough scraper
6-8 quart Dutch oven with tight fitting lid
Please keep in mind that this sourdough recipe gives a general sequence and timeline, but works best when adapted to meet your own individual equipment and conditions. A number of variables, like room temperature, humidity, starter strength, flour type, water quality and more will affect your final results. The important thing is to enjoy the process and keep experimenting until you bake a loaf you love.
Day 1:
Measure 200 grams of slightly warm water into a clean mixing bowl. Add 1-2 tablespoons of starter and mix well. Add 100 grams each of bread flour and whole-wheat flour and stir with a wooden spoon until no large lumps remain. Cover with plastic wrap or a clean towel and let sit for 8-12 hours until the mixture has doubled in size and various sized bubbles blanket the surface. (An easy way to gauge the growth of the leaven is by marking the level on the outside of the bowl before you leave it to ferment.) Reserve 4 tablespoons of starter for feeding future starter as described in the notes below. After feeding, use any remaining starter to make sourdough pancakes. Yum.
Day 2: Check the maturity of the leaven by dropping a small bit of it into a bowl of room-temperature water; if it floats to the surface, the leaven is ready. If it doesn’t, set it aside to ferment a little longer.
In a large glass, ceramic or stainless bowl, combine 250 grams of the mature leaven with 725 grams of warm water and mix well with your hands or a wooden spoon.
Add the bread flour, whole-wheat flour and rye flour and mix together with one hand until all the flour has been moistened and no large lumps remain. Leave the other hand clean in case you get a phone call or need to scratch your nose. Cover the mixture with plastic wrap or a clean tea towel and let rest 30 minutes. (This step is called Autolyse and develops dough that’s easier to shape, and more importantly, gives you bread with better texture, rise and flavor.)
After the 30-minute autolyse, sprinkle the sea salt over the dough and moisten with 50 grams warm water. (I sometimes use a spray bottle to moisten the salt.) Incorporate the salt into the dough by squeezing the dough through your fists until no salt granules can be felt. Don’t worry if the dough feels like its coming apart; it will be fine. Cover bowl again with a towel or plastic wrap and set aside in a fairly warm spot for 30 minutes.
You may have noted that there has been no traditional “kneading” yet. There will not be. Instead you are going to stretch and fold the dough every 30 minutes for the next couple of hours. This process helps build strength and extensibility in the dough, and encourages a beautiful, uneven crumb structure. It also gives you a chance to catch-up on your email.
Fill a container with clean water and place near your work area and place the bowl with the dough in front of you. Dip both hands into the water; grab the bottom of the dough mass closest to you with both hands, and then slowly and gently pull and stretch the dough upwards and away from you, and then fold it over against the opposite edge. Try to do this without tearing the dough. Do this three more times, rotating the bowl one-quarter turn between each stretch. Flip the dough over and gently lift to round the edges. Cover with a clean towel and set aside.
Repeat this process each 30-minutes for an additional 2 to 2-1/2 hours. During this period the dough will be building strength through gluten development, growing enzymes, increasing in volume and developing small pockets of gas, causing it to become billowy. Knowing when to complete this process and move on to shaping takes some trial and error. Once it has increased in size by 50% you should be ready to go to the next step.
Transfer dough to clean, lightly floured work surface and divide into 2 equal pieces. Pre-shape the loaves by dusting lightly with flour and then use your cupped hands or a bench knife to gently shape each piece into a loose round by pulling gently towards you on the countertop to create surface tension. Cover with a towel, and let rest 30 minutes.
While the dough is resting, lightly dust two10” proofing baskets with the rice flour mixture and set aside. If you do not have proofing baskets (and really, who does?) Line two medium mixing bowls with lint free towels (not terrycloth), dust liberally with the rice flour mixture and set aside.
Lightly dust both the pre-shaped rounds with flour. Use your dough scraper to flip one over and onto the work surface so floured top is now facing down and lightly pat into a disc. Working around the circumference of the dough, begin pulling the edges of the disc towards the center at 12 o’clock, 6 o’clock 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock.
Turn the disc over so that the folds are now on the bottom; cup your hands securely and pull the dough towards you, dragging the edge of the dough firmly against the counter to create pronounced surface tension. Rotate the dough one-quarter turn and repeat dragging and pulling the edges until the dough begins to form a ball shape with a smooth, taut outer ‘skin’. Repeat this process with the second round.
Carefully place each dough ball in the prepared basket or lined mixing bowl seam-side up and dust with the rice flour mixture to avoid sticking. Slip each proofing basket or bowl into a large, plastic bag to protect it from drying out and leave in the refrigerator 10-12 hours to cold rise. The dough should have almost doubled in size. (Alternatively you may allow the bread to rise at 75F-80F for 1-2 hours, but in my opinion, flavor, color and texture are superior with a long cold rise.)
About 45-minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to the lower third of the oven. Place Dutch oven and lid on rack; preheat oven to 500 degrees. Carefully remove pot from oven, place on stovetop and remove lid. Gently turn one loaf into the hot Dutch oven seam-side down. (The seam side was facing up in the proofing basket.)
Use a razor blade or sharp knife to slash the top of the loaf (to tell the steam where to go and to encourage expansion); cover tightly and immediately return the pot the oven. Reduce oven temperature to 450 degrees and bake covered for 20 minutes. Carefully remove lid (watch for steam burns!) and continue to bake until loaf is deep mahogany 15-25 minutes longer.
Carefully remove bread from pot; The bottom of the loaf should sound hollow when thumped. Transfer to wire rack and cool at least 30 minutes before slicing if you can stand to wait that long.
Makes two 10-inch loaves
The Often Confusing Topic of Starter Management
Once you have an active and viable sourdough starter, you’ll need to maintain it regularly to keep it happy. If you are a once-a-week baker, plan on feeding and then storing it in the fridge until a day before baking. If you bake everyday, you can keep your starter at room temperature and feed it once or twice a day, depending on how warm your kitchen is. When you feed your starter, combine 3 or 4 tablespoons of your existing starter with equal weights of flour and water. That equates to about 2/3 cup of water for 1 cup of flour Always mix until there are no clumps or dry bits of flour present
Some General Tips and Guidelines:
Once you have a healthy starter, it will rise & fall predictably like the tide as it consumes the nutrients in the flour. Try to time the feeding schedule to occur after it has risen, rather than after it has fallen.
If your tap water contains high chlorine levels, use filtered water or allow the water sit out on the counter overnight before using.Get used to observing the characteristics of your starter at each phase and become familiar with its behavior by connecting its smell and appearance with how it is affecting your final product.
Many bakers prefer storing starter in a container that’s not completely airtight. An easy way is to use a Ball jar with the rubber gasket removed.
Some factors that affect fermentation rate and starter activity are water temperature, amount of mature starter used, flour selection (whole grain, organic flours increase fermentation activity) humidity and ambient temperature. If your starter seems either sluggish or overactive, increase any of these to speed it or decrease to slow down the activity.
About Claud Mann Claud Mann has worked as a culinary professional for more than 30 years, including stints at Nicola in Los Angeles, Project Open Hand inS.F.andExecutive Chef at thePalmillaHotel in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Claud is former co-publisher of the James Beard Award Winning, Edible Ojai and Ventura County Magazine and a founding board member of FoodForThought–The Ojai Healthy Schools Project. Claud also co-created, andwas on-air host for TBS’s long-running television program, Dinner & A Movie. (Described as of the 100 reasons to watch TV by Rolling Stone Magazine.) Mann has also worked closely with The Orfalea Foundation’s School Food Initiative and Santa Barbara Unified to bring fresh ingredients and scratch cooking to public school students in Santa Barbara County. His organic sourdough has been selling like hotcakes at the Ojai Farmers’ Market for ages. Most recently Claud is co-owner and baker at OjaiRotieRestaurant in Ojai, CA.
.5 oz Honey Turmeric Syrup (equal parts honey and water, 4 knobs of turmeric sliced and simmered in honey-water solution)
.25 0z Lemon Juice
1.5 oz Pixie Tangerine Juice
Directions
Combine in shaker
Shake and strain over fresh ice
Garnish with pixie wheel.
Enjoy!
About The Vine Here at The Vine you’ll find inviting atmosphere, amazing staff, the best regulars Ojai has to offer, and tasty food and drinks. Community runs through everything we do.
Butter Cookies
B U T T E R C O O K I E S
By Jeri Oshima, Four Worlds These are one of my favorite cookies, and they have often appeared on the dessert plattersin the Ojai Music Festival Lounge during the weekend.
Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4-teaspoon sea salt
1 cup best quality unsalted cultured butter, at room temperature
In a bowl of a stand mixer, with paddle attachment, combine and beat together, butter and sugar until light and fluffy
Beat in egg yolk and vanilla bean paste, until combined
Slowly add dry ingredients, until dough just comes together – don’t overmix
Roll dough into two logs, each about 8” long
Roll each log in the sugar, wrap in plastic and refrigerate until firm
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Unwrap dough and slice into 1/3” slices
Arrange on cookie sheets, lined with parchment paper, at least 1“ apart
Bake until coolies are golden and start to brown around the edges, about 16 minutes
Remove cookies from oven, let cool on a rack. Store in airtight container, up to a week.
[Makes about 50]
F O U R W O R L D S / C H E F J E R I O S H I M A Jeri Oshima has been a caterer and private chef in Ojai for over 15 years.She has cooked in Washington, DC, New York, and Whistler, British Columbia.She splits her time now between Ojai, California and Montreal, Quebec, creating a food style and presentation that incorporates a fusion of cultures and cuisines, from the modern French to the California fresh to the rustic Japanese of her family.Follow Four Worlds and Jeri Oshima on instagram : fourworlds4u
Congratulations to our friend and collaborator Tyshawn Sorey on his appointment as a MacArthur Fellow. Tyshawn’s astonishing creativity has been so evident in Ojai for the last two Festivals – 2016 with Peter Sellars and Julia Bullock, and in 2017 with Vijay Iyer (Sellars and Iyer are themselves MacArthur Fellows). Ojai is an incubator for artists and music, and we can all be proud to see these so honored and recognized with this exciting award. Wonderful and well-deserved news, Tyshawn.” – Thomas W. Morris
The MacArthur Foundation recently announced their Class of 2017 recipients popularly referred to as a “genius grant.” This esteemed list included two-time Festival alum Tyshawn Sorey. A release from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation cited Sorey for “assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defying distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music.”
The Foundation website summarizes Tyshawn’s work:
A virtuosic percussionist and drum set player who is fluent in piano and trombone, Sorey is an ever-curious explorer of the nature of sound and rhythm, ensemble behavior, and the physicality of live performance. He erodes distinctions among musical genres as well as the line between composition and improvisation and incorporates sophisticated rhythmic and harmonic phrasing, highly prescribed improvisational sound worlds, and real-time experimentation with sound, among many other structural elements. At the same time, he possesses a refined sense of restraint and balance that allows him to maintain his own unique voice while bringing a vast array of musical settings to life. He explores various World and Eastern musical and philosophical concepts on his albums Koan (2009) and Alloy (2014), employing musical languages that range from slowly developing tonally and pantonally based music to free atonal pieces that contain irregular rhythms, lyrical phrasing, and distinctive pacing. Inner Spectrum of Variables (2015) features an extended composition in six movements that merges the harmonic and melodic vocabularies of Western classical, American, and Ethiopian creative expressions, free improvisation, and twentieth-century avant-garde musical traditions. In his song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine (2016), Sorey reimagines the legendary Josephine Baker’s works; his original recreations of songs sung by Baker reflect both the context of her contributions to the civil rights movement and contemporary incidences of racial injustice. Sorey challenges expectations of jazz piano trio performance on Verisimilitude(2017), a set of five abstract, enigmatic, and austere pieces in which the delineation between spontaneous and formal composition is even more obscured.
In addition to his own work as a composer, conductor, and ensemble leader, Sorey’s prowess as a percussionist and drum set player is well known, and he continues to be in high demand as a sideman for popular creative artists. With his genre-free approach to making music and continuous experimentation, Sorey is rapidly emerging as a singular talent in contemporary musical composition and performance.
The Ojai Music Festival congratulates Tyshawn for joining the ranks of these creative and forward-thinking individuals. Read more here >
“Ojai is special. There is no fight with new music, no fear — just curiosity and hunger for fresh music of today. The Ojai audiences are completely open minded, and it’s a wonderful possibility to do music that I truly enjoy and find powerfully relevant in our present world. Ojai is magic,” Patricia Kopatchinskaja, 2018 Music Director.
“When I first met Patricia Kopatchinskaja, I knew she was a natural to be Music Director of the Festival. She is, quite simply, a force of nature. Her unstoppable energy, blazing virtuosity, and relentless curiosity are irresistible. The 2018 Festival will showcase her wildly diverse artistic talents as a violinist, a collaborator, a director, an advocate, and as a creative force. Patricia sees music in the context of today’s social and political issues so the 2018 Festival is one that will surely offer confrontation, questioning, and healing. The 2018 Festival aims to capture Patricia’s infectious energy and virtuosity,” Thomas W. Morris, Artistic Director.
The 72nd Ojai Music Festival, June 7-10, 2018, presents Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s unbounded musical creativity and perspective in the context of today’s social and political climate.
The 2018 Ojai Music Festival welcomes the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) in its first extended United States residency. Founded in 1997, the Berlin-based MCO defines itself as a free and international ensemble, dedicated to creating and sharing exceptional experiences in classical music. With members spanning 20 different countries, the MCO works as a nomadic collective of passionate musicians uniting for specific projects in Europe and across the world. The MCO forms the basis of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and maintains long and fruitful artistic relationships with major artists, including Ms. Kopatchinskaja and Mitsuko Uchida, Ojai’s 2021 Music Director. In Ojai, MCO will display its versatility and virtuosity as an orchestral ensemble, in smaller chamber iterations, and also in superb solo performances from individual members.
The JACK Quartet also makes its Ojai debut at the 2018 Festival. Deemed “superheroes of the new music world” (Boston Globe), JACK is dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new string quartet music. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, the group collaborates with composers of our day, including John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Simon Steen-Andersen, Caroline Shaw, Helmut Lachenmann, Steve Reich, Matthias Pintscher, and John Zorn. Upcoming and recent premieres include works by Derek Bermel, Cenk Ergün, Roger Reynolds, Toby Twining, and Georg Friedrich Haas. At the 2018 Festival, JACK will perform works by Georg Frederick Haas, Horatio Radulescu, Morton Feldman, George Crumb and Jorge Sanchez-Chiong.
Major projects will include two semi-staged concerts conceived and directed by Ms. Kopatchinskaja. The first, which opens the Festival on Thursday night, is Bye Bye Beethoven. Kopatchinskaja describes the concert as a commentary on “the irrelevance of the classic concert routine for our present life.” This program features a mash-up of music by Charles Ives, John Cage, Joseph Haydn, György Kurtág, Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Beethoven Violin Concerto. This marks the US premiere of Bye Bye Beethoven, which was premiered at the Hamburg International Music Festival and subsequently staged in Berlin. This production marked the fourth collaboration between Ms. Kopatchinskaja and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Bye Bye Beethoven involves musicians in both conventional and unconventional roles, encounters with different musical genres – including a collaboration with sound designer Jorge Sanchez-Chiong – and discourse among sound, space and imagery.
The second semi-staged concert conceived and directed by Ms. Kopatchinskaja is her own provocative commentary on the consequences of global warming. Titled Dies Irae, the program is an aesthetic reflection of a time rife with global warming, wars over resources, and refugee crises. Musical selections include Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, George Crumb, Michael Hersch, Byzantine chant, Giacinto Scelsi, and Galina Ustvolskaya’s remarkable Dies Irae for eight double basses, piano, and wooden box. The evening performance on Saturday, June 9, 2018 marks its American premiere.
A new piece by American composer Michael Hersch – described by him as a dramatic cantata for two sopranos and eight instrumentalists – will receive its world premiere at the 2018 Ojai Music Festival, with subsequent performances at Cal Performances’ Ojai at Berkeley and at Great Britain’s venerable Aldeburgh Festival. The Friday, June 8, 2018 premiere follows works by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, and piano music by Bull, Byrd, Purcell as well as improvisations. Mr. Hersch, who wrote a violin concerto for Ms. Kopatchinskaja two years ago, is considered one of the most gifted composers of his generation and is a formidable pianist. He currently serves on the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
Featured on Friday afternoon (June 8) will be the music of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, described by Alex Ross as “one of the century’s grand originals.” Kopatchinskaja has long been a passionate advocate of Ustvolskaya’s music and will perform with pianist Markus Hinterhäuser her Duet and Sonata. Hinterhäuser, who is also the Intendant of the Salzburg Festival, will perform all six of her piano sonatas. Ustvolskaya’s powerful Dies irae will be featured in the Saturday evening concert of the same title.
Additional programming highlights include Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments; Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat on the occasion of its centennial; major chamber and piano music by Galina Ustvolskaya; as well as Roumanian and Moldavian folk music performed by Ms. Kopatchinskaja and her parents, Viktor and Emilia Kopatchinski on cimbalom and violin. The Festival closes with the Ligeti Violin Concerto performed by Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
Free Community Concerts The 2018 Festival continues to build on its commitment to reach broader audiences with several opportunities for all to experience Ojai offerings. On Thursday June 7, following the three-part Ojai Talks dialogues, the Festival commences the first in a series of six free pop-up concerts in the Gazebo of Libbey Park, featuring performances of most of Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas for solo instruments by members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, electronics, will also perform Luigi Nono’s La lontanaza nostalgica utopia future in a free concert Thursday evening in Libbey Park, preceding the Festival’s first main Libbey Bowl concert of Ms. Kopatchinskaja’s semi-staged concert Bye Bye Beethoven. Additionally, Ms. Kopatchinskaja has programmed two free concerts just for children. Children of all ages will convene in the Ojai Art Center listen to works by Berio, Biber, Cage, Holliger, Arthur Honegger, and Ferdinand the Bull by Alan Ridout for solo violin and speaker. These concerts for children are presented in association with the Festival’s BRAVO education program for schools and community.
Ojai Talks The 2018 Festival begins with Ojai Talks hosted by Ara Guzelimian, former Festival Artistic Director and current Dean and Provost of The Julliard School. On Thursday, June 7, a three-part series of discussions will begin with an exploration of Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s musical preferences and inspirations. The Ojai Music Festival’s march toward its 75th anniversary frames the second Ojai Talks, with reflections on its storied legacy, contextualization of its place on the world stage, and hints of what evolutions may impact the Festival in the future. The third part of the discussion series will speak to the reinvention of musical groups, with panelists from the JACK Quartet and from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Additional on-site and on-line dialogue during the 2018 Festival includes Concert Insights, the preconcert talks at the LIbbey Bowl Tennis Courts with Festival artists hosted by resident musicologist Christoper Hailey. Preconcert interviews are broadcast through the Festival’s free live streaming program, hosted by content-expert individuals from across the nation.
Additional details for Ms. Kopatchinskaja’s 2018 Festival will be announced in the spring. New Partnership with the Aldeburgh Festival Following the 2018 Festival in Ojai with Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the following week’s Ojai at Berkeley presented in collaboration with Cal Performances, a new partnership with Aldeburgh will take place at the end of the Aldeburgh Festival (June 21 – 24) based at the acclaimed Maltings Concert Hall and in the town of Snape near Aldeburgh in England. The collaboration with Aldeburgh follows the formation of Ojai at Berkeley as a partnership of co-productions and co-commissions that affords the Ojai Music Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, and Cal Performances the ability to present more complex and creative artistic projects than could be conceived by each partner separately. The Aldeburgh relationship launches in June 2018, for an initial four-year period.
Ojai at Berkeley Marking the eighth year of artistic partnership, Ojai at Berkeley celebrates the dynamic nature of the Ojai Music Festival and of Cal Performances. As two distinct communities, Ojai and Berkeley are both known for intrepid artistic discovery, spirited intellect, and enduring engagement in the arts. Inaugurated in 2011, Ojai at Berkeley is a joint force that enables co-commissions and co-productions and allows artists to achieve more than could be imagined by each organization separately. Ojai at Berkeley will take place from June 15-17 in Berkeley, CA, following the Ojai Music Festival. For more information, visit CalPerformances.org.
2018 Festival series passes are available now and may be purchased online at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053.
2018 Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja discuss the life changing quality of Michael Hersch’s music. The Ojai Music Festival will present the world premiere I Hope We Get A Chance To Visit Soon by Mr. Hersch at the evening concert on Friday, June 8.
Michael Hersch’s solo and chamber works have appeared around the globe. We are honored to welcome Mr. Hersch for his Ojai Festival debut as a composer and performer during the 2018 Festival.
I Hope We Get A Chance To Visit Soon is commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival, Cal Performances, Aldeburgh Festival, and PNReview.
Watch 2018 Music Director, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, explain her vision for the Festival. Audiences can expect innovative staged concerts, premieres of new work, and important works of the past – works that will be given new life.
MUSIC DIRECTORS THROUGH 75TH ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL INCLUDE
Patricia Kopatchinskaja: 72nd Festival, June 7 to 10, 2018 Barbara Hannigan: 73rd Festival, June 6 to 9, 2019 Matthias Pintscher: 74th Festival, June 11 to 14, 2020 Mitsuko Uchida: 75th Festival, June 10 to 13, 2021
(OJAI CA) — Ojai Music Festival Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris announced updated Festival Music Director appointments today. Composer/conductor Matthias Pintscher will take the helm as 2020 Music Director for the 74th Festival (June 11 – 14, 2020). Mr. Pintscher is one of the most prominent composers of our time and has an extraordinarily active conducting career. He serves currently as Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris and as Principal Conductor of the Lucerne Festival Academy. He is active as a teacher both at the Lucerne Festival Academy and at the Juilliard School in New York. His teachers and mentors include two Ojai alumni, Peter Eötvös and Pierre Boulez. As Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival, Mr. Pintscher will follow violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (2018) and soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan (2019), and precedes pianist Mitsuko Uchida (2021).
“I have known Matthias since the 1990s both as a composer and conductor, and have always been impressed with his amazing creativity, unbounded energy and endless curiosity”, said Thomas W. Morris. “He is in high demand as a composer with recent works being commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, Chicago Symphony, London Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, and his conducting career is exploding with regular guest engagements with the world’s greatest orchestras, including this week’s debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Matthias is another natural to be music director of Ojai, and I am confident he will preside over a festival that is engrossing, wide ranging, and full of surprise – consistent with the arc of our artistic planning towards and through the 75th anniversary in 2021 and 2022.”
“It is a tremendous pleasure and incredible honor to be music director for the 2020 Ojai Festival, something I have dreamed about since moving to New York ten years ago,” said Matthias Pintscher. “I feel a combination of joy and responsibility to showcase composers and works that create something like an INVISIBLE BRIDGE between the two continents in which I am living and working: Europe and the USA. I have realized that my role as musical communicator – as composer, conductor, educator, and festival director – is to actively strengthen the interactions and connections between the music of today and its heritage in the US and on the “old continent”. As a European living in New York, I want to explore this INVISIBLE BRIDGE as one of the key elements for my programming of the 2020 Ojai Festival: thoughtful, innovative, loving, provocative, and poetic. Music speaks most directly from human to human, and Ojai is a perfect place to showcase this. I am excited. See you in 2020.”
Initial details for Mr. Pintscher’s 2020 Festival will be announced in June 2019. For complete biographical information on upcoming Ojai Music Festival Music Directors, visit OjaiFestival.org.
Matthias Pinscher, 2020 Music Director Matthias Pintscher is the Music Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and became Principal Conductor of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra at the start of the 16/17 season. He is currently in his eighth year as Artist-in-Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In the 17/18 season, Mr. Pintscher makes several significant debuts including with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Radio Symphony, Finnish Radio Symphony, and the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon. Pintscher and the Ensemble Intercontemporain bring an ambitious presentation of Pierre Boulez’s Répons to the Park Avenue Armory in New York and perform a number of concerts on tour in London (Royal Festival Hall), Vienna (Konzerthaus), and Cologne (Philharmonie). In addition, they will be joined by alumni of the Lucerne Festival in a special multi-media Messiaen project which will be performed in four cities. Return guest engagements this season include the Los Angeles Philharmonic in both a subscription week and at the Hollywood Bowl, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Utah Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (where he premieres Salvatore Sciarrino’s new piano concerto with Jonathan Biss), Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. An enthusiastic supporter of and mentor to students and young musicians, Pintscher will also work with the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, culminating in a concert at the Philharmonie.
In the 16/17 season, Pintscher was featured as the inaugural composer-in-residence and artist-in-focus at Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie concert hall which opened in January 2017. He took the Ensemble Intercontemporain on tour to Asia and celebrated the orchestra’s 40th anniversary. Other highlights included guest appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra (Ottawa), Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and Bayerische Rundfunk, among others. Last season also saw the premiere of Pintscher’s new compositions un despertar, his second cello concerto, performed by Alisa Weilerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of François-Xavier Roth; and Shirim for baritone and orchestra, with Danish singer Bo Skovhus and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra led by Christophe Eschenbach.
Matthias Pintscher began his musical training in conducting, studying with Peter Eötvös in his early twenties, during which time composing soon took a more prominent role in his life. He began to divide his time equally between conducting and composing, rapidly gaining critical acclaim in both areas of activity. As composer, Mr. Pintscher’s music is championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, orchestras, and conductors. His works have been performed by such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de Paris. Bärenreiter is his exclusive publisher, and recordings of his compositions can be found on Kairos, EMI, Teldec, Wergo, and Winter & Winter. Mr. Pintscher has been on the composition faculty of the Juilliard School since 2014.
Update on the Thomas Fire The Ojai Music Festival is deeply grateful for the outpouring of concern and support from our worldwide community after the Thomas Fire raged in the Ojai, Ventura, and Santa Barbara areas. As one of California’s largest wildfires on record, the fire has had a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of acres and on all those in its path. Thanks to the heroic efforts by firefighters, the overall natural beauty including the town of Ojai, Libbey Bowl, other Festival venues, and area hotels and restaurants were spared, allowing the Festival to proceed as planned. Over time, the Topa Topa Mountains surrounding the Ojai Valley will give rise to new life, and the Festival looks to honor this renewal of hope during the upcoming 2018 Festival with Music Director Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
This Year’s Ojai Music Festival (June 7-10, 2018) The 72nd Ojai Music Festival, June 7-10, 2018, will present the dynamic violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as music director. Praised for her “savage energy” (The Washington Post) and “mesmerizing artistry” (The Strad), Ms. Kopatchinskaja’s unbounded musical creativity will be in full force, showcasing her as a soloist, collaborator, and new music advocate. Joining her will be her close artistic collaborators, all of whom are making their Festival debuts: the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in its first extended United States residency, JACK Quartet, composer/pianist Michael Hersch, pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, pianist/harpsichordist Anthony Romaniuk, pianist Amy Yang, composer/sound designer Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, and Ms. Kopatchinskaja’s parents, Viktor and Emilia Kopatchinski. For more information on programs and series passes, visit OjaiFestival.org.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, 2018 Music Director Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s versatility shows itself in her diverse repertoire, ranging from baroque and classical often played on gut strings, to new commissions and re-interpretations of modern masterworks. Kopatchinskaja’s 2017/18 season commences with the world premiere of her new project Dies Irae at the Lucerne Festival where she was ‘artiste étoile’. Dies Irae is her second staged program following the success of Bye Bye Beethoven with Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 2016, and uses the theme from the Latin Requiem Mass as a starting point for her new concept featuring music from Gregorian Chant and Early Baroque to Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustwolskaja. The North American premiere will take place at the Ojai Festival in June 2018.
Thomas W. Morris, Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris was appointed Artistic Director of the Ojai Music Festival starting with the 2004 Festival. As Artistic Director, he is responsible for artistic planning and each year appoints a music director with whom shapes the Festival’s programming. During Mr. Morris’ tenure, audiences have increased, the scope and density of the Festival has expanded, the collaborative partnership Ojai at Berkeley with Cal Performances at UC Berkeley has started, a new partnership with England’s Aldeburgh Festival will be initiated this year, and a comprehensive program of video streaming of all concerts has been instituted. Mr. Morris is recognized as one of the most innovative leaders in the orchestra industry and served as the long-time chief executive of both The Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He is currently active nationally and internationally as a consultant, lecturer, teacher, and writer. Mr. Morris was a founding director of Spring for Music and served as the project’s artistic director. He is currently vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and he is also an accomplished percussionist. In November, Mr. Morris announced his decision to retire as the Festival’s Artistic Director following the 2019 Festival with Music Director Barbara Hannigan, after shaping Ojai’s artistic direction for sixteen years.
Ojai Music Festival From its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has become a place for groundbreaking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic setting 75 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The Festival presents broad-ranging programs in unusual ways with an eclectic mix of new and rarely performed music, as well as refreshing juxtapositions of musical styles. The four-day festival is an immersive experience with concerts, free community events, symposia, and gatherings. Considered a highlight of the international music summer season, Ojai has remained a leader in the classical music landscape for seven decades.
Through its unique structure of the Artistic Director appointing an annual Music Director, Ojai has chosen a “who’s who” for the post, including Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Olivier Messiaen, 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, Peter Sellars, and Vijay Iyer. Following Patricia Kopatchinskaja in 2018, Ojai will welcome Music Director Barbara Hannigan (2019).
Series Passes for the 2018 Ojai Music Festival (June 7-10) 2018 Festival series passes are available and may be purchased online at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. 2018 Ojai Music Festival series passes range from $165 to $925 for reserved seating, and lawn series passes start at $75. Single concert tickets will be available in spring 2018. Directions to Ojai and Libbey Bowl, as well as information about lodging, concierge services for visitors, and other Ojai activities, are available on the Festival website. Follow Festival updates at OjaiFestival.org, Facebook (Facebook.com/ojaifestival), and Twitter (@ojaifestivals).
The Bravo Program is so very grateful to the Ojai Women’s Fund for all of their support on behalf of the children of the Ojai Valley. This grant will further our goal of having weekly music classes for all kindergarten, first, second, and third graders, now including Sunset Elementary.
In human development we know that imagination, intelligence, and play are the same thing. They strengthen the brain. In music class, the teachers come with us and they get to play. It is an important opportunity for them to observe their children as we create the habit of singing, participation, and cooperation.
Recently we played Bombalalom, which is a word from Brazil meaning “our place of peace and happiness”. We sang the song with the words, and the solfeggio hand signs (do, re, mi, etc.). Sometimes we find a partner and put our hands together with them while we sing. We look into each other’s eyes. Joy sprouts forth! The children raise their hands and offer their own places of peace that have meaning to them. Some children say, “My treehouse”, “In my bed with a book”, “Being with my class”, “On my grandma’s lap”. Then one child raised his hand, and I asked where his Bombabalom place was. He shared very softly, his eyes gazing up to the ceiling, “The whole earth”. An entire class of 6 year-old children sighed, and nodded, and smiled.
Ojai Music Festival – “Time, Place, Action” by Vijay Iyer 6/10/2017 Libbey BowlOjai Music Festival – “Yet Unheard” by Courtney Bryan 6/10/2017 Libbey Bowl
The 2017 Ojai Music Festival with Music Director Vijay Iyer embodied the spirit of the Festival with an openness to discovery and stretching musical boundaries. This year as Vijay expressed the 71st edition was an opportunity to bring various communities together. Relive the 2017 Festival anytime by watching our archived live streaming concerts on our You Tube channel.
Feedback from our audience, artists, and members of the press is important to us. Read review excerpts, which we will continue to update as press reviews come in, or download the PDF version here.
[Vijay Iyer] made a festival with a history of daring and risk-taking become more vital and daring than ever. – San Diego Union-Tribune
The compelling feature was in what appeared to be Iyer’s own quest to find examples of how to take the next step and make the music your own.
For that he brought some of the great masters of day, with special and illuminating attention on Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. Friday night, Iyer presented the West Coast premiere of George Lewis’ brilliant 2015 opera, “Afterword,” written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of AACM” – Los Angeles Times
Over the weekend, we heard Iyer in multiple settings. He showed his ever-deepening attributes as a composer, most notably in the impressive world premiere of his engaging Violin Concerto, “Trouble,” for style-flexible virtuoso Jennifer Koh (whose late-night solo concert “Bach And Beyond,” melding Bach, Berio and others, was a bold highlight of the weekend). – DownBeat magazine
Proving once again that for the truly fearless, nothing is impossible, the 2017 Ojai Music Festival effectively erased the boundaries between jazz, classical, traditional Indian music, and more over the course of four sound-packed days in and around Libbey Bowl. – Santa Barbara Independent
Improvisation and invention from two continents staked out new ground somewhere in between. Was it jazz? Maybe. But as a whole, this year’s gathering in Ojai thrived under its long-held, suitably broad umbrella of “music festival,” and an excellent, engrossing one at that. Ultimately, those are the only labels that matter. – Los Angeles Times
Freelance writer/fine art and antiques broker Leslie A. Westbrook covers Ojai and Ventura County for Ventana magazine and the Ventura County Reporter among other outlets.
She had been attending the Ojai Music Festival off and on for more than three decades. Her father – “under the radar” jazz pianist and composer Forrest Westbrook – joined her at the Festival during the later part of his life and became a fan as well. Leslie really wishes he was still alive to partake in this year’s jazzy fest— but he will be with her in spirit. We asked Leslie for some of her favorite spots and things to do in Ojai and she has a nice long list to share:
Ojai’s downtown Arcade. Photo courtesy of Michael McFadden/Ojai Visitors Bureau
Music fans cannot live on music alone (well, almost) so what to do in-between concerts? Explore the valley and all it has to offer. Here are a few more reasons (as if you needed one!) to hit Ojai for the Festival this year.
EAT For quick, casual but tasty Mexican, two hole-in-the wall spots popular with locals:
The pineapple tamales at La Fuente (tucked into the corner of a strip mall) are sweetly addictive, but there are six other flavors ranging from cheese and chili to corn or pork. Street tacos on homemade rosemary tortillas at Ojai Tortilla House satisfy – be prepared to wait in line and eat on the street (no tables here), or better yet, head to Libbey Park and grab a picnic table where you can also enjoy the Rio Negro IIsound installation.
Azu of Ojai
Quick nibble before the tennis court pre-concert chat and evening concert? Pop into Azu for tapas and beers. Looking for a great gluten-free meal – Food Harmonicsis the new “kid on the block” right on the Arcade.
For a more leisurely meal, Suzanne’s is a long time favorite for concert goers (seafood entrees at dinner; salads at lunch); Nocciola is a wonderful alternative in town. Leave plenty of time so you don’t miss a concert to indulge in the tasting menus in this charmingly restored historic Craftsman bungalow – Bravo to owner/chef Pietro Biondi for bringing a tasty bit of Italy to Shangri-La.
DRINK Wake UP! and smell the freshly roasted coffee sourced and roasted by the owners at Beacon Coffee Co. (new since last year’s fest) and a tasty savory or grab a cuppa java at longtime fave Ojai Roasting Co. The gigantic berry muffins at Ojai Café Emporium will hold you through morning concerts.
Midday refreshment? Grab a smoothie or healthy salads from the deli case at Rainbow Bridge – and people watch from a street side table.
The Ojai Vineyard on Montgomery Street
Pop in for a pre-concert wine tasting at The Ojai Vineyardtasting room – we’ve never had a bad wine from winemaker Adam Tolmach. At the Festival’s new “Pub in the Park” on Friday and Saturday night, Attitude Adjustment will have OV wines available for purchase.
PRAY/MEDITATE / CHILLAX
Ojai is famous as a spiritualist retreat and community, Krishnamurti lived here – visit the philosopher’s library and former home in Ojai’s East End. Or head to Meditation Mount for stunning views of the valley.
Meditation Mount spectacular view
LOVE ART From contemporary fine art to handmade pottery, Ojai prides itself on the talent in the valley. If you like what you see, plan to revisit Ojai during the annual Studio Artists Tour in the fall and visit studios and meet the artists.
The Porch Gallery shows cutting edge contemporary art, During the Festival check out its current exhibit – the Ojai Invitational 2017: “California Space & Light”, a collaboration with EMS Arts featuring selected works by Kelly Berg, Brad Howe, Andy Moses and Jennifer Wolf.
Ojai has an earthly side, too. Contemporary ceramics can be purchased at PSpace Pottery or take a drive up and over the grade to visit Ojai icon Beatrice Wood’s (1893-1998) pottery studio, who credited her longevity thusly: “I owe it all to art books, chocolates, and young men.”). We’d add good music.
Rains Department Store in downtown Ojai
SHOP De Kor & Co, is a great emporium for a mix of home wares, clothing and cool gifts. Rains is an old-fashioned department store and Ojai institution. Walk on through – for men and women’s clothing and a great kitchen department! Partake in olive oil tasting at former high fashion mode Carolina Gramm’s gorgeous shop – she flavors EVOO and vinegars as well with subtle flavors. Walnut balsamic vinegar is a fav, but find your own amidst the vast array.
STROLL Don’t miss the Sunday Farmer’s Market – Mingle with locals and check out Ventura County’s rich cornucopia of flavorful, fresh organic produce. Nibble on popsicles in unique flavors (chili anyone?), chocolates made by a mother/daughter team, baked goods and other treats and you might even find Golden State papayas – who knew these tropical treats are raised in our region?
NATURE Need to stretch? Hike Shelf Road – or take a drive 3 miles to stroll Taft Gardens to admire exotic and rare botanicals from Australia and beyond.
Last but not least, don’t miss Ojai’s famous Pink Moment – the magic glow at sunset that kisses the Topa Topa mountain range.
Our student discounts are a great opportunity to enjoy the Festival at any age. All discounts except our gas rebate are available for students of any grade level.
Child Policy: Students age 12 and up are welcome to utilize our student discounts for Libbey Bowl or lawn tickets. We welcome children ages 6 to 11 on our lawn for $5. Children age 5 and under are free on the lawn. Discounted children’s and student tickets must be purchased over the phone or in person at the Festival Office.
For questions and in-person tickets, visit or reach the box office at:
Ojai Music Festival Office 201 S Signal St Ojai, CA 93023
Student Tickets – 30% OFF
When you show your active student ID to the Box Office, either in person or via email.
College Faculty – 15% OFF
When you show your faculty ID to the Box Office, either in person or via email.
Student Rush Tickets – 50% OFF
When you show your active student ID to the Box Office 30 minutes or less before the start time of a Festival concert. Valid only for concerts at Libbey Bowl, while supplies last. In the event that a concert sells out, there is no guarantee of entry.
Photos by Timothy Teague
Other Opportunities to Get Involved
OJAINEXT
Join the next generation of Ojai audiences. Whether you’re an adventurous music lover or simply curious about this yearly Ojai staple, look at our various perks to help welcome you to the free OJAINEXT community.
Our volunteers are the heart and soul of the Festival community. Get an immersive Ojai experience while making a difference in our community, all in an exceptional setting. Volunteer roles inlcude ushering, greeting, set up, and more!.
Each year, the Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program welcomes a dozen college students and recent graduates to go behind the scenes of a renowned summer music festival.
Jamie Bennett at last year’s 2024 Festival. Photo credit: Timothy Teague
Dear Ojai Festival friends,
We began the summer with the sad news of the passing of Jamie Bennett, a key figure in the Festival’s recent history as both a Board member and, for five years, our President and CEO. Jamie was a treasured friend to many in our extended Festival community in both Los Angeles and Ojai, bringing the same immediacy and warmth to all, whether they were of long-standing history or recent acquaintance.
Jamie brought a wealth of professional expertise from his many years in media and non-profit management, working for organizations such as the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Disney, and CBS where his time included a term as General Manager of KCBS-TV. Jamie came to the Festival first as a Board member and then took a staff leadership role as President and CEO from 2015 until 2020, helping to navigate the complicated early days of the pandemic and that year’s online Festival. Happily, for all of us, he returned to the Board after his work as CEO and remained deeply engaged in all dimensions of the Festival’s progress. He remained active until his last days, making calls, and sending helpful notes to the end.
I first met Jamie at the beginning of my return as Artistic and Executive Director in 2020. He was extremely helpful in providing grounding and much information to get me started. He was also an extraordinary ambassador to the Festival with his natural knack for putting people together. I have numerous rewarding recent friendships that began with Jamie saying, “You should meet this person, I think you would like them.” He was right in each case. His devotion to community in both his home cities of Los Angeles and Ojai led to his generous involvement in many worthy civic organizations and causes. We will miss him.
Claire Chase and Pan participants at the opening night concert. Photo Credit: Timothy Teague 2025
Savoring the Festival
I have been traveling extensively for both professional and personal reasons in the weeks following the Festival, which has given me the time, distance, and perspective to reflect on our wonderful time together in June. There are so many memories and experiences that remain in such sharp focus. We can relive the Libbey Bowl concerts by way of our treasure-trove archive of livestreams on demand:
Patrons walking in the Ojai Meadows Preserve. Photo Credit: Timothy Teague 2025
One of my favorite newer Festival traditions is that of our free Morning Meditations, which this year took place in the atmospheric Chaparral Auditorium as well as most memorably at the Ojai Meadows Preserve in an extremely happy and fruitful collaboration with the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy. My OVLC colleagues and I watched with delight as several hundred people streamed into the grove of trees with mountain panoramas as backdrop.
Joshua Rubin playing with composer Tania León listening behind him. Photo Credit: Timothy Teague 2025
The morning began with Susie Ibarra’s Sunbird, originally a multi-tracked solo flute piece for Claire Chase, here specially arranged for the occasion for four players – Claire, Joshua Rubin, Michael Matsuno, and M.A. Tiesenga.
Although the complex logistics prevent livestreams of these early morning concerts, we can find some of the works on recordings by the same artists. Here is the original flute version of Sunbird for us to savor:
The next day, the Sunday morning meditation at Chaparral ended in a mesmerizing way with Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Sola, played by violist Leilehua Lanzilotti. Happily, Leilehua’s studio recording of the work allows all of us to hear it.
We will continue to revisit some special moments of this past June throughout the summer even as we focus work on planning the 2026 Festival with Esa-Pekka Salonen, which will be our 80th Anniversary. Because of the June timing of the Festival, our fiscal year ends on August 31. Like so many of our colleagues in arts organizations, we are facing significant financial challenges with reductions or even elimination of arts funding in our ever-changing national landscape. We hugely thank our devoted supporters and ask those have not yet done so to consider making a gift prior to August 31 to help us close out what has been a most rewarding year artistically. We need all of you!
Ojai has been a creative laboratory for today’s pathbreaking artists
My name is Laura Walter and I am the Bravo Coordinator for the Ojai Music Festival. We are excited about our new, online videos. We’ll explore some secret songs, solfegge using hand signs, rhythmic patterns, and ideas for you to play with your own family. These song experience games of Education Through Music improve listening skills, memory, and critical thinking. Singing releases endorphins. Play increases intelligence.
Children often know this song from singing around the campfire. The notes of the scale have corresponding hand signs: do, re, mi, fa, so, la and ti. These hand signs were developed by Sarah Glover in the 1700’s in England to help her choir members learn to read music. John Curwen popularized them, and Kodaly also integrated them into his teaching method. Often when we sing the songs, we use the hand signs to indicate the notes. We are learning about pitch relationships.
Playing this game is one of our favorites. We sit in a circle and one child drops a letter while we hide our eyes. The chosen child gets up and chases the letter dropper. What this song game does for children is pretty incredible—we start to enjoy another’s turn just as much as getting one ourselves. Here we learn empathy through play. We often turn to a rhythmic representation of the song (find here), and discover the different sounds by adding body movements for distinct rhythmic notes.
All of
In addition to his own work as a composer, conductor, and ensemble leader, Sorey’s prowess as a percussionist and drum set player is well known, and he continues to be in high demand as a sideman for popular creative artists. With his genre-free approach to making music and continuous experimentation, Sorey is rapidly emerging as a singular talent in contemporary musical composition and performance.
The JACK Quartet also makes its Ojai debut at the 2018 Festival. Deemed “superheroes of the new music world” (Boston Globe), JACK is dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new string quartet music. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, the group collaborates with composers of our day, including John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Simon Steen-Andersen, Caroline Shaw, Helmut Lachenmann, Steve Reich, Matthias Pintscher, and John Zorn. Upcoming and recent premieres include works by Derek Bermel, Cenk Ergün, Roger Reynolds, Toby Twining, and Georg Friedrich Haas. At the 2018 Festival, JACK will perform works by Georg Frederick Haas, Horatio Radulescu, Morton Feldman, George Crumb and Jorge Sanchez-Chiong.
Featured on Friday afternoon (June 8) will be the music of Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, described by Alex Ross as “one of the century’s grand originals.” Kopatchinskaja has long been a passionate advocate of Ustvolskaya’s music and will perform with pianist Markus Hinterhäuser her Duet and Sonata. Hinterhäuser, who is also the Intendant of the Salzburg Festival, will perform all six of her piano sonatas. Ustvolskaya’s powerful Dies irae will be featured in the Saturday evening concert of the same title.
