Staying On It
“Speak boldly!” The soul-stirring exhortation from the saints to Joan d’Arc that launches the opening night concert might serve as the overall motto for the 2022 Ojai Music Festival. As conveyed by bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Julius Eastman’s musical imagining of this transcendent encounter is of an operatic intensity — a summons to explore the audaciously interdisciplinary and expanded vision that the artists of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) and their colleagues are bringing to Ojai for this 76th edition of the Festival. There is no conventional opera on the program, though the archetypal love-death journey of Tristan and Isolde merges with borrowings from ancient Andean culture in Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi, which is being presented in a new semi-staging directed by AMOC* co-founder Zack Winokur. Instead, the events designed to unfold over the Festival’s four-day span could be parts of a grand, openended mega-opera that freely juxtaposes media, genres, and performance practices. In Harawi, for example, the musical performances by soprano Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick are amplified by the choreography of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.
22 | 76
TH
OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL
| JUNE 9-12, 2022
Tearing away the divisions that would relegate music theater, dance, instrumental music, art song, and poetry to separate realms, AMOC* is a collective of 17 artists who recombine and realign their fields of expertise to create revelatory new hybrids. Together with their like-minded associates from the early music ensemble Ruckus and various guest artists, AMOC*’s ways of “speaking boldly” during this long Festival weekend will traverse a spectrum from the solo singing voice and instrumental soliloquy through the spoken word to dancing bodies in motion, culminating in the realization of another rousing piece by Eastman, Stay On It: the raucously anthemic ode to determination that he wrote in an earlier era plagued by anxiety and violence. The impetus for such boldness comes — as it often does in moments of radical reconsideration of what we want music to do, of how it can map a way into the future — from looking back, like Orpheus, to a utopian ideal that forever vanishes beyond the horizon. In his recently published book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, AMOC* co-founder Matthew Aucoin argues that “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form” called opera emerges from the unfulfillable quest for “an imagined union of all
