(Ojai CA – February 5, 2025) – Composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to the Ojai Music Festival to serve as Music Director for the 80th Festival, June 11 to 14, 2026. Since the late 1940s, the Festival has continued the tradition of appointing a new Music Director each year, fostering vitality and diversity in its programming throughout the years.
“Esa-Pekka Salonen is one of the most inventive, adventurous thinkers of 21st-century musical life. The unique format of the Ojai Music Festival gives him an unusually free creative hand as both composer and conductor. I’m thrilled at the prospect of all that he will dream up,” said Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who previously collaborated with the Ojai Music Festival as Music Director for the 1999 and 2001 Festivals, is known as both a composer and conductor. He is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and the Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. As a member of the faculty of the Colburn School, he directs the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting Program. Salonen co-founded, and until 2018 served as the Artistic Director of the annual Baltic Sea Festival.
This season, Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony in world premieres of works by Nico Muhly, Xavier Muzik, and Gabriella Smith, among many other programs. He also returns to the Philharmonia Orchestra—both in London and on tour in Italy—and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he leads wide-ranging programs including Bryce Dessner’s Violin Concerto with Pekka Kuusisto and Boulez’s Notations with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. With the Orchestre de Paris, Salonen conducts a reprise of his and Romeo Castellucci’s staged production of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” and a Boulez Centennial celebration with choreography by Benjamin Millepied, while a Salzburg Easter Festival residency with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra centers on a new Simon McBurney production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina.
Salonen’s compositions are programmed with thirteen different orchestras this season. He conducts his own Tiu, kínēma, and cello concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra; he also conducts the cello concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he leads his Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra. His works, led by other conductors, also appear on programs at the Montreal and Aarhus symphony orchestras (Sinfonia concertante), Munich Philharmonic (Insomnia), Lahti Symphony Orchestra (kínēma), Netherlands Radio and Magdeburg philharmonic orchestras (Gemini), Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra (Nyx), Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra (Cello Concerto), and Ensemble intercontemporain (Meeting).
Salonen has an extensive and varied recording career. Releases with the San Francisco Symphony include recordings of Bartók’s piano concertos, spatial audio recordings of several Ligeti compositions, and the GRAMMY® Award-winning (Best Opera Recording) world premiere recording of Saariaho’s Adriana Mater. Other recent recordings include Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin and Dance Suite, and a 2018 box set of his complete Sony recordings. His compositions appear on releases from Sony and Deutsche Grammophon, among others; his Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, and Cello Concerto all appear on recordings he conducted himself. Initial details about Mr. Salonen’s 2026 Ojai Music Festival will be shared prior to the 79th Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025, with Music Director Claire Chase. Please visit OjaiFestival.org for information.
ARA GUZELIMIAN, ARTISTIC AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Ara Guzelimian is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival, having begun in that position in July 2020. The appointment culminates many years of association with the Festival including tenures as director of the Ojai Talks and as Artistic Director from 1992–97. Guzelimian stepped down as Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School in New York City in June 2020, having served in that position since 2007. He continues at Juilliard as Special Advisor.
Guzelimian serves as artistic consultant for the Marlboro Music Festival and School in Vermont. He is a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Music Awards, the artistic committee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in London, and a board member of the Amphion and Pacific Harmony Foundations. Prior to the Juilliard appointment, he was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006 and earlier held positions at the Aspen Music Festival and School and at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Guzelimian is editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, he was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL The Ojai Music Festival represents an ideal of adventurous, open-minded, and openhearted programming in the most beautiful and welcoming settings, with audiences and artists to match its aspirations. Now in its 79th year, the Festival remains a creative laboratory for thought-provoking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic outdoor setting. Each Festival’s narrative is guided by a different Music Director, whose distinctive perspectives shape programming — ensuring energized festivals year after year.
Throughout each year, the Ojai Music Festival contributes to Southern California’s cultural landscape with in-person and online programming as well as robust educational offerings that serve thousands of public-school students and seniors. The organization’s apex is the world-renowned Festival, which takes place over four days in Ojai, a breathtaking valley 75 miles from Los Angeles, which is a perennial platform for the fresh and unexpected. During the immersive experience, a mingling of the most curious take part in concerts, symposia, free community events, and social gatherings. The intimate Festival weekend, considered a highlight of the international summer music season, welcomes up to 5,000 patrons and reaches exponentially more audiences worldwide through streaming and broadcasts of concerts and discussions throughout the year.
Since its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has presented expansive programming in unusual ways with an eclectic mix of new and rarely performed music, as well as refreshing juxtapositions of musical styles. Through its signature structure of the Artistic Director appointing a different Music Director each year, Ojai has presented a “who’s who” of music including Mitsuko Uchida, Rhiannon Giddens, American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), Vijay Iyer, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Barbara Hannigan in recent years; throughout its history, featured artists have included Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, David Robertson, Eighth Blackbird, George Benjamin, Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, Jeremy Denk, Steven Schick, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Sellars.
79th OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL, JUNE 5 TO 8, 2025, WITH MUSIC DIRECTOR CLAIRE CHASE 2025 Libbey Bowl series passes are available and may be purchased online at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. Passes start at $215 for reserved seating. Lawn Area passes start at $90. Single tickets and day passes will go on sale in spring 2025. Follow Festival updates at OjaiFestival.org.
OJAI, CA- June 11, 2015: Music Director Steven Schick leads International Contemporary Ensemble in Varese’s Deserts at Libbey Bowl during the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.
The Ojai Music Festival audience members and donors are highly educated, affluent, and influential. An effective way to reach this desirable group is through advertising in the Festival’s program book.
“…a musical utopia where open-minded audiences welcome adventurous works presented against a backdrop of green hills, bird song, and Pixie tangerines.” (New York Times)
About The Program Book
Call us old-fashioned, but our complimentary printed Festival program book has always had the unique quality of being used repeatedly by patrons throughout the four-day immersive experience. Advertising with us is an unbeatable opportunity to reach this loyal core of the music-loving and art-going community and leave a memorable impression. Our program books are also a wonderful keepsake — our patrons refer to it throughout the year!
This perfect-bound collector’s item includes program notes by Thomas May on all Libbey Bowl concerts, free concerts and events, artist and composer bios, in-depth Festival features on the Festival, donor listings, staff and volunteer rosters, maps, FAQ, and much more.
Snapshot of Festival Patrons
Upwardly mobile consumers with important purchasing power
Established patrons who support music and arts programs
Dual-income families of $250,000 and above
Visits Ojai during the year outside of the Festival weekend
Travel more than three times a year
Highly educated executives and professionals
Advertising in the 2026 Program Book
By supporting the Ojai Music Festival as an advertiser, you support Ojai’s signature music event and music education in our Ojai Valley schools.
Deadlines and Submission of Artwork Space deadline: April 15, 2026 Artwork due: April 21, 2026
Attendance Attendance at the Festival is up to 5000 patrons and community members. Many reference their program books multiple times during the four-day Festival. Ojai Music Festival patrons save and share their books for years as treasured mementos. It is also distributed at key Ojai Valley businesses before the Festival.
Since the Ojai Music Festival’s founding in 1947, volunteers have ensured the enduring success of the organization, from our renowned four-day Festival and our acclaimed BRAVO music education program.
Volunteer opportunities range from ushering at concerts, administrative office work, and concessions to housing Festival artists and production team. The Festival is fortunate to have a large community of volunteers who make the experience even more memorable.
Besides receiving benefits to volunteer that include lawn tickets, a festival commemorative t-shirt and invitations to events, volunteers get to enjoy the camaraderie of working together and meeting interesting music enthusiasts like Jodine Hammerand!
JODINE HAMMERAND: A Return to Ojai and the Music Festival!
What brought you to Ojai? My family was living in Los Angeles when my parents took my siblings and I to Ojai for the week of Spring Break. We all fell in love with Ojai and our family moved here in 1972.
L-R: Wendy Gray and Jodine Hammerand at the Festival’s volunteer event in March, 2024
When did you start your involvement in the Music Festival? I started at Nordhoff High School as a freshman. It was probably my junior year when I started volunteering for the Ojai Music Festival as an usher. I will never forget watching a run-through with the LA Philharmonic that was being conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas!
When did you make your way back to Ojai? After retiring from Alaska Airlines, I ultimately chose to move back to Ojai right at the height of the pandemic. I was interested in volunteering again and finally was able to usher for the 2022 Ojai Music Festival, then again in 2023. It felt like a happy reunion!
What is a recent fond memory of the Festival? I am a lover of all music genres, especially the Blues. I really enjoyed Rhiannon Giddens being the music director in 2023 with her banjo playing. She also introduced the pipa and the kora, two great instruments rooted deep in history. ‘The roots of the present are deep in the past’ my high school history teacher used to always say! I attended the performance of Ghost Opera and enjoyed listening to the pipa with all the instruments. I ushered at the performance of Omar’s Journey and heard the kora played by Seckou Keita. I arrived before the concert as ushers do to prepare the Libbey Bowl. I was walking down the center aisle of seats when I saw Seckou practicing on stage. When he was finished, he looked my way, and I gave him a thumbs up indicating how beautiful he played. He smiled his big smile and that made me very happy, and I will never forget it.
I look forward to volunteering for the Ojai Music Festival. It is a joy every year, no matter the style of music. In addition, I enjoy every year when the staff and volunteers gather together before the Festival, to listen to Ara Guzelimian with his knowledge of the musicians. He is an asset as artistic and executive director.
Music Director Claire Chase and Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian Announce Updates for the 79th Festival, June 5 to 8, 2025
The Ojai Music Festival celebrates collaboration and dialogue across multiple generations of composers and performers, including four World Premieres of works by Susie Ibarra, Tania León, Terry Riley, and Bahar Royaee; two U.S. Premieres by Tania León and Liza Lim; eight West Coast Premieres; residencies by Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Liza Lim, Craig Taborn, Susie Ibarra, Leilehua Lanzilotti, and Marcos Balter; and seminal works by John Coltrane, Julius Eastman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and more
“There’s no place in the world like Ojai, and there is no gathering of musicians and ideas like the Ojai Festival. From the time I was a kid growing up in Southern California, the Festival has taken on mythical dimensions for me.” – Claire Chase, 2025 Music Director
(March 19, 2025, OJAI, CA) — The 79th Ojai Music Festival, running June 5 to 8, 2025, welcomes as Music Director one of today’s most vital artists, flutist Claire Chase. Chase, together with the Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director, Ara Guzelimian, today announces the complete programming for the June Festival, welcoming a multi-generational international community of composers, performers, composer-performers, and improvisers.
Claire Chase is known internationally as a flutist, new music advocate, and educator. After establishing her professional career as co-founder and artistic director of the multi-award-winning International Contemporary Ensemble, Chase quickly developed a reputation as an artist with a penchant for collaboration and community-building. Her esteem within the new music community continued to grow with the 2013 launch of her signature Density 2036 project. This 24-year initiative—in which she commissions a program of new pieces for flute each year, concluding in 2036—has enriched the contemporary flute repertoire with dozens of new compositions, while the Density Fellows program, founded in 2023, mentors a new generation of flutists while ensuring the pieces remain in the repertoire. In recognition of her efforts, she has earned the Avery Fisher Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and, in the 2022–23 season, served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall.
“Claire Chase is one of the most vibrant generators of ideas in today’s musical life,” says Guzelimian, “something she does with boundless imagination and generosity of spirit. It’s been so rewarding to imagine all of Ojai’s possibilities with her. I’m particularly excited by the musical community she’s creating with the resident performers and composers, weaving them throughout in collaborations and cross-current inspirations. And being a native of California, Claire responds deeply to the particular beauty and complexity of Ojai’s natural setting, something represented in many works that explore many distinct environments.”
Under Chase’s musical leadership, the 2025 Ojai Music Festival celebrates collaboration and dialogue across multiple generations of composers. Among them are Composers-in-Residence Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Liza Lim, and Marcos Balter; composer-performers Craig Taborn (piano), Leilehua Lanzilotti (viola), and Susie Ibarra (percussion); luminaries including Sofia Gubaidulina, Terry Riley, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir; and emerging composers including Eduardo Aguilar, Vincent Atria, and Bahar Royaee. Together, these artists will present new and recent works—including four world premieres, one U.S. premiere, and eight West Coast premieres—in dialogue with one another, as well as with era-defining artists such as J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, Julius Eastman, and Pauline Oliveros. In the spirit of Chase’s tireless advocacy for new music, each composer appears on equal footing with one another, each piece as vital to the narrative of its program as its counterparts. Household names share the stage with rising talents, and notated works coexist with improvised ones, illuminating unexpected commonalities and delighting in divergences.
“While shaping these programs,” writes Chase, “I was inspired by the author Donna Haraway’s invitation to encounter one another in ‘unexpected combinations and collaborations,’ in what she calls ‘oddkin’—a term for our deep and unruly interdependence. What a beautiful description of the messy and miraculous experience of making music in the 21st century! The four days of the Festival will be anchored by four generations of brilliant composers whose projects—though wonderfully divergent stylistically—explore common themes of rebirth, re-imagination, reclamation, and rewilding. Our programs will be brought to life by an exhilarating lineup of performers whose manifold musical backgrounds will meet in unpredictable and electrifying new ways. From Thursday to Sunday, we will conjure thinking forests, liberated rivers, endangered charms, ancient mythologies, holy presences, magical spells, and reimagined communities. And we will embrace multispecies collaboration in performance experiences that extend from the newly rewilded landscapes of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy to the feathered night choruses fluttering around Libbey Bowl. My hope is that these programs will illuminate and celebrate the fragilities as well as the exuberant possibilities of music made in oddkin. I look forward to welcoming you to the adventure!”
The spirit of collaboration and found community suffuses not only the music and its presentation, but the performers themselves. Ojai’s 2025 Festival collaborators represent artists from the Latin American, European, Australian, and American contemporary music scenes. Among them are returning artists Steven Schick, who previously served as 2015 Music Director; cellist Seth Parker Woods; the JACK Quartet comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell; cellist Katinka Kleijn; Levy Lorenzo, percussion and electronics; M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone and electronic hurdy-gurdy; percussionist Ross Karre; clarinetist Joshua Rubin; bassist (and ELISON Ensemble member) Kathryn Schulmeister; and pianist Cory Smythe. Several artists appear in their Festival debut, including Wu Wei, sheng; Michael Matsuno, flute; Ben Marks, trombone, and Tristram Williams, trumpet, of ELISION Ensemble; Alex Peh, keyboards; Leilehua Lanzilotti, composer and viola; Susie Ibarra, composer and percussion; Craig Taborn, composer and piano; Wesley Sumpter, percussion; and the USC Cello Ensemble.
Rather than limiting each artist to set ensembles, this year’s Festival collaborators comprise a single, flexible ensemble whose various configurations can flow and evolve to best suit the unique requirements of each program. “In the spirit of collectivism and collaboration, I’m excited to invite these artists to play together in new and sometimes surprising ensemble configurations,” says Chase. “We’ll all show up as both headliners and side acts in each other’s explorations.”
The 2025 Festival opens on Thursday, June 5 with Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, an affectionate tribute to Pauline Oliveros, and culminates with Marcos Balter’s Pan from Chase’s Density 2036 project. Balter’s already iconic Pan (2017–18) is a musical drama for solo flute, live electronics, and an ensemble of community musicians. The all-ages, all-abilities Pan ensemble—a kind of 21st-century Greek chorus that serves as the conscience of the community in this telling of the Greek myth—is assembled newly in each city to which the work travels.
Friday, June 6 begins with an early morning program featuring the JACK Quartet with works by Tania León, Liza Lim, and two emerging composers, Vicente Atria and Eduardo Aguilar. The Libbey Bowl concert on Friday at 10:30am celebrates the old made new in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions for harpsichord and the world premiere of Alex Peh’s trio arrangement of Terry Riley’s Pulsing Lifters and ends with a “summit meeting” between Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe, two inventive composers and pianists whose worlds encompass creative music, free jazz, new music, and beyond.
In its West Coast premiere, Australian composer Liza Lim’s Density 2036 contribution Sex Magic for solo contrabass flute and electronics centers Friday afternoon. Inspired by Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute (Bertha), Sex Magic evokes and celebrates women’s power across time and cultures, evoking the giant bass flutes of Papua New Guinea and the Australian didgeridoo in a work that ritually moves across three altars, creating a mystical, mesmerizing evocation of both the present and the timeless past.
Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff will be featured on the Friday evening Libbey Bowl concert. Claire Chase partners with the JACK Quartet in a 45-minute rendition realized in collaboration with Samuel Clay Birmaher that was conceived as a series of musical sketches and brilliantly colored drawings. Of Riley’s Density 2036-commissioned work Chase said, “At 90 years old, Terry is on fire with ideas. He’s creating new forms and inciting collaborations with urgency and vitality. For Ojai, we are imagining the limitless variations, realizations, and possible interpretations of his ‘liftoff’ to include both performers and audiences.” Music for a “chorus of cellos” by Sofia Gubaidulina and Julius Eastman precede The Holy Liftoff.
On Saturday, June 7, the first Libbey Bowl concert of the day centers on the West Coast premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Density 2036 commission Ubique for flute, two cellos, piano, and electronics. Thorvaldsdottir describes the work as “inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance. Throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite.”
Saturday afternoon continues with the West Coast premiere of composer-pianist Craig Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics. Composed for Chase’s Density 2036 project, Taborn’s critically acclaimed piece was inspired by a dream in which plants awake, blossom, grow, and change as the dreamer walks through a garden. (A second performance of Taborn’s Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms will be offered on Sunday afternoon, June 8.) At the Libbey Bowl that evening is a program of music by Bach, Sofia Gubaidulina (inspired by Bach), and Tania León, concluding with Liza Lim’s large-scale How Forests Think, a work inspired by the imagery of ancient forests as vibrant, symbiotic communities that, as Lim writes, “nourish the old connections and keep a song going. One might think of a forest as a choir or certainly as an ensemble. Stories, dreams, and thoughts inhabit multiple forms in a living matrix.”
On Sunday, June 8, the JACK Quartet explores their ongoing Modern Medieval project at Libbey Bowl, with music from the 14th to 17th centuries renewed for contemporary performance by composers/JACK violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman. The program includes the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, a musical tribute to rich and fragile ecosystems inspired by the distinct rainforest habitats of Luzon, Philippines. The work features the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Philippine Northern style bamboo, gong, and flute music, performed on new sound sculptures of gong metals. Sky Islands is described as “a musical call to action, drawing awareness to dwindling biodiversity, changing climate, and global community practices.”
An exuberant all-company 2025 Festival finale on Sunday afternoon includes music by Leilehua Lanzilotti, Pauline Oliveros’s The Witness and the world premiere of a new version of Tania León’s Singsong adapted for solo flute. The Festival culminates in the world premiere of Terry Riley’s Pulsefield 3,in ajoyous celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday.
COMMUNITY OFFERINGS An integral part of the immersive Ojai Festival experience are the free community events in Libbey Park and throughout Ojai. The 2025 schedule will include two “Morning Meditations.” On Saturday, June 7 at the Ojai Meadows Preserve, in a collaboration with the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, the free event will feature the music of Pauline Oliveros and Susie Ibarra. On Sunday, June 8 at Chapparal Auditorium, the Morning Meditation will include music of Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bahar Royaee, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. During Festival weekend, Annea Lockwood’s Housatonic sound installation will be open to Festival patrons and the community. The annual family concert at the Libbey Gazebo will take place on Sunday following the Libbey Bowl morning concert with featured artists.
OJAI FILMS The Ojai Music Festival welcomes the return of showcasing documentaries during the weekend at the recently remodeled Ojai Playhouse. The two films featured will be Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros and 32 Sounds. Deep Listening is a documentary film project by Daniel Weintraub. Produced in collaboration with executive producer lone, Oliveros’s partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maat, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, live performances, and unreleased music with appearances by Terry Riley, Anna Halprin, lone, Linda Montano, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Alvin Lucier, Claire Chase, Miya Masaoka, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender, and many more ground-breaking artists. 32 Sounds is a film by Sam Green, with music by JD Samson. This immersive documentary and profound sensory experience explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us.
EXPERIENCE THE 79TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL, JUNE 5 TO 8, 2025 Single tickets and day passes are available and may be purchased at OjaiFestival.org or by calling (805) 646-2053. Single tickets range from $55 to $175 for reserved seating in the Libbey Bowl. General admission for the Lawn in Libbey Bowl is $25, and add-on event prices are $55. Ojai Films can be purchased directly at OjaiPlayhouse.com. Student discounts and group sales are available by inquiring with the Festival Box Office at boxoffice@ojaifestival.org.
CLAIRE CHASE, MUSIC DIRECTOR Claire Chase, described by The New York Times recently as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022–23 season and serves as the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival. Previously, Chase performed at the Ojai Music Festival with the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2015 with that year’s Music Director Steven Schick, in 2016 with Music Director Peter Sellars, and in 2017 with Music Director Vijay Iyer.
Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, and London Philharmonia. This season, Chase toured Europe and Japan with the premiere of a new double concerto by Dai Fujikura for flute and violin (with collaborators Leila Josefowicz and Akiko Suwanai). In the 2022–23 season, Chase premiered a new double concerto by Felipe Lara with the vocalist and bassist esperanza spalding and the conductor Susanna Mälkki, which was named one of the Best Classical Music Performances of the Year by The New York Times.
In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, described by The New Yorker as “a quarter-century journey with little precedent.” Now in its twelfth year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, educational initiatives, and a community-focused approach to cultural production. In 2023, Chase performed all ten Density programs to date in a weeklong series of events co-produced by Carnegie Hall and The Kitchen. Central to the Density project is a commitment to supporting an international, multigenerational community of flutists who will take the Density repertoire in bold new interpretive directions. The Density Fellowsprogram, launched in 2023 in celebration of the tenth anniversary,provides an international cohort of emerging flutists with the resources to make the Density repertoire their own. Chase is the artistic director of Density Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute in the 21st century.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017 and as an ensemble member on performance and educational projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that resulted in the premieres of more than 1,000 new works and earned the group multiple Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, and the Ensemble of the Year Award from Musical America Worldwide.
A deeply committed educator, Chase is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural advocacy. Chase is also Creative Associate at The Juilliard School, where she mentors young artists and engages students in a range of interdisciplinary projects. With her longtime colleague Steven Schick, she co-founded Ensemble Evolution at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, a three-week intensive for the next generation of interdisciplinary artists, curators, and teachers. Chase’s Debs Creative Chair residency at Carnegie Hall encompassed programming for all ages, including a “Day of Listening” for children and families inspired by the listening philosophies of Pauline Oliveros. Chase partnered with MacArthur Fellow Josh Kun and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to expand her Pauline Oliveros project as part of the PST ART x Science Collide festival in November 2024.
Claire Chase’s extensive discography includes eight solo albums of world premiere recordings and dozens of collaborative recordings with ensembles, composers, and sound artists from a wide range of musical genres. Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She lives in Brooklyn.
ARA GUZELIMIAN, ARTISTIC AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Ara Guzelimian is the Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival, having begun in that position in July 2020. The appointment culminates many years of association with the Festival including tenures as director of the Ojai Talks and as Artistic Director from 1992–97. Guzelimian stepped down as Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School in New York City in June 2020, having served in that position since 2007. He continues at Juilliard as Special Advisor.
Prior to the Juilliard appointment, he was Senior Director and Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. Guzelimian serves as artistic consultant for the Marlboro Music Festival and School in Vermont. He is a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Music Awards, the artistic committee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in London, and a board member of the Amphion and Pacific Harmony Foundations. He is also a member of the music visiting committee of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
Previously, Guzelimian held the position of Artistic Administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, and he was long associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, first as producer for the orchestra’s national radio broadcasts and subsequently as Artistic Administrator. Guzelimian is editor of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon Books, 2002), a collection of dialogues between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. In September 2003, he was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for his contributions to French music and culture.
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL The Ojai Music Festival represents an ideal of adventurous, open-minded, and openhearted programming in the most beautiful and welcoming of settings, with audiences and artists to match its aspirations. Now in its 78th year, the Festival remains a creative laboratory for thought-provoking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic outdoor setting. Each Festival’s narrative is guided by a different Music Director, whose distinctive perspectives shape programming — ensuring energized festivals year after year.
Throughout each year, the Ojai Music Festival contributes to Southern California’s cultural landscape with in-person and online programming as well as robust educational offerings that serve thousands of public-school students and seniors. The organization’s apex is the world-renowned Festival, which takes place over four days in Ojai, a breathtaking valley 75 miles from Los Angeles, which is a perennial platform for the fresh and unexpected. During the immersive experience, a mingling of the most curious take part in concerts, symposia, free community events, and social gatherings. The intimate Festival weekend, considered a highlight of the international music summer season, welcomes up to 5,000 patrons and reaches exponentially more audiences worldwide through streaming and broadcasts of concerts and discussions throughout the year.
Since its founding in 1947, the Ojai Music Festival has presented expansive programming in unusual ways with an eclectic mix of new and rarely performed music, as well as refreshing juxtapositions of musical styles. Through its signature structure of the Artistic Director appointing a different Music Director each year, Ojai has presented a “who’s who” of music including Mitsuko Uchida, Rhiannon Giddens, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Vijay Iyer, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Barbara Hannigan in recent years; throughout its history, featured artists have included Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, David Robertson, Eighth Blackbird, George Benjamin, Dawn Upshaw, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mark Morris, Jeremy Denk, Steven Schick, Matthias Pintscher, and Peter Sellars.
Get an inside look at the creative process with our free Virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music and ideas with the 2025 Festival artists, composers, innovators, and thinkers. Virtual Talks are free and open to the musically curious!
Marcos Balter and Susie Ibarra WED April 16
Join Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian with special guests Marcos Balter and Susie Ibarra, two of today’s innovative composers who continue to stretch musical limits in their approach to music, and fortunate for Ojai, this year’s composers-in-residence. Gain insight into their unique creative processes and discover what to expect at the Festival in June, led by their colleague and friend Claire Chase as music director.
PAST TALKS
Claire Chase and Annea Lockwood February 25, 2025
Renowned composer Annea Lockwood will join us for a special Ojai Talks session alongside Music Director Claire Chase. Together, with Ara Guzelimian, they will delve into their shared passion for the interplay of sound in nature and its integration into their musical creations of which will be featured at this year’s Ojai Festival.
Q&A with Tom Morris and special talk with Barbara Hannigan December 4, 2024
Always The Music is the fascinating story of former Ojai Music Festival Artistic Director Tom Morris’ personal metamorphosis through the highest levels of the world of classical music, his learning and insights into how storied musical institutions function, great artists create, and audiences engage. Join us for a participatory Q&A between Tom and Ara Guzelimian, plus a special conversation between Tom and 2019 Music Director Barbara Hannigan, recorded for this online session.
Meet the Music Director September 18
To kick off preparations for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival, June 5-8, join us for a conversation between Music Director Claire Chase and Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian.
Our favorite pre-Festival tradition returns with our Virtual Ojai Talks. At Virtual Talks, we get an inside look at the creative process with Festival composers, artists, innovators, and musical thinkers. Virtual Talks are free and open to the musically curious!
PAST TALKS
Violinist Leila Josefowicz
WED March 18 @ 5:30PM PT on Zoom
Leila Josefowicz, who makes her OMF debut this June, is celebrated for her passionate advocacy for contemporary music for the violin. Over the years, she has worked closely with many of today’s most compelling composers, including Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, Oliver Knussens, helping to bring new works to audiences worldwide.
Join Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian and Leila for a conversation about what draws her to new music and the collaborative process behind it.
In celebration of the Ojai Festival’s Eight Decades of Discovery, Creativity, and Community, we welcome back John Adams as our special guest for our Virtual Ojai Talks. With Ara, John will share some of his favorite Festival memories as both composer and conductor, as we look forward to hearing his music at the 2026 Festival led by their good friend Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Sign your child up for a week of music, art, games, and storytelling with Ms. Laura. There is no previous musical experience required. BRAVO Music and Arts Camp is a productive way to expose your child to music for the first time or to develop an existing passion for music over the Summer. Session one has come to a close with 31 students, but it’s not too late to sign up for the second session!
Special thanks to our partners Ojai Parks and Recreation Department and BRAVO volunteers.
When: June 22-26, and August 10-14, 2026 Ages: 5-15 Fees: $125 + $25 materials fee; scholarships are available, all are welcome!
All of us at the Festival are so grateful for your support and commitment during this deeply unsettled and unsettling time. The coming year holds the promise of better things, especially with the arrival of vaccines quite literally beginning to be distributed as I write these words. We dream of having dinner with friends, traveling to see loved ones, seeing the smile on the face of a passing stranger.
And of listening to music in each other’s company. We are keeping the dream of our June reunion alive, working to realize the energizing vision of John Adams as we anticipate the 75th Festival. We will continue to consult with medical and public health professionals to create the safest environment possible for the Festival.
In the meantime, our own spirits have been buoyed by all you have done to sustain the Festival, from the great generosity of financial support to notes and messages telling us how much you missed the special experience of music in those four magical days in June.
We want to thank you with a small year-end gift that captures the beauty and adventurous spirit of the Ojai Music Festival in a newly created video filmed in the serene setting of Meditation Mount, which has recently finished its own period of renewal.
We hope that the quiet joys of the holidays brighten you and yours. And that the promise of the New Year brings to us a better world and the occasion to gather together once again.
With thanks and warm regards from all of us at the Ojai Festival,
Ara Guzelimian Artistic & Executive Director
The mission of MeditationMount is to promote the building of an enlightened and compassionate world through the power of creative meditation, inspirational educational programs, and community-based events focused on the practical application of the following universal spiritual principles: Right Human Relations, Goodwill, Group Endeavor, Unanimity, Spiritual Approach, and Essential Divinity.
MeditationMount invites you to dream, to imagine and to articulate with us, the design of a new world founded upon spiritual principles and values through the practical application of creative meditation in daily living. The Mount stands as a refuge for the regeneration of the spirit and a beacon of fiery hope in a world yearning for a more light-filled and compassionate approach to building community. There is so much more waiting to emerge that will grow the Mount’s capacity to be of even greater service in this time of global transition. Therefore, we graciously welcome your participation in securing the future of the Mount’s work in the world. For more information visit their website here.
ABOUT ELLIOT COLE, composer Elliot Cole (*1984) is a composer and “charismatic contemporary bard” (The New York Times). He has written for and performed with Grammy winners Roomful of Teeth, Grammy Nominees A Far Cry and Metropolis Ensemble, and many other ensembles. His percussion music evokes “sparkling icicles of sound” (Rolling Stone) and has been performed by over 250 groups all over the world. He is currently on faculty at the The New School and Juilliard Evening Division, and is Program Director of Musicambia at Sing Sing, where he runs a music school for incarcerated men. Cole is a PhD candidate in Composition at Princeton University.
ABOUT Fiona Digney, vibraphone Fiona Digney is an Australian-born percussionist, producer, and educator who holds both education and performance degrees from Australia, The Netherlands, and the USA, and recently received her doctoral studies under the guidance of Steven Schick at UC San Diego. This year, she was named as the Ojai Festival Producer & Artistic Administrator. Digney has enjoyed a wide-ranging freelance career performing in solo, ensemble, and theatrical settings across the globe. She has performed with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, La Jolla Symphony, Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, Tetrafide percussion quartet (AUS), and red fish blue fish (USA), as well as a soloist at Club Zho and the launch of the Totally Huge New Music Festival (AUS). Digney is also Managing Director & Artistic Producer of San Diego based performing arts organization Art of Elan.
The 76th Ojai Music Festival is scheduled for June 9–12, 2022 Anchor programming will include world premiere performances:
Staging of Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi by soprano Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick, staged by Zack Winokur, with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, who also perform as dancers
Broken Theater, staged and choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith incorporating the entire AMOC company alongside special guest collaborators
Family Dinner, a cycle of mini-concertos by Matthew Aucoin, featuring the entire AMOC company, including Davóne Tines, Miranda Cuckson, Emi Ferguson, and Keir GoGwilt
“For many decades, the Ojai Festival has been an artistic oasis, a place where artists and audiences alike go to be refreshed by the Festival’s atmosphere of openness, experimentation, and adventure. AMOC is thrilled and honored both to uphold Ojai’s essential spirit and to expand the Festival’s scope by offering numerous interdisciplinary offerings that feature our signature blend of music, dance, and theater. We can’t imagine a better forum to feature the astonishing work of AMOC’s many artists, and next year’s Festival will include several world premieres—including choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith, music by Matthew Aucoin, a production by Zack Winokur starring Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick, and much more.This Festival will be a welcome return for many of us: a return to Ojai for beloved Festival artists including Julia Bullock, Jay Campbell, Miranda Cuckson, Emi Ferguson, and Davóne Tines, and a return to collaboration with Ojai’s Artistic Director & Executive Director Ara Guzelimian for the many AMOC artists who have benefited from Ara’s wisdom throughout their careers.”— AMOC, 2022 Music Director
OJAI, California – September 15, 2021 – As the Ojai Music Festival begins the 75th Festival (September 16–19, 2021) with Music Director John Adams, the Festival’s 2022 Music Director AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) and Artistic & Executive Director Ara Guzelimian announce initial programming for the 76th Festival, June 9- 12, 2022, which will conclude the Festival’s 75th anniversary year.
“We are exhilarated to gather this week in Ojai for our long-awaited return to an in-person Festival with John Adams as Music Director and the central presence of a new generation of composers whom John has invited,” said Guzelimian. “This is such a fitting beginning to our 75th Anniversary celebrations. And we even get to meet two brilliant artists this September — violinist Miranda Cuckson and flutist Emi Ferguson — who are members of AMOC, the creative collective who serve as Music Director of the next Ojai Festival in June 2022. I am so delighted to be collaborating with the endlessly imaginative artists of AMOC as the culmination of our 75th anniversary celebrations. They represent a fearless discipline- and genre-crossing leap into a new generation of artistic work. Several of the AMOC artists — Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, and Jay Campbell — are already well known to Ojai audiences, so there are elements of both reunion and discovery in this remarkable company of 17 artists. We are in for a great adventure.”
Ojai’s 2022 Music Director AMOC is a discipline-colliding collective made up of 17 of the most adventurous singers, dancers, instrumentalists, choreographers, and composers at work today in music and dance. For the 2022 Ojai Music Festival, AMOC will serve as the first-ever collective to hold the position of Music Director in the Festival’s 75-year history. As described by The Boston Globe, AMOC is “a creative incubator par excellence . . . where the boundaries between disciplines go to die.” A collective of some of the most creative, forward-thinking artists, AMOC is led by its co-founders — composer/conductor Matthew Aucoin and director/choreographer Zack Winokur — collaborating with Core Ensemble members Jonny Allen (percussion), Paul Appleby (tenor), Doug Balliett (double bass/composer), Julia Bullock (soprano), Jay Campbell (cello), Anthony Roth Costanzo (countertenor), Miranda Cuckson (violin/viola), Julia Eichten (dancer/choreographer), Emi Ferguson (flute), Keir GoGwilt (violin/writer), Conor Hanick (piano), Coleman Itzkoff (cello), Or Schraiber (dancer/choreographer), Bobbi Jene Smith (dancer/choreographer), and Davóne Tines (bass-baritone). Julia Bullock, Jay Campbell, Miranda Cuckson, Emi Ferguson and Davóne Tines will all make welcome returns to Ojai, having participated in past Festivals.
Programming for the 2022 Festival will include the world premiere performance of AMOC’s staging of Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi by soprano Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick, staged by Zack Winokur, with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, who also perform as dancers. Harawi, written in 1945, is based on an Andean love song genre of the same name, with texts by Messiaen and incorporating the Quechua language. The 2022 Festival also will present the world premiere performance of AMOC’s Broken Theater, staged and choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and with participation by the entire company alongside special guest collaborators. Broken Theater is an intensely personal response to our time, beginning with the concept of a “ghost theater,” a theater empty in a time of isolation. The world premiere of Family Dinner also anchors the 2022 Festival. Family Dinner, a cycle of mini-concertos by Matthew Aucoin, features the entire AMOC company, including Davóne Tines, Miranda Cuckson, Emi Ferguson, and Keir GoGwilt. Additional programming details for Ojai 2022 will be announced in the fall.
AMOC (American Modern Opera Company), 2022 Music Director
Founded in 2017, the mission of AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) is to build and share a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways. The company’s current projects include Comet Poppea, which includes an AMOC-commissioned opera by composer George Lewis and is produced in collaboration with Anthony Roth Costanzo and Cath Brittan, and The No One’s Rose, a new music-dance-theater work created in partnership with San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Stanford Live.
Past projects include Zack Winokur’s production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón, starring Davóne Tines, which has been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Repertory Theater; a new arrangement of John Adams’s El Niño, premiered at The Met Cloisters as part of Julia Bullock’s season-long residency at the Met Museum; Davóne Tines’s and Winokur’s Were You There, a meditation on Black lives lost in recent years to police violence; and Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt’s dance/music works With Care and A Study on Effort, which have been produced at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and elsewhere. Conor Hanick’s performance of CAGE, Zack Winokur’s production of John Cage’s music for prepared piano, was cited as the best recital of the year by The New York Times in 2018 and The Boston Globe in 2019.
If the Ojai Festival aged like a human being, the formidable storehouse of memories it has already accumulated would likely tilt the spotlight of this 75th anniversary edition toward the past — perhaps in the form of a retrospective celebrating highlights of these many decades. But the very spirit of Ojai — its open-eared curiosity and resistance to received ideas — evades that kind of chronological, linear account-taking.
The dislocations caused by the pandemic, the implications of which are still unfolding, have even triggered something of a Benjamin Button effect. After the long, traumatic abstention from live performance, it feels as though we’re aging backwards as we reconsider the basic issues we may have thought long since sorted out. And the urgency of today’s social justice consciousness has intensified a desire to hit the restart button. Acting your age, in this age, is to make room again for a radical hope that not so long ago might have seemed utopian overreach.
“This year’s Ojai Festival brings a real focus to young talent: especially young composers, but also young performers,” says Music Director John Adams, who previously served in that role in 1993. Even though much of the programming was envisioned prior to the pandemic, Adams instinctively chose the future as the vanishing point for his image of musical vitality.
Not that this is a new outlook for the eminent composer. Born in the same year as the inaugural Ojai Festival, Adams himself has steadfastly resisted the temptation to settle into comfortable habits and predictable patterns even while being increasingly feted as a musical sage. Anyone who comes to his work with expectations still constrained by such long-outdated pigeonholes as “Minimalism” is bound to be astonished by his tireless development of a complex musical language — and particularly by the paths he has followed over the past 15 years.
Aside from his own composing career, Adams has long been committed to mentoring the new generation through his involvement in teaching, curating, and commissioning. Not long after resettling from his native New England to the Bay Area in the 1970s, he led a new music ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory that presented many premieres and experimented with fresh voices. “I was thinking about what has really meant the most to me over the years, and particularly now, at my age, it is my relationships with these younger composers,” Adams says.
Ojai Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian recalls that Adams insisted on this focus on the future early on: “When he began thinking about this summer’s program, he became so determined that even though this is an anniversary festival it should not be a retrospective in any sense — and that it should not be centered around his music. This idea of bringing discoveries of new composers to the audience is very fitting for Ojai. He wanted the takeaway of this Festival to be an exploration of the next generation — the ultimate act of optimism, because they are the ones who will carry us forward.”
But what does Adams find so promising in these young artists? Above all, it’s their openness to inspiration from all directions — temporally and across genres, from the classical tradition, from its avant-garde fringes, from the by-now inextricably interwoven discourses that fuel our many-layered musical lives. Composers like Carlos Simon are navigating new ways of relating to an increasingly interrogated canon while at the same time honoring the authenticity of voices that it has historically marginalized. “I’m excited that at this Festival we have such a broad bandwidth of talent and also backgrounds,” says Adams.
Guzelimian adds: “If there is one takeaway from the 75th anniversary Ojai Festival, it might be that there is health in being poly-stylistic.” In this sense, the composers and performers featured over this intense, long weekend of music-making mirror the identity that the Ojai Festival itself has cultivated over its history: an openness to new sounds, unusual combinations, uninhibited fusions and even contradictions, and, above all, to the possibility of genuine epiphanies amid these uncertain, fearful times. Sometimes, this might even be an attempted recovery of what was once known as a sense of the sublime, as we encounter in the world premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s Sunt Lacrimae Rerum.
Mattingly is among the California composers who have a particularly strong presence in Adams’s lineup — along with Gabriella Smith, Samuel Adams, and Anthony Cheung. This in turn represents a subsidiary theme of “homecoming” and a West Coast sensibility that runs through the programming — though this, too, cannot be reduced to a single trend. Gabriela Ortiz, the outstanding Mexican composer, extends this geographical orientation further and offers a potent counterweight to the Eurocentric focus that has so long dominated discussions of new music. “I think that music is very interested in other latitudes and other cultures, that the future is no longer limited to European aesthetics, as we were taught in the past,” Ortiz emphasizes.
And through the participation of Julie Tumamait- Stenslie, a modern-day leader of the peoples who originally inhabited this magical paradise-on-earth, we acknowledge the enduring presence of the Chumash people. They have given this place its name: “Awhay,” meaning “moon” or “lunar phase” — changed to “Ojai” to make it easier to pronounce — was chosen to replace the Germanic “Nordhoff” in the wake of the First World War.
Adams’s choice of performers likewise intensifies the focus on a fresh, youthful perspective that is redefining the entire field. Just before the pandemic shutdowns began, Adams got to spend time touring with Víkingur Ólafsson for some of the first European performances of his dazzling new piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? “Not only
is Víkingur a phenomenal pianist, he also has an amazing creative mind,” Adams remarks, referring to the Icelandic pianist’s equally convincing approach to well-known repertoire and new scores.
Like the featured composers — including fellow pianist Timo Andres — Ólafsson approaches inherited tradition as a contemporary language, transforming it into an inescapably thrilling new experience. By the same token, the Attacca Quartet and Miranda Cuckson bring to the new scores they interpret a conviction that confers on them the sense of longstanding authority. And the incomparable Rhiannon Giddens is such a natural fit for Ojai that it’s surprising this summer marks her debut at the Festival. “She seemed to John and to me to be ideal,” recalls Guzelimian, “because she is one of the most genuine pan-stylistic artists I know. She’s somebody who really is deeply rooted and convincing in a wide variety of musics.”
If there is no overarching trend among the composers and performers who are shaping music’s future, there is a shared value — the value of acting their age, as Guzelimian puts it, recalling how Esa-Pekka Salonen was criticized at the beginning of his tenure with the LA Philharmonic for playing “too much” contemporary music: “He responded: ‘When I conduct Lutosławski’s music, I bear the same relationship and age to him as Karajan did to Richard Strauss.’ What he was essentially saying is, ‘I’m acting my age, I’m bringing forward what I know and love.’
I think this current generation is the least inhibited yet in drawing on the multiplicity of musics that they know.”
It is more than a festival. It is a homecoming, the recognition of a bond. On rough wooden benches — back in the day — or stretched out on the lawn, settled on a blanket, families in tow, this is a kindred fellowship, both alert and at ease. Performers get it right away because it only takes a rehearsal or two to realize that here it’s different. Young composers, cradling their newborn, often take more time. But after the jitters and anxieties of a premiere or first performance they look around and see where they are and are transformed.
For all the unseen planning of a dedicated staff (or more likely because of it) — Ojai always feels improvised, something that just happens. How easily conversations begin, over a new work, a performance, or this and that. Introductions come later, maybe after a year or two with a “remember when.” Then casual acquaintance blossoms into friendship. Yes, that’s a big part of it, the shared memories, something even initiates pick up on, when on Sunday they look back on Friday and the distance travelled in between. Something, too, about the place, the trees, the hills, the soft mists in the morning, the beating sun at noon, the evening chill. Old-timers know to come prepared, newcomers learn quickly. Then we leave, disperse, maybe one last meal and the long drive back, envying those who call Ojai home.
There are regulars, of course, true believers who attend every event. For others, however, Ojai is a smorgasbord — up for a day, perhaps, or an afternoon, or some years not at all. No matter; we all come back sooner or later, a habit formed through decades. Naturally, there have been changes. Time was, the festival was a simpler affair. Three days, five or six concerts; lots of time to spare, to chat, shop, a leisurely coffee, a bookstore browse, perhaps a walk, or bike ride. Back then Ojai sometimes felt like a coda to the Los Angeles season, to the Monday Evening Concerts, or the concerts of the Philharmonic, a showcase for the Southland’s finest, under the guidance, among others, of Lawrence Morton, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Ingolf Dahl, Pierre Boulez, Ernest Fleischmann, not to mention resident composers such as Messiaen, Carter, or Kurtág — the legacies of giants. There was never a formula, a fixed agenda. There was freedom to pick, choose, and explore; to address the cultural and political preoccupations of the moment, to dare something new, to cozy up to something familiar, to be unapologetically eclectic. Ojai, as John Henken has written, “was always ahead of the counter- and multi-cultural curve.” Theater, dance, opera, non-Western music, and jazz have long been part of the mix. Just one thing: The music comes first.
It’s been more abuzz with activity recently. A stage rebuilt and shifted, a few trees lost, proper seats instead of sagging benches, a more forgiving sunshade, lots of bustle in the park. Tom Morris brought us events from dawn to midnight, spread around the lower and upper valley. The focus has grown from conductors and composers to include performers and ensembles; brash, innovative young artists from across the country and abroad who are rethinking music and the concert experience. New trends and fashions, our legacies in the making.
75 years — or longer? Consider a long-forgotten 1926 Ojai Valley Festival of Chamber Music, the so-called Frost-Sprague Festival with a $1,000 prize for the best new string quartet. “One of the greatest musical events that has ever taken place in America,” was the local assessment. Ah, the pride! We like to think we’re on the map, that we make a difference. No doubt we are, no doubt we have. Commissions, premieres, big names, new talents, correspondents from New York, London, and Frankfurt, weblinks, blurbs, and blogs, the world takes note. That’s all nice, good, and fine. But somehow, though we might care, Ojai itself is above such things. We listen, delight in new sounds, discover other cultures, new ways of making music, or interpretations that make us hear afresh what we thought we knew. But this place, this space takes it all in its serene embrace — the music with the birds, the crickets, the sirens, the bells, and the distant lawn mower. And because that’s so, this is a place of private epiphanies, revelations that come unbidden — we all have our favorites — moments to store quietly in our memories, to recall and share. Such are the shared moments that make each year’s festival a reunion. Together again. How good it will feel.
by Christopher Hailey
Special thanks to Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne for their support of the Festival’s 75th anniversary season
Ojai Music Festival 2021. John Adams, Miranda Cuckson, Rhiannon Giddens, Víkingur Ólafsson, Attacca Quartet. Photos by Timothy Teague
Thank you for joining us at our 75th Festival, September 16-19, 2021. Read review excerpts below. Relive concerts anytime by watching our archived live streaming concerts. View our photo gallery of some of our favorite Festival moments.
“a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future” New York Times
“Against unsettlingly uncertain odds, Ojai’s 75th anniversary festival happened as hoped and promised, and it was special” Los Angeles Times
“In Ojai, circa 2021, themes of “homecoming” and pandemic-related dynamics struck emotional chords beyond the provocative and consoling musical goods.” San Francisco Classical Voice
“Throughout its illustrious history, the Ojai Music Festival has been known for a series of unpredictable, serendipitous musical experiences that become known as quintessential Ojai moments. One such moment stood out as a highlight of this year’s festival – an “Ojai Dawns” concert… [with a program of] all Mexican composers, music by [Gabriela] Ortiz, Javier Álvarez, and Georgina Derbez.” San Francisco Classical Voice
“Pandemic-waylaid, the Ojai Music Festival finally erected its contemporary-music-geared Big Top with one of its strongest programs of late.” Santa Barbara Independent
“Rhiannon Giddens was an inspired choice to anchor the festival with… a rousing concert of her original/traditional material on Saturday night… The concert… resonated with all of the pain and struggle we have experienced over the last two years in a way that was at once healing and grounding.” Santa Barbara Independent
“arguably the most exciting music event in this country” Berkshire Fine Arts
“Music sounds fresh and very much of the moment. It both delights and moves in its Ojai setting.” Berkshire Fine Arts
“thoughtfully programmed and precisely performed” Sequenza 21
“The Ojai spirit of adventure was alive in the programming hands of music director du jour John Adams… and the new artistic and executive director Ara Guzelimian” Classical Voice North America
Thank you for joining us! Revisit your favorite festival memories below Note: Images have been optimized for web/social media display; Please credit and tag Timothy Teague or Ben Hoffman for photo credit.
Photo by Ben Hoffman SAT 8am Dawn Concert with Lynn Vartan Ojai Music Festival 2021
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Photo by Ben Hoffman SAT 8am Dawn Concert with Lynn Vartan Ojai Music Festival 2021
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Photo by Ben Hoffman SAT 8am Dawn Concert with Lynn Vartan Ojai Music Festival 2021
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Libbey Bowl Evening (OMF 2021)
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Photo by Timothy Teague Festival Finale Ojai Music Festival 2021
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Photo by Timothy Teague Festival Finale Ojai Music Festival 2021
It turned out to be a magical time of reunion and renewal, as we celebrated our 75th anniversary Festival in the best of company. As I take a breath and reflect on that beautiful September weekend, I feel boundless gratitude. We gathered together in Ojai and cherished the singular joy of being in the company of music and musicians as a communal experience.
The predominant emotion of the concerts was one of joy and optimism, particularly as defined by the energies and creativity of a new generation of composers. John Adams was so very wise in making sure this anniversary festival looked forward. All our artists embraced that spirit wholeheartedly, especially determined to do so in the face of the painful events of the past eighteen months. Our great thanks go to John, not only for the riches of his own music, but also for the choice of artists and works which so beautifully defined the arc of this festival.
Let us take a moment to bask in just a few selected memories. Enjoy our photo gallery of Festival moments as captured by photographer Timothy Teague:
It took remarkable devotion on the part of many people to get us here, beginning with our dedicated Board of Directors who have been steadfast in their vision, generosity and clarity of purpose. I offer my heartfelt thanks to the artists, the staff, interns, volunteers and housing hosts who worked tirelessly to make this a most special festival, often in the face of unexpected challenges – did I mention that Víkingur Ólafsson was nearly turned away at the airport in Reykjavik because of confusion about his (entirely correct!) visa documentation? Somehow, there was always a solution to be found. Even the weather was ideal, with mild temperatures and soft breezesto bring Ojai enchantment
But I reserve a very measure of thanks to each of you, for your continued faith in the Ojai Festival, for complying with the safety measures, for your generosity in supporting the festival financially, and most of all, for your irreplaceable presence at concerts (and by extension, long distance by way of our streamed concerts). You help create one of the most attentive, understanding, adventurous, and open-hearted audiences I have ever experienced.
And now, we begin the happy anticipation of the Festival to come in June 2022. We had a vivid introduction to two more artists from AMOC (the American Modern Opera Company), the collective of 17 instrumentalists, singers, dancers, choreographers, and composers, who together will be the Music Director in June. Violinist Miranda Cuckson and flutist Emi Ferguson, core members of AMOC, both made brilliant debuts at this year’s Festival.
Miranda Cuckson shone in the virtuosic and expressive challenges of Samuel Adams’ Chamber Concerto, played a recital that ranged from Bach to Saariaho, and, in a stunning Libbey Bowl performance of Bach, created an iconic only-in-Ojai image:
Emi Ferguson played Gabriela Ortiz’s Huitzitl with expressive power and grace, despite the distractions of another only-in-Ojai moment, the sounding of a persistent security alarm nearby. So I thought it’s only fair to revisit Emi’s mesmerizing performance, this time with the benefit of some subtle audio filtering that magically minimizes the sound of the alarm and focuses attention entirely on Gaby’s evocative music and the beauty of Emi’s playing!
We canhappily anticipate look ahead to more musical encounters with both Emi and Miranda, the return of favorite Festival favoriteartists (and current members of AMOC) soprano Julia Bullock, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and cellist Jay Campbell, as well as a happy introduction to all ofthe brilliant creative spirits of this endlessly-creative collective in the next Festival. We will meet all ofthe members of AMOC in the coming months by way of special online programming and conversations.
In the meantime, our wholehearted thanks to each of you. I look forward to seeing you all again in June 2022 or sooner!
The Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) develops and produces a body of discipline-colliding work, to combine traditional and experimental artistic processes, and to maintain enduring creative relationships between its members. Founded by Artistic Directors Zack Winokur and Matthew Aucoin, AMOC is made up of some of the most adventurous singers, dancers, and instrumentalists at work today in the fields of contemporary and classical music and dance. Get a glimpse of this boundary-breaking ensemble and understand why they are a perfect fit for Ojai’s longstanding legacy of innovation and adventure.
Welcome back to the Festival’s continuing series of Virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music, ideas, and the creative process with 2022 Festival artists, composers, innovators, and thinkers.
MAY 25, 5:30PM PT:AMOC* DANCES: COLLABORATIVE DANCE/MUSIC WORKS featuring Bobbi Jene Smith, Julia Eichten, Keir GoGwilt, Coleman Itzkoff, and Or Schraiber with guest host WYNC/New Sounds John Schaefer.
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A new song cycle, the echoing of tenses, commissioned by the Ojai Festival (with a gift in honor of Nancy Sanders) from Anthony Cheung, sets poetry by Asian-American writers interconnected by the larger theme of memory, made complicated by the circumstances of cultural and personal identity. Join us for this illuminating conversation with composer Anthony Cheung and two members of AMOC* – violinist Miranda Cuckson and composer/co-founder Matthew Aucoin.
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Messiaen’s HARAWI WED April 6, 2022 | 5:30-6:30pm Julia Bullock, Conor Hanick, and Zack Winokur, AMOC members The Festival will present the world premiere of AMOC’s staging of Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi for soprano and piano. In addition to Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick’s performance, this production breaks open Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death into a newly theatrical dimension through the choreography of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, directed by Zack Winokur.
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The Music of Julius Eastman Davóne Tines and Doug Balliett, AMOC members Seth Parker Woods, cello Episode 3: The legacy of Julius Eastman will come to the 2022 Ojai Music Festival in a multi-dimensional performance piece, reflecting Eastman’s art and the larger context of his life, creativity, and humanity. Showcased in this concert will be AMOC members Davóne Tines and Doug Balliett, along with cellist and frequent AMOC colleague Seth Parker Woods. Join us for another illuminating conversation on the creative process and Eastman’s impact on each of them.
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Episode 2:Pianist and AMOC member Conor Hanick joins us for a lively conversation with Ara Guzelimian to talk about his advocacy for performing new works and his recent discovery of pioneering German composer Hans Otte’s The Book of Sounds, which Conor will perform in an epic recital at Ojai in June.
Conor Hanick is regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old. A fierce advocate for the music of today, he has premiered over 200 works and collaborated with composers both emerging and iconic. Among them, he has worked with Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, in addition to championing music by leading composers of his own generation, including Caroline Shaw, Matthew Aucoin, Nina Young, Nico Muhly, and Samuel Adams. Conor appears regularly as a recitalist and chamber musician and in recent seasons has been presented by the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Caramoor Festival, Park Avenue Armory, and Gilmore Festival. Since 2014 he has been a faculty artist at the Music Academy of the West and in 2018 became the director of its Solo Piano Program.
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Episode 1: Co-founders Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur of AMOC, 2022 Music Director, talk with Ara Guzelimian on the origin story of this exciting collective of artists
Founded in 2017 by Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, the mission of AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) is to build and share a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways.
Current and past projects include The No One’s Rose, a devised music-theater-dance piece featuring new music by Matthew Aucoin, directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith; EASTMAN, a multi-dimensional performance piece contending with the life and work of Julius Eastman; Winokur’s production of Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarrón, which has been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Repertory Theater; a new arrangement of John Adams’s El Niño, premiered at The Met Cloisters as part of Julia Bullock’s season-long residency at the Met Museum; Davóne Tines’s and Winokur’s Were You There, a meditation on black lives lost in recent years to police violence; and Bobbi Jene Smith and Keir GoGwilt’s dance/music works With Care and A Study on Effort, which have been produced at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and elsewhere. Conor Hanick’s performance of CAGE, Zack Winokur’s production of John Cage’s music for prepared piano, was cited as the best recital of the year by The New York Times in 2018 and The Boston Globe in 2019. Additionally, AMOC will serve as the Ojai Music Festival’s 2022 Music Director, only the second ensemble, and first explicitly interdisciplinary company, to hold the position in the Festival’s 75-year history.
The 2022 Festival Music Director AMOC, a collective of today’s most adventurous musicians, singers, composers, choreographers, and dancers, is as eclectic and open minded with their musical interests as one would expect. To begin the new year and expand our own musical horizons, we asked each member of AMOC to share their personal listening of the moment — a selection which is characteristically wide-ranging and very individualistic.
Listen on Spotify and Apple Music (Preview the AMOC playlist and log on to your account to listen to the full songs)
Jonny Allen: Jazz Crimes by Joshua Redman This is a track that I just keep coming back to. The groove is subtle but persistent. Joshua Redman is such an incredible artist and Brian Blade’s drumming has always been an inspiration to me.
Paul Appleby: My “what I’m listening to” pick is Kate Soper’s set of three songs for soprano and string quartets, Nadja. I am a huge fan of Kate’s music because she has a language and voice that is entirely her own. Her intellectual and literary interested are deeply personalized in her compositions and performances and her somewhat esoteric tests become vivid and immediate in her music. This score is a great example of Kate’s incredible level of technical accomplishment as well as her imaginative and unique approach to her art.
Matthew Aucoin: Stranger Love, Act 3 (excerpt), by Dylan Mattingly, performed by Contemporaneous Dylan Mattingly writes music of limitless jubilance and joy. This excerpt from his opera Stranger Love is a kind of dance party for the angels, built upon an unlikely echo from a Springsteen-esque “promised land.”
Doug Balliett: I cannot stop listening to Ok ok pt 2 from Kanye’s latest album “Donda”. It’s got a heavy dark groove and guest Shenseea’s verse is jaw-dropping.
Julia Bullock: Up From The Skies by Jimi Hendrix, from the album Bold As Love (1967) It’s like some prophetic, post-apocalyptic love song… (honestly hope to find a way to sing it one day)
Jay Campbell: I’m currently listening my way through Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers, a gigantic sprawling 4.5 hour collection of 19 pieces written over the course of 30+ years, each one titled after various moments, ideas, people, or places related to the Civil Rights Movement. It’s music that is very much alive in a literal sense. As in, it really feels like it is deeply meditating on the lived experience of human life itself. It’s extremely moving, exciting, surprising, and sometimes baffling. But when I listen to this highly abstract music, my ears somehow feel closer to hearing a full spectrum of complex human experience in all of its contradictions of tragedy, playfulness, rage, and joy. And maybe things that I haven’t even felt yet. And — when you consider the context of the composer himself, a Black man born and raised in segregated Mississippi — things that many of us are privileged to never have to personally feel or experience.
Anthony Roth Costanzo: Lately I’ve become obsessed with Betty Carter and how wildly inventive and abstract she is, both in how she deploys the extremes of her voice, and how she charts the trajectory of a song. From her piercing head tones, to her forthright parlato, to her childlike upper chest register, to her impossibly rich baritone notes, I find her a total revelation. You can hear those colors set forth in this track:
Miranda Cuckson: Wadada Leo Smith America’s National Parks I adore this work (which I first heard a few years ago) for many reasons, including its bracing beauty, its grouping of very satisfyingly distinct utterances and instrumental presences, its continually thrilling sensations of space and texture, and the composer’s deep vision of the psychological tension in our shared natural landscapes.
Julia Eichten: While it was an extreme challenge to choose only one song from Xenia Rubinos’ latest album, Una Rosa, Cógelo Suave has been one of many that I have on repeat. This swirl of a song will make any day brighter, break you open and have you singing!
Emi Ferguson:
Keir GoGwilt:
Conor Hanick: The last thing played on my music app was the first disc of Beach House’s upcoming album, Once Twice Melody, which is lush, sweeping, synthy, and grandiose.
I’ve also been enjoying Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack to the film The Power of the Dog, especially the Messiaen-esque finale Psalm 22.
Lastly, folks are rightly excited about the recent Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders collaboration, but I’ve found myself revisiting Floating Points’ 2015 album of experimental synth-jazz, Elaenia, with a particular habit of rewinding “Silhouettes (I, II, III)”
Coleman Itzkoff: Pick: Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice I’ll admit to a certain degree of bias for my playlist pick, Matt being a close friend and current roommate here in New York City, but I truly felt compelled to list this new opera of his, which recently held it’s Met premiere to much acclaim. I was able to attend two live performances, as well as listen to the BBC broadcast on a recent long car trip and found so much of the music staying with me, swirling around in the back of my consciousness like the really great music tends to do. The score is dazzling, deeply moving, complex, tectonic (superlatives abound!), and the performance by Erin Morley, Joshua Hopkins, Barry Banks, and more, all backed by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra, is totally and utterly ravishing. For those already dedicated fans of Matt’s work, Eurydice is the latest and greatest contribution to his oeuvre (not to mention the latest in a 400-year Orphic opera tradition). And for those less familiar with the music of Matthew Aucoin, I can think of no better place to start!
Or Schraiber: Formidable by Stromae always makes me dance.
Bobbi Jene Smith: La Solitude always makes me feel the dance inside of me. It has been a song that has been a starting point for many dances I have made. Thank you, Barbara, for haunting and dancing with me. I hope this song will make you feel the dance in you too.
Davónes Tines: six thirty by Ariana Grande Towards the end of the year I’m feeling cozy and romantic. This song from one of my favorite artists, on her latest album, continues to evolve her special combination of crisp vocals wrapped in string-infused r&b redux.
Zack Winokur: We Do Not Belong Together performed by Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin. I’ve been listening pretty nonstop to Stephen Sondheim since his death. It’s hard to choose just one, but this song is the devastating apotheosis of a genuinely real relationship at the core of Sunday in the Park with George, a show I was going to direct last spring until covid struck it down.
As we welcome in a new year – full of anticipation for the 75th Festival, June 9-12, 2022 with Music Director AMOC – we’re looking back at our 75th Festival held in September with conductor and composer John Adams as music director.
Adams’ festival was focused on the work of a new generation of composers and performers to make a decidedly forward-facing festival.
Thanks to our artists, composers, staff and team, volunteers, patrons, and the Ojai community for being a part of our musical journey! Re-visit the 75th Festival by enjoying our live stream concert archives here >
Beato Chocolates at Porch Gallery (porchgalleryojaistore.com)
Our community, long known as a haven for artists, is now reveling in a dynamic collection of vibrant and innovative art spaces that are exciting and fun to discover and share with our out-of-town visitors and guests. Imagine the following selection of top Ojai arts venues as a virtual gallery crawl to enjoy in one afternoon where one is bound to find one’s self both delighted and inspired by each radically different art experience.
Let’s start our tour at a white well kept historic building from 1874 that houses the Porch Gallery Ojai. Located in the heart of town, the gallery presents a diverse schedule of exhibitions of talented local, national, and international artists. Also a local hub for events by many organizations and nonprofits based in Ojai and Ventura County, this is a true community gathering space centered around contemporary art. (310 E Matilija St, porchgalleryojai.com) Don’t forget to visit the Store at Porch Gallery the home of Beato Chocolates and many artist designed and inspired goods. Featured exhibition:John Millei: Works on Paper.
Matisse’s tête de femme, 1935 (canvasandpaper.org)
Head back now on Matilija Street and take a quick left up North Montgomery where you will find a handsome recently renovated cottage housing Canvas and Paper, the newest venue on our tour. Founded by a generous and scholarly collector, this is a small private gallery that offers a museum-like setting for contemplating three carefully selected works of art from the founder’s collection of 20th century modern and contemporary master works. (311 N Montgomery St, canvasandpaper.org). Featured Exhibition:Henri Matisse drawings.
Porfirio Gutiérrez: Continuous Line, Linea Continua (carolynglasoebaileyfoundation.org)
The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is a great Ojai art space to encounter museum quality artists from the greater Southern California region. The venue and its newest initiative, The Ojai Institute, is an artist residency, gallery, studio, and gathering space for artists and creatives. (248 S Montgomery St, cgbfoundation.org) Featured Exhibition:Porfirio Gutiérrez: Continuous Line/Linea Continua. Come by for a special gift to celebrate the Ojai Music Festival when you complete your art tour! Saturday only!
Current Exhibit: Sacred Deities of Ancient Egypt (beatricewood.com)
And there’s more! If you are attending one of the Saturday performances at the Zalk Theater at Besant Hill Scool, please make sure to visit the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, the longtime home and studio of the “Mama of Dada.” The center with its bright gallery and enticing gift shop offers a glimpse into Wood’s dynamic world of fascinating ceramics while also highlighting the works of some of our most talented local artists and artisans. (8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Rd) hours are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm, Admission is $5 per person. Tours are $10 per person and include a discussion of Beatrice Wood’s life and work, as well as the Happy Valley Foundation’s fascinating history.
(thebasicpremisegallery.com)
And on Ojai Avenue you will find The Basic Premise. An artists’ space and gallery, this is a great place for the new and established collector alike to discover art by some of the most daring and thought-provoking artists in the region. (918 E Ojai Ave, @thebasicpremise) Featured Exhibition: Tara Jane O’Neil & Jmy James Kidd in Residence.
Welcome to OJAICAST where we pull back the curtain to explore all-things music to satisfy musical appetites, whether you are a newcomer or longtime music fan. Special guests help shine the light on topics, ranging from concert repertoire, music of today, to their own Ojai experiences. OJAICAST is hosted by composer, pianist and Festival Live Stream Host Thomas Kotcheff.
Episode 1
Our first episode gives an in-depth look into the 75th Ojai Music Festival (September 16-19, 2021) repertoire and the musical threads that connect it all together, curated by Music Director John Adams. Guests include Ojai Festival Artistic & Executive Director Ara Guzelimian, Program Book Annotator Thomas May, and featured 2021 composer Gabriela Ortiz.
SHOW NOTES / CREDITS: Thomas Kotcheff, host Thomas Kotcheff, producer Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music used in this episode: Philip Glass – Evening Song No. 2 performed by Timo Andres Gabriela Ortiz – Río de las mariposas performed by Southwest Chamber Music
N.B. John Adams was Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival in 1993 and not 1994 as stated in the podcast.
Episode 2
American composer and conductor John Adams, who leads the 75th Ojai Music Festival, has been an influence for many artists and composers, including several of our 2021 collaborators. The second episode invites pianists Vicki Ray and Joanne Pearce Martin, composer Dylan Mattingly, and chairman emeritus and longtime president of Nonesuch Records Robert Hurwitz to discuss their personal connections with John Adams.
SHOW NOTES / CREDITS:
Thomas Kotcheff, host Thomas Kotcheff, producer Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music used in this episode: John Adams – Hallelujah Junction performed by Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind John Adams – Road Movies: III. 40% Swing performed by Leila Josefowicz and John Novacek Dylan Mattingly – Magnolia performed by ZOFO duet (Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi) John Adams – The Dharma at Big Sur, Pt. II: Sri Moonshine performed by Tracy Silverman, John Adams, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra John Adams – I Still Play performed by Timo Andres
Episode 3
Classical music can be intimidating to newcomers and frequent concertgoers alike, even more so, new contemporary music. Host Thomas Kotcheff discusses this topic with the help from his guests, Musicologist Lance Brunner and composer and Festival Live Stream host Veronika Krausas, on finding meaning and confidence in the process of listening to classical music.
SHOW NOTES / CREDITS: Thomas Kotcheff, host Thomas Kotcheff, producer Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music used in this episode: Rachmaninoff – Isle of the Dead performed by Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis Glass – Glassworks, Opening (Reworked By Christian Badzura) performed by Víkingur Ólafsson Knut Nystedt/Johann Sebastian Bach – Immortal Bach performed by Maulbronner Kammerchor, Benjamin Hartmann
Episode 4
The Ojai Music Festival has been around since 1947, but rather than sticking to status quo, it continues to evolve and surprise with unusual intersections of musical styles and genres. Invited to talk about their Ojai experiences will be alum – Matthew Duvall of Eighth Blackbird, Music Director of the 2009 Festival, and Steven Schick, percussionist, conductor and Music Director of the 2015 Festival.
SHOW NOTES / CREDITS: Thomas Kotcheff, host Thomas Kotcheff, producer Louis Ng, recording engineer
OJAICAST theme by Thomas Kotcheff and Louis Weeks
Music used in this episode: Missy Mazzoli – Still Life with Avalanche performed by Eighth Blackbird Xenakis – Rebonds B performed by Steven Schick
About Thomas Kotcheff: Thomas Kotcheff is a Los Angeles based composer and pianist. His compositions have been described as “truly beautiful and inspired” (icareifyoulisten.com) and “explosive” (Gramophone magazine), and have been performed internationally by The Riot Ensemble, wild Up, New York Youth Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, violinist Jennifer Koh, the Argus Quartet, the Lyris Quartet, the Alinde Quartett, The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, HOCKET, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble amongst others. Thomas has received awards and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presser Foundation, the Aspen Summer Music Festival, BMI, ASCAP, the New York Youth Symphony, the National Association of Composers USA, and the American Composers Forum. Thomas has been a composition fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s National Composers Intensive, the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, the Aspen Summer Music Festival and School, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Bennington Chamber Music Conference, and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival. He has been artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, the Studios of Key West, the Blackbird Creative Lab, and the Hermitage Artist Retreat. Thomas holds degrees in composition and piano performance from the Peabody Institute and the University of Southern California. For more information visit www.ThomasKotcheff.com
In our current time of endless Zoom meetings or even when watching the news, we have taken notice and peeked curiously at other people’s backdrops. Inevitably, a bookshelf seems to be a frequent ‘prop’ — always lined with what looks like interesting books…and so we all wonder, what’s on their bookshelf? What is there that might interest me, inspire or entertain me during these times? What might I learn about the person on screen that I didn’t know? For this, we turned to our Festival family – Barbara Hannigan, George Lewis, Thomas W. Morris, and Miranda Cuckson – to share with us their own inspirations. What we come out with to share with you is a multitude of fascinating reading and music resources. Enjoy!
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What's on your bookshelf with George Lewis
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BARBARA HANNIGAN Books: Nuria Schoenberg-Nono – Arnold Schoenberg: Playing Cards Arnold Schoenberg – Theory of Harmony Carl Schorske – Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Music: Alban Berg – Lulu George Gershwin – Girl Crazy Suite
GEORGE LEWIS Books: Naomi André – Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement W.E.B. Du Bois – The Comet Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello – The New Spirit of Capitalism Uwe Johnson – Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl Kim Stanley Robinson – The Ministry for the Future
Music: Wagner – Lohengrin Wagner – Parsifal Composers he is following: Andile Khumalo, Hannah Kendall, Courtney Bryan, Leila Adu-Gilmore, Jessie Cox, Jason Yarde, Daniel Kidane, Tania León, Alvin Singleton
Thomas W. MORRIS Books, etc: Joshua Wolf Shenk – Powers of Two: How Relationships Drive Creativity Heidi Waleson – Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America Stave Jigsaw Puzzles, Vermont
Music: J.S. Bach – Cantatas Fritz Reiner – Chicago Symphony Play Works by Ravel and Debussy. RCA Red Seal, 1986, CD Fritz Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra – The Complete RCA Album Collection, CD
MIRANDA CUCKSON Books: Dominique Fourcade – Henri Matisse Ecrits et propos sur l’art Charles Mackay – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Joseph Szigeti – Szigeti on the Violin Tobias Wolff – This Boys Life: A Memoir
Music: Alban Berg – Lulu Blue Heron (Renaissance Choir) Christelle Bofale (Singer/songwriter) Jon Hassell (Experimental trumpeter/composer) Paco de Lucia (Flamenco guitarist) Johannes Ockeghem (Renaissance composer)
ARA GUZELIMIAN Books: André Aciman – Out of Egypt: A Memoir Eric Ambler – A Coffin for Dimitrios Ishmael Beah – Radiance of Tomorrow Tove Jansson – Travelling Light Penelope Lively – Moon Tiger Tayeb Salih – Season of Migration to the North Zadie Smith – Swing Time Lizabeth Strout – My Name is Lucy Barton Miral Tahawi – Brooklyn Heights: An Egyptian Novel
Music John Adams – The Wound Dresser Smithsonian Anthology of Blues Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground Vikingur Ólafsson playing Bach – Concerto in D minor, BWV 974 – 2. Adagio Read Ara’s “Music for our Time” blog
Welcome to the Festival’s continuing series of the virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music, ideas, and the creative process with Ojai Festival artists, innovators, and thinkers.
The Festival is honored to have 2021 Festival Resident Composer Gabriela Ortiz join Festival Producer Fiona Digney for our October session. Click on the tabs below to learn more about Gabriela.
Latin Grammy-nominated Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today and one of the most vibrant musicians emerging on the international scene. Her musical language achieves an extraordinary and expressive synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde by combining high art, folk music and jazz in novel, frequently refined and always personal ways. Her compositions are credited for being both entertaining and immediate as well as profound and sophisticated; she achieves a balance between highly organized structure and improvisatory spontaneity.
Gustavo Dudamel, the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, called her recent work Téenek “one of the most brilliant I have ever directed. Its color, its texture, the harmony and the rhythm that it contains are all something unique. Gabriela possesses a particular capacity to showcase our Latin identity.”
Ortiz has written music for dance, theater and cinema, and has actively collaborated with poets, playwrights, and historians. Indeed, her creative process focuses on the connections between gender issues, social justice, environmental concerns and the burden of racism, as well as the phenomenon of multiculturality caused by globalization, technological development, and mass migrations. She has composed three operas, in all of which interdisciplinary collaboration has been a vital experience. Notably, these operas are framed by political contexts of great complexity, such as the drug war in Only the Truth, illegal migration between Mexico and the United States in Anaand her Shadow, and the violation of university autonomy during the student movement of 1968 in Firefly.
Based in Mexico, Ortiz’s music has been commissioned and performed all over the world by prestigious ensembles, soloists and orchestras, such as: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel and Esa Pekka Salonen, Zoltan Kocsis, Carlos Miguel Prieto, the Kroumata and Amadinda Percussion Ensembles, the Kronos Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Sarah Leonard, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Pierre Amoyal, Southwest Chamber Music, the Tambuco Percussion Quartet, the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Malmo Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra Simón Bolivar, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Recent premieres include: Yanga and Téenek, both pieces commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, Luciérnaga (Firefly, her third opera) commissioned and produced by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Únicamente la Verdad (Only the Truth, her first opera) with Long Beach Opera and Opera de Bellas Artes in Mexico.
Ortiz has been honored with the National Prize for Arts and Literature, the most prestigious award for writers and artists granted by the government of Mexico, and has been inducted into the Mexican Academy of the Arts. Other honors include: the Bellagio Center Residency Program, Civitella Ranieri Artistic Residency; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Fulbright Fellowship; first prize in the Silvestre Revueltas National Chamber Music Competition; first prize in the Alicia Urreta Composition Competition; a Banff Center for the Arts Residency; the Inroads Commission (a program of Arts International with funds from the Ford Foundation); a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation; and the Mozart Medal Award.
Born in Mexico City, her parents were musicians in the renowned folk music ensemble Los Folkloristas, founded in 1966 to preserve and record the traditional music of Mexico and Latin America. She trained with the eminent composer Mario Lavista at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and Federico Ibarra at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1990 she was awarded the British Council Fellowship to study in London with Robert Saxton at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1992 she received a scholarship from the UNAM to complete her Ph.D. studies in electroacoustic music composition with Simon Emmerson at The City University in London.
Ortiz currently teaches composition at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and as a Visiting Professor at Indiana University. Her music is currently published by Schott, Ediciones Mexicanas de Música, Saxiana Presto, and Tre Fontane.
Music Links
Gabriela Ortiz’s Liquid Borders | Steven Schick, conductor with Red Fish Blue Fish
Gabriela Ortiz’s discussion on Yanga with the LA Philharmonic
Excerpts from Gabriela Ortiz’s opera Camelia le tejana
Estudios entre preludios: Preludio No. 1
Behind the Curtain: 5 Fun Facts
An enjoyable and always surprising time during our Festival is when audience members run into Festival artists in Libbey Park, at a coffee shop, or the Festival Lounge. Those cherished moments are a chance to see artists in a different light. Here, we try to replicate those intimate conversations with “Behind the Curtain.”
Gabriela Ortiz on five fun factoids:
What are your favorite homecooked meal(s)? Spanish Gazpacho, Mexican Ceviche, and Key Lime Pie
Your go-to composer or piece of music when you need to relax? Anything Debussy
What’s on your bookshelf or nightstand that you’d recommend reading? And maybe even something we can find at Bart’s Books! Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
When you were a student, how would your teachers describe you? Extroverted
If you could collaborate with any musician or composer who would that be? LA Philharmonic
Welcome to the Festival’s continuing series of the virtual Ojai Talks, where we celebrate the intersection of music, ideas, and the creative process with Ojai Festival artists, innovators, and thinkers.
The Festival is honored to have 2021 Festival Resident Composer Carlos Simon discussing his musical journey and the source of his inspiration for his new work “Between Worlds.” Plus, enjoy a new music video performance of 2021 Festival artist and violinist Miranda Cuckson, playing Simon’s beautiful piece.
Carlos Simon is a native of Atlanta, Georgia whose music ranges from concert music for large and small ensembles to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-romanticism.
Simon was named as one of the recipients for the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence. The Sphinx Medal of Excellence is the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization, recognizing extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians. Along with a $50,000 career grant, Sphinx annually awards the Medals of Excellence to three artists who, early in their career, demonstrate artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and an ongoing commitment to leadership and their communities. Simon’s latest album, MY ANCESTOR’S GIFT, was released on the Navona Records label in April 2018. Described as an “overall driving force” (Review Graveyard) and featured on Apple Music’s “Albums to Watch” MY ANCESTOR’S GIFT incorporates spoken word and historic recordings to craft a multifaceted program of musical works that are inspired as much by the past as they are the present.
As a part of the Sundance Institute, Simon was named as a Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellow in 2018, which was held at the historic Skywalker Ranch. His string quartet, Elegy, honoring the lives of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner was recently performed at the Kennedy Center for the Mason Bates JFK Jukebox Series. With support from the US Embassy in Tokyo and US/Japan Foundation, Simon traveled with the Asia/America New Music Institute (AANMI) on a two-week tour of Japan in 2018 performing concerts in some of the most sacred temples and concert spaces in Japan including Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Japan. Other recent accolades include being a Composer Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, winning the Underwood Emerging Composer Commission from the American Composers Orchestra in 2016, the prestigious Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award in 2015, and the Presser Award from the Theodore Presser Foundation in 2015. He has also served as a contributing arranger for Rachel Barton Pine Foundation’s Music by Black Composers series for violin.
Recent commissions have come from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Reno Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra, Irving Klein String Competition, Morehouse College celebrating its 150th founding anniversary, the University of Michigan Symphony Band celebrating the university’s 200th anniversary, Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire (American Music Festival) as well as serving as the young composer-in-residence with the Detroit Chamber String and Winds in 2016. Simon’s music has been performed by Tony Arnold, the Third Angle New Music Ensemble, Hub New Music Ensemble, the Asian/American New Music Institute, the Flint Symphony, the Color of Music Festival, University of North Texas Symphony Band, University of Miami Symphony Band, Georgia State University Wind Ensemble and many other professional performance organizations. His piece, Let America Be America Again (text by Langston Hughes) is scheduled to be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary chronicling the inaugural Gabriela Lena Frank Academy of Music. He has served as a member of the music faculty at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia and now serves as Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.
Acting as music director and keyboardist for GRAMMY Award winner Jennifer Holliday, Simon has performed with the Boston Pops Symphony, Jackson Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony. He has toured internationally with soul GRAMMY-nominated artist, Angie Stone, and performed throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Simon earned his doctorate degree at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. He has also received degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College. Additionally, he studied in Baden, Austria at the Hollywood Music Workshop with Conrad Pope and at New York University’s Film Scoring Summer Workshop.
Carlos Simon, Jr. is a member of many music organizations including ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), where he was honored as one of the “Composers to Watch” in 2015 and will take part in the ASCAP Film Music Workshop in Los Angeles, California in 2019. He is also an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Music Sinfonia Fraternity and a member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, Society of Composers International, and Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society. His compositions have been published by the Gregorian Institute of America (GIA) Publications and Hal Leonard Publications.
Music & Video Links
About Between Worlds
Bill Traylor was born a slave in Alabama in 1853 and died in 1949. He lived long enough to see the United States of America go through many social and political changes. He was an eyewitness to the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and the Great Migration. As a self taught visual artist, his work reflects two separate worlds— rural and urban, black and white, old and new. In many ways the simplified forms in Traylor’s artwork tell of the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture. This piece is inspired by the evocative nature as a whole and not one piece by Traylor. Themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion pervade Traylor’s work. I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study; hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.
Text related to Bill Traylor and the project title “Between Worlds” are borrowed from, and organized in relation to, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, by Leslie Umberger for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, (book and exhibition), 2018: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/traylor.
We continue our learning even in the virtual world! Working with the Ojai Unified School District, the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO education & community program offers online classes with Ms. Laura.
Special thanks to the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee for their ongoing support for BRAVO, and to the Ojai Women’s Fund for their generous donation during the FY2022-2023 school year!
Click the tabs below to watch our Song & Play lessons.
HERE WE ARE TOGETHER Our first day back, and it’s so glorious to be together, even though it can only be virtually for now! We are going to set ourselves up to be the most successful we can be, through singing and playing, and starting to learn each other’s names. How important is a name? It is how we are known. It is an avenue for attachment. It leads us into community.
HOT CROSS BUNS, THE STORY 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.
CLICKETY CLACK Movement causes our attention systems to click on. Adding movements helps lower distractibility. When we create a train somewhere and move to it, our brain kicks into participation. Participating physically in a basic way is a direct route to play. When we couple the movements with the words (notice the syllables in the fingers), we move the student into stabilization, and the emergence of intelligence.
LESSON 10 | 9.3.20
This week’s play involves the balance between repetition and variation.
TIDEO The brain loves repetition. Up to a point. It looks for patterns. Then it delights when there is novelty, something different. Balancing these two helps to stabilize a child’s emotional state. The song stays the same. It is predictable. The fingers popping up are a surprise. Looking for a Hot Cross Buns pattern is always fun!
LESSON 11 | 10.01.20
Taking a look atproprioception,puzzling, and the playfulness of Mozart.
WHEN I WAS ONE One thing that children need is tons of proprioceptive input. This is how they orient themselves to the world—jumping, skipping, stomping, spinning. They develop their spatial awareness, both of themselves and their environment. This song is a great way to play with rhyming words, and get the body up and moving.
SOMEONE’S WEARING Here’s a fun way to connect visual art and music. When we are together we sing about someone’s clothing. Sometimes the clue is very hard to spot, but an amazing thing happens; the children become focused on each other in a positive way, hoping they can find who is wearing, for instance—”unicorns”, or “something delicious”. This positive social regard for other is important for gathering in community and building the tools of empathy.
MOZART CUCKOO CANON Have you ever wondered where Mozart got his sense of playfulness? Here is the first stage of learning his “Cuckoo Canon”. When we sing it in a round, using the hand signs, there is a wonderful symbiosis of challenge, skill and the delight in doing it. And we can hear the cuckoo bird. Genuine play has a characteristic of being autotelic—doing it for its own sake. It is so joyful to feel this!
LESSON 12 | 11.05.20
FARMER IN THE DELL – TRACKS FOR READING Using a secret song triggers the brain’s memory and recall. The brain looks for an auditory match. It searches previous experiences and pictures it has made, based on our play of this game. We represent the song by acting it out in the classroom. Here is an extension of that—new verses to explore rhyming and phrasing patterns. The prosody of our language is reflected in our songs, and this assists with the development of language and listening skills.
SEE SAW This folk song has a rich history, being used by lumberjacks who were using a saw together. They would sing the song to keep their sawing movements in sync. It is about an apprenticeship relationship, when there were master electricians and plumbers, etc. that would take on a young person to learn the trade. I think poor Jack liked to goof off, to which we can all relate! True to its nature, this song sung by a room of children and adults cause the group to sync together, matching awareness, skills, and action.
COME GOOD RAIN We are learning to use the sign language symbols for this song. Children share why the rain is good. Being interested in nature, and the cycles of rain, growth, and plants is good for all of us to remember. Later on in school, this is a beautiful song to sing in canon, and as a partner song that goes with other songs. But first, we explore its meaning.
LESSON 13 | 12.03.20
HOP OLD SQUIRREL This week we explore the importance of the proprioceptive system, and listening for accents and syllables. The most distinguishing characteristic of a piece of music is its rhythm, so we play with that.
RIG A JIG This old jig from the British Isles enacts the joy of a chance meeting with a friend. Going for a walk and seeing someone you know can be an experience of amazement for a child. Especially when they see others from school out in the community. This song works to preserve that delight.
OH I KNOW SOMEONE Learning to hear the accented and unaccented parts of speech and music are key to comprehension. Children love exploring syllables, both in their own names, and those of their friends. Sometimes they love when we make it harder just to see if we can get the flow of the number of syllables, the correct accents, and all at the normal speed of speech. It’s a fun challenge.
NOTE OF THE DAY We spend most of our time singing songs, acting out the words, and exploring the sounds auditorily. This is referred to as procedural learning. The declarative process of learning note names can be done very quickly and is an addendum to our weekly lessons focused on play.
LESSON 14 | 01.07.21
Exploring sounds and symbols leads to increased literacy. And we have a science experiment with song!
WINDY WEATHER We are excited about science, and pairing science with music. Sound vibrations are fun to study from a science perspective also. Watching how different leaves blow in the wind is curiously relaxing. It’s fun to make predictions.
LETTER POEMS Children delight in challenges of object permanence, as well as searching for objects. This satisfies the brain’s natural tendency to look for patterns in nature (is that a saber-tooth tiger hiding in those bushes?). When we play this in class, one person drops the letter behind someone while we sing with our eyes closed. We love watching the face of the person who finds the letter, and gets to chase the other person. So joyful! Poems by Shel Silverstein.
ROW, ROW Someday soon we will be singing this favorite in a round. At summer camp, we have groups of children acting out their own boats together, and see how they move across the floor. Then we have them come up with their own words to extend the drama. Imagination builds intelligence!
SECRET SONG Once we have played a song many times, we can start to look at the rhythm. Rather than explaining right off the bat, we explore. How do these symbols function? These lines are just arbitrary signs that have developed into symbols in music for the speed of notes. Interpreting written symbols by having a sound for them is what reading is all about. Since the children know the song, they can search their memories for an auditory match. Doing is stronger than telling. By singing the solfège, we start to understand the relationships between notes.
LESSON 15 | 02.04.21
A symbol is a symbol only if it makes present again that for which it stands. We are playing with sound experiences.
Sally Go Round When objects can stand for other objects, we are engaging the imagination. Eventually, abstract symbols, such as letters, which make up words, can stand for objects. While playing with these ideas, the children are learning a lot of folk songs that accurately carry the prosody of the English language.
Note of the Day—F In class the children take turns whispering their guess to me. The room gets very quiet, except that we all start laughing about how quiet we just got!
Roly Poly Tracks Rhyming helps our auditory system develop, and the auditory system is of primary importance for reading, either music, or language. In this way, studying and singing music helps the brain develop structures for greater academic success.
Penny solfege Another symbol used in representing sound is solfege. This is the do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and ti of the scale. In our classes, we sing the solfege, explore the difference in sounds, and read the solfege after we have already experienced it. The song and sound need to be represented in our bodies and physically experienced, before seeing the symbols. This leads to a robust learning experience.
LESSON 16 | 03.04.21
Repetition and variation are the two spices of music mastery. We set up an environment where the students ask if we can do it again. This is internal motivation at its finest!
Fly Away I had some birds outside my window, so I sang for them. The melody of this song goes up, and then it goes down. And our bird follows the melody by going up, and then coming back down to the nest. It’s so important to have a comfortable nest.
Here We Are Together We not only talk about community; we sing about it. Our actions with our students and families show it. These pro-social skills help to build a safe environment of inclusion and acceptance. Our hands are singing the “do” and “so” of the song, too!
Clickety Clack Children love the predictability of making different movements that correspond to distinct sounds. This helps us practice, by repeating the experience to achieve mastery. Changing the motions provides the variation that the brain needs to stay engaged. The brain is always looking for patterns, and novelty.
LESSON 17 | 04.08.21
Play is one the greatest equalizers we have in society. When we play together, we are equal participants; no child or adult has any advantage over any other. People who have play experiences together are much less likely to lash out at their peer, but rather work to come to a resolution. Our games feature many opportunities for partnership and collaboration, as we get to practice listening to all ideas and negotiating solutions.
Bombalalom This song comes from the deep south of Brazil and means “our place of peace”. Sharing our peaceful place builds attachment to our community, because it is something very personal about us, and we want to be known. The beauty of this song when sung in a round, or with other partner songs, or with its descant, helps us to appreciate each other.
Ginger Snap Eventually, we have a room full of people with wings extended, trying to fly around the room. We bow to our partner, modeling respect. When we “take them by the shoulders”, all the children quickly organize themselves into a line (all by themselves!) to fly together. We have our own flock then!
Sally Go Round, rhythm, solfa When puzzling over a secret song, the brain is looking through its memory banks for an auditory match. Sometimes a part of the rhythmic sound sparks a word, or a movement that we have previously done. The cross lateral indexing of the modalities of learning is one thing that gets dendrites branching. Building the experience to singing only one of solfa syllables out loud engages the skill of picking out the figure from the auditory ground, a skill so necessary in reading and paying attention.
LESSON 18 | 05.06.21
Today we have some experiences of kindness, acceptance, and integrity through music.
Note of the Day—A Music is such an abstract language, but isn’t all written language? Once we make sense of it, we are all set. Once we sing it, it becomes concrete. Children love to explore the relationships between notes: in how they sound, in what they look like, and with the hand signs. That is why we sing a lot before we read music, just as we speak before we read. Emerging intelligence needs to hear it first, then see it.
Mulberry Bush The integration of learning modalities happens when our actions line up with our words. Here I suggest actions that the children will know about, but maybe haven’t had direct experience of, such as throwing a snowball (coastal California!), or petting an iguana. Setting down this template in the brain, of matching language with movement, lays the foundation for integrity. We are doing what we say.
Love Canon, 4 parts One of the great joys of singing together is singing in canon. Once the children know the song automatically, without needing to use up a lot of attention and focus to enjoy it, they are ready for singing in a canon. The harmonies in this song are wonderfully pleasing. The children are so happy to create such a thing of beauty. Harmony is naturally produced through the melody. They can own it, because they produced it themselves.
Make New Friends in Different Languages Singing together helps us understand who and what we are. We are in a season of hope (at least, we hope we are!), embracing our common humanity. People from around the world are looking forward to coming together to greet old friends and to meet new friends. We embrace people and extend the hand of welcome. We can’t wait to get to know you better.
LESSON 19 | 06.03.21
Play is to intelligence as breath is to life. If we make our interactions with children joyful and filled with beauty, they will want to come back and do it again.
Row Row
Making up new verses for songs helps imagination to develop. The rhyming scheme assists auditory development, which is important for fluent reading skills.
Penny Song
Brains are attracted to beauty and play. Guessing where the penny is boosts resiliency, as there is a 50/50 chance we will miss. Experiences with manageable disappointment help to build a robust self-image. Drawing a map of the song is our way to symbolize the sound with a visual cue. Everybody’s map will look different, and by reading others’ maps, we are building the practice of empathy.
Windy Weather Rhythm
We love learning sign language! We sing in many languages: the words, the rhythm, the solfege with our hands, and now ASL. In class, the children take turns being leaves blowing around in the wind.
Tallis Canon
Thomas Tallis worked at the court of King Henry VIII. He wrote in a beautiful, lyrical vocal style. We sometimes take this melody and superimpose new words to tell a story, in the form of our own “operas.”
Violinist Jennifer Koh reflects on her 2017 Festival debut, performing Vijay Iyer’s world premiere of Trouble and its significance even today; she also reminisces on her “Bach & Beyond” concert in 2017 and her current projects including working with 2017 composer Courtney Bryan!
Vijay Iyer
2017 Music Director Vijay Iyer talks about his Festival debut as both musician and composer that also brought his collaborators to create a thought-provoking, community-making immersive experience. He shares his memories of the music-packed Thursday night concert that gave us both two premieres and a performance with the great Wadada Leo Smith.
As he taped this video at his home in New York for us, he also gave us an update on upcoming projects:
“The biggest news is that I have a new album titled UnEasy,in a trio format with Tyshawn Sorey (drums) and Linda May Han Oh (contrabass), due out April 9 on ECM Records. We intend to play some trio concerts as soon as possible! My piece “Bruits” (2014) for piano and wind quintet is featured on a new album of the same name by Imani Winds, with Cory Smythe on piano, due out February 5 on Bright Shiny Things. I just wrote a new solo piece for Matt Haimovitz titled “Equal Night,” which he recorded for his Primavera project, due out this spring on Oxingale Records. I also recently composed “The Window,” a duo for cellist Inbal Segev and myself; “Crown Thy Good,” a solo variation of a certain American anthem for pianist Min Kwon; “Plinth for Kwame Ture,” a solo piano piece for Shai Wosner; and “For Violin Alone,” a very short piece for Jennifer Koh; all of these will be recorded soon. In the longer term, I’m also working on a cello concerto for Inbal, and a large-ensemble project with Wadada Leo Smith and Peter Sellars, and I’m contributing to a new project for Boston Lyric Opera. Details to follow!”
Relive the Thursday June 8, 2017 concerts
Vijay Iyer: Emergence Vijay Iyer: Trouble Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke
2017 Program book notes by Christopher Hailey Not so long ago Vijay Iyer said that “to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America— which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.” Iyer went on to urge his audience not to allow this ugly past to determine our future. “What I humbly ask of you, and of myself,” he concluded, “is thatwe constantly interrogate our own complicity with excess, that we always remain vigilant to notions of community that might—perhaps against our best intentions, sometimes—embrace a system of domination at the expense of others.” This concert explores three contexts for this kind of balanced creative interaction: between differently constituted ensembles; between a soloist and an orchestra; and between two artists across generations.
Iyer has written of Emergence: “Emergence is a composition for my group, the Vijay Iyer Trio, plus chamber orchestra. This piece situates our trio’s collaborative improvisational language in the context of a classical ensemble. In juxtaposing the respective powers of these very different ensembles, and featuring them separately and together, we explore how these two contrasting perspectives on music might coexist. The trio’s specialized skills of internal rhythmic synchronization and organic creative embellishment exist in relief against the orchestra’s interpretive powers, range of colors, and sheer physical spread of sound. In this piece, the trio should not be featured up front in a typical “concerto” formation, but rather in the rear of the orchestra, driving the energy from within the ensemble. At times this “rhythm section” function may challenge the role of the conductor, since the sense of pulse is often guided sonically by the trio. In addition, at certain moments, the orchestral players are asked to make choices in real time, sometimes by listening and responding to each other, which challenges the centrality of the score and the composer. These reconsiderations of authority and agency are key questions for me as a composer and improviser.”
Here, as in all of Iyer’s writing, terms like “authority” and “agency,” “community,” and “collaboration” point to his understanding that music can serve as an analogue and laboratory for social formation and action. We see it in the abstract in Emergence; in Trouble it is explicit: “Good trouble,” “necessary trouble”— these are favorite phrases of U.S. Representative John Lewis, referring to the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights movement and the ongoing struggles for equality and justice in the last six decades. When meeting with Jennifer Koh over the past year to discuss the details of this piece, I often found it difficult to focus; typically we found ourselves instead recoiling in horror at the events of any given day. This pattern has only intensified since January 20th, as we find our communities, our country, and our planet in greater peril with each passing hour. In creating the piece I found myself both channeling and pushing against the sensation of extreme precarity that pervades our moment.”
Here, too, is a work that explores the relationship between musical forces, though Iyer sought to avoid the clichés of the virtuoso concerto: “I didn’t want to rehash the typical narrative positioning a heroic individual over or against a multitude. Ms. Koh told me that the soloist could instead be viewed as someone willing to be vulnerable, to publicly venture where most people won’t, to accept a role that no one else will accept, to bear the unbearable. In other words, the soloist can embody the relationship of an artist to her community: not so much a “leader” or “hero,” but something more like a shaman, a conduit for the forces in motion around us.”
Although Trouble is not a programmatic work it is informed by the experience of its time. “The short second movement,” Iyer writes, “is dedicated to Vincent Chin, whose murder in the early ’80s signaled an ongoing pattern of violent hate crimes against people of color. His death became a watershed moment for antiracist activism, which is as urgently needed today as it has ever been.”
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“If you look at my collaborations,” Iyer has said, “it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from; to refuse to be silenced.”
Wadada Leo Smith has not been silent. He came of age during the 1950s and was a witness of the civil rights battles of the 1960s. His Ten Freedom Summers was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, described by the jury as “an expansive jazz work that memorialized 10 key moments in the history of civil rights in America, fusing composed and improvised passages into powerful, eloquent music.” The power and eloquence of Smith’s voice is felt across a range of activities, including composing, performing, improvising, teaching, and writing. For Vijay Iyer he is “a hero, friend, and teacher” of the past two decades, in particular through his own participation in Smith’s Golden Quartet:
“The group’s broad palette included ‘pure’ tones and distorted sound, motion and stillness, melody and noise. In quartet performances, Wadada and I often became a unit-within-the-unit, generating spontaneous duo episodes as formal links. In the process, a space of possibility emerged that introduced me to other systems of musicmaking.”
Their special chemistry bore fruit in a joint album, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016), which has been lauded by critics for its “charismatic delicacy and subtle force” and an “awareness and acuity between the players that overlaps and breaks away on razor-thin margins.”
Like Iyer, Smith believes that music is a reflection of and means for engaging with social and political experience. Music, he has said, “allows the person a moment to reflect minus the distraction of living and being involved in living. And that reflection allows them that little moment with themselves so that they can figure out the best way to maneuver through this maze of a society.” People’s problems may still be there, he concedes, “but they have experienced a few moments of liberation to give them enough energy to carry on until the next challenge comes.”
“You run through your life,” he concludes, “and you hope that you can show something that enlightens somebody at some point in time. And if that happens, then that is really leading to a better humanity, a better society.”
Anthony Romaniuk
72nd Ojai Music Festival
Across Time, Part 1
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.
Julia Bullock
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.
Jay Campbell
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.
Aphrodite Patoulidou
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.”
Barbara Hannigan
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).
Steven Schick
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.
Gabriela Ortiz on five fun factoids: