april 24 – june 22
cornelis kick
william scott louis valtat
canvasandpaper.org
located in a classic california bungalow a short walk from the arcade, canvas and paper is a small art museum with a focus on 20th century modernism. exhibits change every two months. admission is free.
louis valtat, les tulipes perroquet, c. 1910
311 n. montgomery street
thursday – sunday noon – 5pm
A MUSICAL GENESIS MARTÍN + ALTSTAEDT + SCHUMANN
Sep 13+14, 2025
Jaime Martín Music Director
Nicolas Altstaedt Cello
Oct 4, 2025
John Holiday Countertenor
Lara Downes Piano
ROMANTIC RESONANCE MARTÍN + HAMELIN + BRAHMS
Oct 25+26, 2025
Jaime Martín Music Director
Marc-André Hamelin Piano
A BRAHMSIAN AFFAIR
Nov 22+23, 2025
Margaret Batjer Director of Chamber Music
Learn more about the programming: LACO.ORG/2526SEASON
HARMONIC CONVERSATIONS RICHARD GOODE PLAYS MOZART
Dec 14+16, 2025
Margaret Batjer Director of Chamber Music
Richard Goode Piano
CURRENT: REFLECTIONS IN SONG A GRAND BAROQUE SALON
Jan 17+18, 2026
Pierre Hantaï Leader
PASSION + MYSTERY MARTÍN + SAY + BEETHOVEN
Feb 14+15, 2026
Jaime Martín Music Director Fazil Say Piano
TURNING POINTS FAUST + SOUSA + MENDELSSOHN
Mar 12 + 14, 2026
Dinis Sousa Conductor Isabelle Faust Violin
CURRENT: INVENTIONS REIMAGINED
Mar 28, 2026
Lara Downes Piano
TEMPORAL ECHOES MARTÍN + BANSAL + SHOSTAKOVICH
Apr 11, 2026
Jaime Martín Music Director
Anne Akiko Meyers Violin
RADIANCE + REVERIE MARTÍN + MARWOOD + MOZART BAROQUE IN BLOOM
May 16+17, 2026
Jaime Martín Music Director
Anthony Marwood Violin
Coleman Itzkoff Cello
May 30+31, 2026
Margaret Batjer Leader
Amanda Forsythe Soprano
1 5/8/25 4:22 PM
About the Cover:
Nathan Wickstrum is an Ojai photographer and longtime staff member at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy (OVLC). His photography reflects a deep connection to the land and its history, with a focus on conservation, cultural resource preservation, and engaging with Indigenous communities. From local nonprofits like Los Padres Forest Association and the Ojai Valley Museum to contributing educational resources for the Smithsonian Institution, Nathan’s work supports efforts at both local and national levels.
His photograph, featured on the cover of this year’s Festival program book, was taken from OVLC’s Ventura River Preserve, capturing the Santa Ynez Mountains at sunset. On this particular evening, where lush greens met shades of magenta, shadow and light revealed the layers of the mountains, creating a quiet, unfolding harmony between land and sky.
For more information about events commemorating our 50th anniversary, scan the code or visit oakgroveschool.org/50th
From ancient days, man has sought something beyond the materialistic world, something immeasurable, something sacred. It is the intent of this school to inquire into this possibility.
Thank you for joining us for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival. Whether you have been with us for many years or are attending for the first time, welcome from the entire Ojai Music Festival family. Our collective adventure this weekend, led by Music Director Claire Chase and her remarkable Festival collaborators, will be very special. We will share musical experiences that combine curiosity with remarkable creativity and talent.
For years, I’ve urged everyone at this musical festival to help sustain and secure its future. With Ara’s leadership and through the efforts of our staff, Board of Directors, donors, and patrons, we have successfully completed our Future Forward campaign, balanced the budget and added reserves to our modest endowment fund. Thank you to each and everyone who has been part of our story and contributed to our success. Because of your generosity, we will continue to thrive!
Hopefully, everyone appreciates that the Ojai Music Festival is an audience supported organization. Long term financial sustainability relies on annual funding from our patrons and the growth of our endowment fund. The federal government’s defunding of the arts makes your support even more essential to help ensure the Festival’s future.
As we look forward to the 2026 Festival with Esa-Pekka Salonen returning as our Music Director and further into the future, we are grateful for your continued engagement and support.
Each year, the Ojai community warmly welcomes us to the Festival. Ojai is a magical place, and we appreciate the hospitality. Enjoy the community, the music, and the company.
Help Light the Way! For each donor who renews or begins their support during the Festival, a lantern will be illuminated in a one-of-a-kind installation, symbolizing the generosity that makes the Festival possible. Visit the installation at Libbey Park to learn more.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
JERRY EBERHARDT Chair
BARRY SANDERS Vice Chair - Governance
DON PATTISON Vice-Co-Chair-Development
LUTHER LUEDTKE Vice-Co-Chair-Development
CATHRYN KRAUSE
Secretary
HOPE TSCHOPIK SCHNEIDER
Treasurer
MARGARET BATES, MD
JAMIE BENNETT
MICHELE BRUSTIN
NANCYBELL COE
RUTH ELIEL
STEPHAN FARBER
JAMES FREEMAN
GREG GRINNELL
CHRIS HACKER
DAVID LEEDS
TOM MCNALLEY
GLENN MERCER
NEIL SELMAN
BRIDGET TSAO BROCKMAN
JEREMY TURNER
GAYLE WHITAKER OFWC President
Directors Emeritus
RICK GOULD, MD*
JOAN KEMPER
STEPHEN J.M. MORRIS
ESTHER WACHTELL*
ARA GUZELIMIAN Artistic and Executive Director
BOARD OF GOVERNORS
KATE BARNHART
WILLIAM J. SHANBROM Co-Chairs
SASHA AND BILL ANAWALT
ANN BARRETT
BARBARA BARRY
MARJORIE BEALE AND WILLIAM MEYERHOFF
SUE BIENKOWSKI
MERRILL AND JUDY BLAU
SUSAN BOWEY
TOM AND LILY BROD
PAMELA BURTON AND RICHARD HERTZ
BARBARA COHN
JILL COHEN
BARBARA DELAUNE WARREN
KATHY AND JAMES DRUMMY
MICHAEL DUNN
WILLIAM DUXLER
CONSTANCE EATON AND WILLIAM HART
LISA FIELD
RUTH GILLILAND AND ARTHUR RIEMAN
BETSY GREENBERG
LENORE S. AND BERNARD A GREENBERG
LINDA JOYCE HODGE
MARY AND JON HOGEN
SCOTT JOHNSON
SUZY AND MOE KRABBE
RAULEE MARCUS
SHARON MCNALLEY
PAMELA MELONE
DIANE WILLIAMS MURPHY
JOAN OLIVER
CLAIRE AND DAVID OXTOBY
LINDA AND RON PHILLIPS
SANDY ROBERTSON AND MARSHALL DONOVAN
PETER SCHNEIDER
ABBY SHER
SHELLEY AND GREG SMITH
ANNE-MARIE SPATARU
JANE TAYLOR AND FREDERIC OHRINGER
CHRISTINE UPTON
GARY WASSERMAN
JANE AND RICHARD WEIRICK
SUSANNE WILSON
JOAN WYNN
CATHY ZOI AND ROBIN ROY
*In Memoriam
JUNE 15 - AUGUST 9
Discover new works showcasing cutting-edge compositions that push musical boundaries by today’s innovators.
Dear Ojai Music Festival friends,
Welcome to this year’s Festival. We gather once again in the enchanted setting of Libbey Bowl as well as locations throughout Ojai to celebrate the spirit of community, adventure and discovery, the hallmarks of the Festival since its founding in 1947.
We are so fortunate in the company we keep, beginning with each of you. It is the act of coming together for an immersive, communal experience of music that gives this Festival its unique spirit. Thank you for being here.
Our endlessly creative and generous-spirited Music Director, Claire Chase, has devised a remarkable program that brings together nearly four generations of composers, happily many of them here in attendance with us. The creation of community is central to Claire, so she has gathered an assembly of extraordinary musicians who will form a unique festival collective, playing individually and with each other in myriad combinations that blossom and transform throughout each program. It has been such a joy to work with Claire in preparation for this year’s Festival and I know that this tangible sense of joy will pervade these four days together, something to cherish in these times of division, strife, and dispiriting news around us.
A festival like this is, at its core, an act of profound optimism. The Ojai Festival is, in many ways, an improbable undertaking. Who would imagine bringing together such formidable musicians in a small town park? And who would have dreamed that the magical small town would host some of the greatest musicians of the time across nearly 80 years of its history?
Happily, the unlikely becomes precious reality because of you. We are so grateful to have the support of our audiences, our donors, our incredibly dedicated Board of Directors, our fabulous volunteers, along with so many individuals and organizations throughout Ojai who participate and help in ways large and small.
Thank you and welcome! Let the music begin.
ARA GUZELIMIAN
Artistic and Executive Director
The music world is celebrating the centennial of the birth of Pierre Boulez, one of the giants of the 20th century as both composer and conductor. Here in Ojai, we are deeply gratified to celebrate someone who served as Festival Music Director a total of seven times between 1967 and 2003, helping to lead some of the most significant events in our history.
That association originated with Lawrence Morton, Ojai’s defining Artistic Director between the 1950s and the 1980s. It was Lawrence who created the distinctly adventurous DNA of our wonderful, improbable festival, bringing some of the leading musicians of the day to this idyllic setting. Lawrence first invited Pierre Boulez to the pioneering Monday Evening Concert series in Los Angeles, where Boulez conducted the American premiere of his then brand-new Le Marteau sans maître in 1957, beginning a decades-long musical partnership and close friendship. That first engagement also marked Boulez’s debut as a conductor in America.
The position of Ara Guzelimian as Artistic and Executive Director is made possible by the generous support of Jill and Bill Shanbrom and the Shanbrom Family Foundation.
Boulez was a formidable intellect and musical force, who could be absolute and intimidating in certain situations. But he always retained a deep affection for Ojai and the unique experience of this Festival, fondly recalling that rehearsals had to stop in the early years for the orange train to pass behind Libbey Bowl (where the walking/ bike trail is now located).
Boulez created and led some of the most memorable high points in Festival history, leading his own works and those of the great 20th century pioneers whom he championed, from Mahler to Bartok, Debussy to Stravinsky. I remember one particularly rapt performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which had one of those only-inOjai moments as a full moon rose above and behind the Bowl in mid-performance. It was also in Ojai where Boulez first collaborated with the director Peter Sellars, conducting a performance of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, with twin rappers as narrators and a set that included a functional pickup truck on stage!
We are profoundly grateful to count this towering musician as one of our own here in Ojai and to celebrate his fearless spirit of musical innovation and integrity.
— ARA GUZELIMIAN
From the intimate first notes of Marcos Balter’s Alone on Thursday night to the raucous and joyous convergence of all our Festival artists in Terry Riley’s Pulsefield on Sunday afternoon, I invite you to a four-day feast of wonder, exuberance, reflection, and renewal.
While the works we’ll experience this weekend are wonderfully divergent in their stylistic and notational approaches, what binds them is a courageous commitment to an ethos of making music in community. On stage, a spirit of generosity grows like a ginger root, wild and multidirectional. Many of the pieces we’ll hear are composers’ attempts to engage with the work of fellow artists across distance and time: Annea Lockwood with Pauline Oliveros, Tania León with Ornette Coleman, Cory Smythe with John Coltrane, Susie Ibarra with Steven Schick, Liza Lim with Eduardo Kohn, Balter with the mythological Pan, the JACK Quartet with obscure 14th century French composers, Leilehua Lanzilotti with the Ojai poet brooke smiley, Sofia Gubaidulina with J.S. Bach.
I’ve also invited our Festival artists—a thrilling, multigenerational cohort of performers, composers, improvisers, and sound artists working at the fissures of different disciplines— to incite new collaborations with one another. We’ll be treated to world premieres of work written expressly for this place and this gathering, and we’ll have our imaginations set ablaze while witnessing improvisations that come into being before our very eyes, in dazzling encounters that will only happen once, here, never to be repeated.
In our explorations of open-form scores by Lockwood, Oliveros, and Riley, musicians are asked to sculpt the compositions in real time with one another, with our surroundings, and with you, our beloved listeners. These pieces are playful provocations to listen unconditionally to one another, in delighted deference to the unexpected outcomes that such listening inspires. What results is not just speculation about a more compassionate world; the music creates, enacts, that very world, where life’s tenderness and brutality, grief and uplift, are embraced. However briefly, we get to live in a more capacious world, one shaped consciously and lovingly by our deep and unruly interdependence. In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, “We hail / what heals and sponsors and restores.”
I love and deeply admire all the artists in this Festival. They have changed me as a player and thinker and listener, and my hope is that their music and the wider worlds they conjure will change you, too.
Gwendolyn Brooks ART
Art can survive the last bugle of the last bureaucrat, can survive the inarticulate choirs of makeiteers, the stolid in stately places, all flabby gallantries, all that will fall.
Lending our strength to keep art breathing we doubly extend, refine, we clarify; leading ourselves, (the halt, the harried) through the icy carols and bayonets of this hour, the divisions, vanities, the bent flowers of this hour.
We hail what heals and sponsors and restores.
From In Montgomery: And Other Poems (Third World Press, 2003)
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.
Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia. Recent concerto projects include Kaija Saariaho’s “Aile du Songe” at Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center, and the world premiere of a new duo concerto by Dai Fujikura which Chase premiered with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in January with the violinist Akiko Suwanai, on tour in Europe with the violinist Leila Josefowicz, and on tour in Japan with the violinist Mayumi Kanagawa. In the 2022-23 season, Chase premiered a new duo 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 12th 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 coproduced 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 Fellows program, launched in 2023 in celebration of the 10th 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 over 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 cofounded Ensemble Evolution at Banff Centre for Arts & 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 to expand her Pauline Oliveros project as part of the PST ART x Science Collide festival in 2024-25.
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 now lives in Brooklyn with her partner, the author Kirstin Valdez Quade, and their twoyear-old daughter.
PRE-KINDERGARTEN-12TH GRADE | DAY & BOARDING FOR GRADES 3-12 |
Ojai Valley School offers a challenging curriculum with small classes led by supportive & dedicated teachers, a diverse student body, a vibrant visual & performing arts program, competitive athletics and equestrian programs, and numerous opportunities for hands-on learning through outdoor exploration & service.
Ojai Valley School is proud to support the 2024 Ojai Music Festival as a performance venue. LEARN MORE AT OVS.ORG
support the
a performance venue.
2026 FESTIVAL ARTISTIC DIRECTORS
FEATURED ARTISTS
Tessa Lark, violin
Michael Thurber, double bass & Friends
FESTIVAL CONCERTS
LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE | LAGUNA BEACH, CA
Friday, February 13 @ 8pm
Saturday, February 14 @ 8pm
Sunday, February 15 @ 3pm
Classically trained violinist Tessa Lark and double bassist Michael Thurber first met years ago as alumni of NPR’s From The Top and began developing their duo collaboration in 2016 after a memorable one-off performance at a WXQR event in New York City. It didn’t take long for them to realize how much they shared musically.
From bluegrass and jazz to Bach, there’s no musical boundary this dynamic duo can’t cross. Don’t miss this week of thrilling, genre-defying performances that showcase the versatility and artistry of two of today’s most exciting musicians!
SEASON HIGHLIGHTS
Renée Fleming
Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Riccardo Muti
Joshua Bell with Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Mahler Chamber Orchestra with Yuja Wang
Vienna Boys Choir
A retrospective of her celebrated career
Ojai Valley Museum
June 19 – August 3
Opening Reception: June 20, 5–7 PM
“Becoming maximally attuned to each other and to our environments — that’s what you want to have happen at Ojai Music Festival,” says Claire Chase. Her observation might well serve as a motto and guiding principle for what she has curated: four days of close collaboration, porous boundaries, and deep listening.
To step into the 2025 edition of the Festival is to enter a living system — not merely a sequence of performances but an artistic ecosystem. Here, performers and the pieces they bring to life do more than share a stage. “Every combination is unexpected in these imagined dialogues, conversations, even confrontations,” as Chase puts it. Music ceases to function as a consumable product but is a process of exchange. Composers, performers, audiences — even landscapes — are drawn into dynamic interrelationship. All participants act as pollinators of ideas and impressions. In this context, music becomes an ecology — alive, relational, and continually in flux.
Alongside her artistic practice, Chase’s role as a thought leader has long embraced this entangled mode of creativity and relationality. She fondly cites the neologism oddkin, coined by the feminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway. Known for her work on the history of consciousness, Haraway — who was recently awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion — uses the term to refer not to blood relatives but to the connections and understandings that develop among “kinby-sympathy” with other beings, human and non-human alike.
“Oddkin” connections suggest the “complicated, unruly, chaotic interdependence” that will unfold across the Festival’s programs,
according to Chase. As Haraway puts it: “We require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become—with each other or not at all.” This summer’s Ojai Music Festival invites us to such a gathering, where new lineages are encouraged to emerge through sound.
The natural world itself has been enlisted as an active participant. Ojai’s birdsong, restored meadowlands, and shimmering light become acoustic collaborators. But the ecological lens extends outward, beyond the local, as well as into memory and imagination. We hear the bayous of Pauline Oliveros’s Houston childhood reimagined as a “sonic map” by her longtime friend Annea Lockwood. Susie Ibarra’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sky Islands translates the polyphonic biodiversity of Philippine rainforests, their flora and fauna, into resonant textures. Its closing processional serves as both culmination and invocation — a call to environmental action. Liza Lim’s How Forests Think urges us to move beyond anthropocentric limits that are our default. Listening itself becomes a form of ecological consciousness — a way of attuning to both the infinite and the infinitesimal – in Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s exquisitely immersive Ubique
Many of Chase’s chosen works unfold like living systems themselves: porous, cyclical, unpredictable. A morning meditation concert in the Ojai Meadows Preserve invites participants to listen to a recovering landscape. Leilehua Lanzilotti invokes Indigenous Hawaiian understandings of communal interdependence in ahupua‘a Composer-pianist Craig Taborn uncovers an ecology of emotions — shifting terrains of intimacy and surprise — through a dynamic constellation of solos, duos, and ensemble interactions in Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms
If the 2025 Festival celebrates how sound and place are deeply, inseparably intertwined, themes of community and ritual are equally central. Chase and her colleagues seek to dissolve divisions separating professionals from newcomers, making from witnessing, stage from audience. In Marcos Balter’s Pan, the community is invited to share the art-making with Festival artists – including Chase herself as she performs on a variety of her flutes and embodies the complex, contradictory facets of the mythic protagonist.
The audience plays witness to sonic rites that take shape throughout the Festival. “Every piece on the program is grounded in ritual in some way,” notes Chase. It might be the explosive energy of the piano soloist in Tania León’s Rituál, the channeling of ancestral feminine power in Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, or the exuberantly rambunctious collectivity of Terry Riley’s ecstatic visions in his latest opus, The Holy Liftoff
Mingling a comic-book levity with the transcendence of musical koans, The Holy Liftoff is the latest addition to Density 2036, Chase’s epic, ongoing, 24-year commissioning project. Several earlier works from Density 2036 form the backbone of this year’s Festival: Pan, Sex Magic, Ubique, and Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms. Together they exemplify the Festival’s ethos of unfettered experimentation, collaborative evolution, and radical inclusion.
Riley, who turns 90 this month, sums up much of that ethos. He joins a multigenerational cohort of living composers: wise elders like Annea Lockwood and Tania León in addition to Riley; composers in their prime such as Liza Lim, Marcos Balter, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Susie Ibarra, Craig Taborn, Cory Smythe, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir; and emerging voices like Vicente Atria, Bahar Royaee, and Eduardo Aguilar. Their lineage extends to the dearly departed: Sofia Gubaidulina, Julius Eastman, and Pauline Oliveros, who silently bears witness, her presence felt in the very act of listening.
“Claire Chase has brought together composers and performers across generations and across ensembles,” says Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian. “Ojai is the place where that community can come together.”
This is not a festival of polished, contained re-creations that reverently retrace patterns in tribute to well-worn repertoire. These are living pieces — open-ended, improvisational, provisional. Many of these works are unrepeatable, becoming something different each time they are performed.
Chase likens a festival to its etymological cousin, a feast, where “tons of different kinds of food” are in the spread. That spirit of abundance includes offering multiple perspectives on a single work. Lanzilotti’s ko‘u inoa, a meditative reflection based on the Hawaiian anthem of identity and community, is heard both in a viola solo and in a string ensemble version that serves as a musical blessing for the final concert — a joyful communal leave-taking. Cory Smythe enters into microtonal dialogue with John Coltrane’s era-defining Countdown, ringing changes of his own. On another program, J.S. Bach’s socalled “deathbed” chorale is paired with a profoundly contemplative response in which Sofia Gubaidulina imagines “the visible and invisible parts of a soul” — transformed, yet recognizably kin.
The 2025 Festival’s aesthetic of multiplicity is similarly encountered in Marcos Balter’s use of the medieval Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical lingua ignota (“unknown language”) in Pan; in the kaleidoscopically transforming musical ideas of Tania León’s Hechizos, written for Ensemble Modern; and in Bahar Royaee’s A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, a poetic realization of “memory-in-the-making” for percussion and electronics.
What holds this widely-ranging musical terrain together is an attitude of attentiveness to the moment, openness, curiosity — and a generous spirit of collaboration. You may find yourself drawn to the mycelial weave of Liza Lim’s forest-like textures or to the cavernous radiance of a single note from Bertha, Chase’s contrabass flute.
Listening itself becomes an act of multidimensional attention and communal presence in Pauline Oliveros’s The Witness, performed on the closing concert from a “text score” of instructions that have ramifications beyond the realm of sound. A mentor who profoundly influenced not only Chase but many other 2025 Festival artists, Oliveros reminds us that listening can be a form of resistance, of healing, of attention paid in full.
—THOMAS MAY
Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in an array of international publications, including the New York Times and Gramophone. The Englishlanguage editor for Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, he also writes for such institutions as the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Davos Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and The Juilliard School. He blogs at memeteria.com.
THURSDAY, JUNE 5
3:00PM Ojai Talks (Ojai Presbyterian Church)
6:30PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo)
8:00PM Opening Night (Libbey Bowl)
FRIDAY, JUNE 6
8:00AM Ojai Dawns (Zalk Theater, Besant Hill School)
10:30AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl)
12:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo)
1:00PM Ojai Films (Ojai Playhouse)
3:30PM Ojai Afternoons (Greenberg Activity Center)
6:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo)
8:00PM Evening Concert (Libbey Bowl)
SATURDAY, JUNE 7
8:00AM Morning Meditation (Ojai Meadows Preserve)
10:30AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl)
12:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo)
1:00PM Ojai Films (Ojai Playhouse)
2-5:00PM Housatonic installation (Move Sanctuary)
3:30PM Ojai Afternoons (Greenberg Activity Center)
6:00PM Ojai Chats (Libbey Park Gazebo)
8:00PM Evening Concert (Libbey Bowl)
SUNDAY, JUNE 8
8:00AM Morning Meditation (Chaparral Auditorium)
10:30AM Morning Concert (Libbey Bowl)
12:00PM Community Concert (Libbey Park Gazebo)
1:00PM Ojai Films (Ojai Playhouse)
2-5:00PM Housatonic installation (Move Sanctuary)
2:30PM Ojai Afternoons (Greenberg Activity Center)
5:30PM Festival Finale (Libbey Bowl)
Magic Hour is a women-owned tea company and spiritual wellness brand centered on ritual. We blend biodynamic botanicals with astrology, intention, and ancient wisdom to create transformative experiences in every cup.
217 E. Matilija Street, Ojai, CA 93023
Mon–Sat 10am–6pm | Sun 9am–4pm Shop online anytime at clubmagichour.com
An important part of the Festival is enjoying the wonderful setting of Libbey Park. Meet up with friends and other music enthusiasts, or relax between concerts.
The Grab-and-Go is your place to grab a drink and a bite. This year, each day of the Festival will feature a culinary takeover by a different Ojai restaurant: Ojai Rotie, Pinyon, Sam’s Place and Sama Sama Kitchen. Keep your eye on our free Festival mobile app for food offerings.
Enjoy coffee takeovers with patron-fave Pinholita Coffee Van and new Bonito Coffee over the weekend. You can also find a glass of wine from our curated imports, local beers, and soft drinks.
Take something home to help remember your Festival experience, featuring 2025 Festival T-shirts, as well as essentials including hats, blankets, CDs, and more. Plus, shop for local Ojai goods from participating vendors.
Enjoy a gourmet boxed dinner with wine provided by The Ojai Vineyard. Friday, June 6 and Saturday, June 7 with Sundance Catering. Advance reservations only.
OJAI
Learn about concert works from the composers! John Schaefer will host 30-minute chats followed by music pop-ups by Festival artists at Libbey Park Gazebo. Look for the daily schedule of featured guests on our free mobile app.
Take a stroll in the park and make sure you visit our booths: the Festival’s BRAVO Education Program, KOJY Community Radio, Bart’s Books, Ooo-Lala Toffee, and Ojai Studio Artists over the weekend. You can also view the installation with Terry Riley’s one-of-a-kind illustrated scores!
LIKE US ON FACEBOOK Facebook.com/OjaiFestival
VIEW AND SUBMIT FESTIVAL PHOTOS ojaimusicfestival #ojai2025 #ojaimusicfestival
Visit our mobile-friendly website on your device for the latest updates at OjaiFestival.org
Scan the QR code below to download our free Festival mobile app to view concert info, Festival venues, food offerings, things to do in Ojai, and digital content.
2026 Music Director
Esa-Pekka Salonen
June 11–14, 2026
Libbey Bowl passes on sale
S A L O N E N O J A I
MY CLIENTS SAY IT ALL:
“We had the best experience working with Sharon. When my husband and I decided to sell our home, we were overwhelmed by the process. But Sharon swooped in and made everything easy and seamless. We would work with Sharon again in a heartbeat.” - Gabriela London
“Sharon is personable and an absolute pleasure to deal with, and she’s a great advocate for your interests. A+ experience.” - Bob and Trish Moore
“Sharp, helpful, and friendly, Sharon is a pro with a deep knowledge of the market and a super helpful attitude.” - Chris Noxon
“Sharon was hands down the best agent I’ve ever worked with. You’ve got a great agent if you’re lucky enough to work with her.” - Leslie Rathe
The Festival Box Office is in the center of Libbey Park, just North of the Tennis Courts. Our friendly staff and interns will be glad to help you with ticket purchases and questions, as well as ordering your 2026 Festival series passes. Assisted listening devices are available for checkout at the Box Office. Please bring a valid photo ID. If you cannot use your tickets, convert them to a tax-deductible contribution at least one day before the concert. Tickets received less than 24 hours in advance may still be converted. Stop by the Box Office or call our Ticket Donation Hotline at 805 646 2192.
HOURS OF OPERATION:
Thurs., June 5 12pm-9pm Fri., June 6 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sat., June 7 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sun., June 8 9am-1pm / 4pm-7pm
Performances start at the time designated on your ticket. We recommend that you arrive at the venue at least 30 minutes prior to the concert. In deference to the comfort and listening pleasure of the audience, late-arriving patrons will not be seated while music is being performed. Latecomers are asked to wait quietly in the designated areas until the first break in the program when ushers will assist them to their seats. Late seating breaks vary by concert and are at the discretion of the house manager in consultation with the producer and stage manager. Please note that select performances may not have late seating opportunities. Chimes will ring before the concert starts and before the end of intermission.
Note: Artists and programs are subject to change without notice. In the event of a weather emergency, concerts may be canceled without ticket refunds.
Photography, audio recording, and videography are prohibited during Festival performances. We appreciate your cooperation in helping us create an environment for the artists that is not distracting.
As a courtesy to others, please turn off your phone, watch and car alarms, and any other electronic device that makes noise or emits light before the start of Festival performances. Efforts to limit paper rustling, coughing, and unwrapping candy will be appreciated by both audience members and artists.
Due to City of Ojai policy, alcohol that is purchased at the Festival’s Green Room in the Park must be consumed in the designated restricted areas. Alcohol purchased at our concessions in the Green Room in the Park will be permitted only in the lawn area of the Bowl. We appreciate that patrons do not bring beverages in the reserved seating sections of the Libbey Bowl. No food or drinks will be allowed in our off-campus venues. No outside alcohol may be brought into Festival concerts and events.
Both Libbey Park and Libbey Bowl are designated no-smoking zones (including vape pens and e-cigarettes) by the City of Ojai. The Festival’s office, donor lounge, off-campus events, and backstage are also non-smoking areas.
As a courtesy to other lawn patrons, blankets and low-rise chairs are preferred. Please bring low-rise, beach-style chairs with legs of 10 inches or less. Patrons with higher-rise chairs, such as camping or deck chairs, will be asked to move to the house right side of the lawn. Please do not leave valuable items in the lawn area and be sure to remove lawn chairs at the end of each Festival day. The Festival is not responsible for lost or damaged items.
If you lose or find an item, please check in with the Festival Box Office, just outside the entrance to Libbey Bowl.
The Festival provides and maintains portable restrooms which are located 50 yards east of the Box Office in Libbey Park.
Seating for patrons with wheelchairs is available in a reserved section of Libbey Bowl. Please contact the Box Office as early as possible for special seating requests. A handicapped parking lot is located on Signal Street for vehicles displaying a DMV handicapped parking hang tag or license plate. Early arrival is encouraged, as these spaces fill up. For patrons requiring a short walk into Libbey Bowl, a handicapped drop-off point is located near the backstage on Signal Street. Please notify the barricade attendant and they will direct you. There is also nearby parking for the drivers of those needing assistance. For listening devices, please visit the Box Office. Public restrooms at the east end of Libbey Park are wheelchair accessible. Please contact an usher if you need assistance.
Patrons with disabilities are welcome to bring service animals. Service animals, as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks directly related to a person’s disability. The dog must be able to rest in the seat area of the individual with a disability, excluding aisles or walkways. Please note that any animal whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support does not qualify as a service animal under ADA regulations.
We reserve the right to withhold or remove a service dog that fundamentally alters the nature of our programming by behaving in an unacceptable way during a performance, and/ or if the person with the disability does not or cannot control the animal. No other animals or pets are permitted at Festival concerts and events.
Emergency exits are clearly marked, please take note of your nearest one as you enter. In the event of an emergency, ushers and Festival staff will provide instructions. Contact an usher or member of the Festival staff if you require medical assistance.
We appreciate your cooperation in helping to clear the seating area after concerts. Be sure to take all lawn chairs and personal items with you when you leave the Bowl and please dispose your recyclable trash in the Festival recycle boxes.
The Festival strives to minimize its ecological footprint. We encourage you to do your share by separating your trash and using our recycle boxes provided by E.J. Harrison & Sons, and by using our complimentary water refill stations located throughout the Park and inside the Bowl. The same program book can be reused throughout the Festival and recycled at Festival’s end by dropping it off at the front gate.
The Ojai Music Festival is committed to protecting and ensuring the health and safety of its staff, artists, volunteers, and the Ojai community. Your support and participation are greatly appreciated.
During the 2025 Festival, masks are optional but recommended for individuals who are at increased risk for severe disease. We will have hand sanitation supplies available throughout the Festival campus. Please stay at home if you have any symptoms of illness. If you find yourself coughing and sneezing during a performance, please remove yourself to an open area away from others to keep performance distractions and health risks at a minimum.
These guidelines are subject to change based on the advice of public health officials and conditions at the time of the Festival. Keep informed with any updates on our free Mobile App.
To get details, alerts and notifications or to check out happenings around Ojai at local businesses, go on the Festival’s free Mobile App.
Our free offerings are made possible with the generous support of the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee.
An important part of the Ojai Music Festival’s tradition is offering free events and musical surprises during our four days together. Add these to your Ojai Festival experience calendar!
THURSDAY, JUNE 5
6:30PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 6
12PM
6PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 7
8AM
12PM
2PM
Enjoy viewing of Terry Riley’s colorful illustrated scores of The Holy Liftoff and Pulsefield located at Libbey Park.
6PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 8
8AM
12PM
2PM
Ojai Chats with Wu Wei and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds, plus Music Pop-Up
Libbey Park Gazebo
Ojai Chats with Marcos Balter and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds, plus Music Pop-Up featuring Festival artists
Libbey Park Gazebo
Ojai Chats with Vicente Atria, Eduardo Aguilar, Bahar Royaee, and Ross Karre and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds
Libbey Park Gazebo
Morning Meditation
Music of Susie Ibarra and Pauline Oliveros
Ojai Meadows Preserve
Ojai Chats with Leilehua Lanzilotti and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds, plus Music Pop-Up featuring Festival artists
Libbey Park Gazebo
Housatonic sound installation
Annea Lockwood’s sound map of the Housatonic River, captured as a four-channel sound installation. Complete cycles of the work begin at 2pm and 3:30pm. Casual drop-ins welcome at any time.
Move Sanctuary
Ojai Chats with Tania León, Eduardo Kohn and host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds
Libbey Park Gazebo
Morning Meditation
Music Of Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bahar Royaee, Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Chaparral Auditorium
Community Concert
Music of Festival composers and Bird Call Jam featuring Festival artists
Libbey Park Gazebo
Housatonic sound installation
Annea Lockwood’s sound map of the Housatonic River, captured as a four-channel sound installation. Complete cycles of the work begin at 2pm and 3:30pm. Casual drop-ins welcome at any time.
Move Sanctuary
Ojai Talks is made possible with the generous support of Kathy and David Leeds
OJAI CHATS & MUSIC POP-UP at Libbey Park, 6:30pm Festival artists
Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 3:00pm
PART I
OJAI PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
304 N. FOOTHILL ROAD, OJAI
PART II
Music Director Claire Chase with Ara Guzelimian
BREAK
2025 Featured Composers and Artists with host John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds
The 2025 Ojai Music Festival residencies of composers Eduardo Aguilar, Vicente Atria, Marcos Balter, Susie Ibarra, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Craig Taborn, and Bahar Royaee are made possible with the generous support of the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cathryn and Tom Krause
The performance of Pan is made possible in part with the generous support of the Rotary Club of Ojai
OJAI CHATS & MUSIC POP-UP at Libbey Park, 6:30pm Festival artists
Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 8:00pm
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone
Wu Wei sheng | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre, Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion
Alex Peh piano | M.A. Tiesenga electronic hurdy-gurdy
Marcos BALTER Alone
Claire Chase flute
Daphne and Penelope DiFrancesco tuned glasses
Annea LOCKWOOD bayou-borne
Joshua Rubin clarinet
Steven Schick, Ross Karre, Susie Ibarra, and Wesley Sumpter percussion
Wu Wei sheng
Dan Rosenboom trumpet
Mattie Barbier trombone
M.A. Tiesenga electronic hurdy-gurdy
INTERMISSION
Marcos BALTER Pan
I Death of Pan
II Lament for Pan’s Death
III. Pan’s Flute
IV Music of the Spheres
V. Echo
Claire Chase flute
Ojai Pan Community Ensemble
Ben Richter Ensemble Director
VI. Serenade to Selene
VII. Dance of the Nymphs
VIII. Fray – The Unravelling
IX. Soliloquy
Lighting and production design by Nicholas Houfek
Video by Adam Larsen
Projection design by Ross Karre
Original direction by Douglas Fitch
Original sound design and electronics by Levy Lorenzo
Commissioned and developed by Project& and Jane M. Saks
as part of Density 2036 part vii (2020)
Bathed in the afterglow of Ojai’s evening sky, as nighttime ushers in new mysteries, Libbey Bowl becomes a place of transformation befitting the enigmatic Pan. The ancient Greeks imagined this demigod as an embodiment of contradictory forces — simultaneously beastly and divine, playful and fearsome, herald of ecstasy and terror. His name gave rise to the English word panic, a reflection of the outburst of irrational fear his sudden appearance could ignite. But in Greek, pan also means “all” or “everything” — a root found in words like panorama and pandemic — suggesting his ability to blur boundaries and connect the seen and unseen, the earthly and the cosmic.
Pan is also a bringer of music. As the inventor of the panpipes, he might be considered an ancestral god of the flute — the instrument that serves as the artistic alter ego of this summer’s Ojai Festival Music Director, Claire Chase. In Marcos Balter’s boldly imaginative reinterpretation of the legends associated with the demigod, Pan becomes the great connector between the multiple — and contradictory — facets of our own humanity. He thus emerges as an especially compelling protagonist for the opening night of the 2025 Festival. As Chase notes, her hope is to “open the whole space to demonstrate what it is to be in community,” inviting the audience into a dynamic ecosystem of sound, collaboration, and renewal.
First, though, Libbey Bowl awakens with the delicate twilight shimmer of ambient triangles, mingling with aleatory birdsong to begin this evening’s adventure with another piece by Balter. Alone is an excerpt from Poe, another large-scale musical drama by the Brazilian-born composer.
When Balter first met Chase more than two decades ago — while he was a doctoral student in Chicago — he recalls sensing instantly that they were “twin souls.” Like Pan, Poe is a product of their deep and enduring artistic collaboration. Balter created Poe during a summer residency in 2013 at Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskills, which he shared with Chase and percussionist Svet Stoyanov. For this creative retreat, Balter arrived without sketches or a predetermined plan — just a single text to which he had long felt a special connection: “Alone,” a poem written in 1829 by a 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe is a half-hour, multi-movement work that meditates on the artist’s paradoxical sense of isolation and connection with the natural world. Two movements — Pessoa and Alone — have taken on lives of their own through Chase’s ongoing advocacy. She often programs Alone, a duet for flute and tuned glasses, as a freestanding piece and invites audience members to join her by playing the glasses. For tonight’s performance, two festival family members share the stage with Chase.
The principle of collaboration extends — quite literally — to nature itself in Annea
Lockwood’s mesmerizing bayou-borne, created to mark the 85th birthday of her close friend and fellow maverick Pauline Oliveros, who passed away in November 2016 — just six months shy of that milestone. Acclaimed for her compositions and installations that foster mindfulness about the environment, Lockwood designed a sonic realization of a map of the bayou flowing through Houston, where Oliveros was born and grew up. “I always imagined Pauline splashing around one of the bayous nearby and coming back into the house, her feet all muddy and full of what she discovered as a little kid.”
An important part of Lockwood’s artistic practice centers on her exploration of the infinite variety of “life spans” of the sounds that unfold within natural environments. The New Zealand–born composer, who has been based in the U.S. since the 1970s, also pays tribute to Oliveros’s reputation as a great improviser. bayou-borne creates a framework in which each performer is required to improvise by interpreting a map of the slow-moving main tributaries feeding into the marshy Buffalo Bayou that flows through Houston. Lockwood translates these map lines into parts, leaving it to the performers to make decisions about such factors as tempo or density of the musical texture according to where the lines thicken or curve.
The choice of instrumentation is left to the players, who begin spatially separated and
CONTINUED }}
Another of Lockwood’s sound maps can be experienced on Saturday and Sunday (June 7 and 8) at Move Sanctuary (306 E. Matilija Street). Created in 2010, this four-channel installation traces the myriad sounds made by the Housatonic River from its sources in the Massachusetts Berkshires to Long Island Sound on the Connecticut shore. Unlike bayouborne, this sound map is based on actual field recordings made by Lockwood. These are not modified beyond a bit of equalization.
Lockwood remarks: “Rather than project an event — which is what happens in bayou-borne — this is an invitation for people to embed themselves in the river sounds. When you listen closely, in a way that allows you to feel yourself in the river, then you cease to perceive the river as an it that you’re listening to. You listen to something from which you are not separate. That is the real goal of the river sound maps.”
individualized, entering the space from different angles. For this performance, some parts will be played by pairs of musicians. Gradually, they converge and blend until they form what Lockwood describes as “a massive sound block.”
Attentive to nature’s ever-changing contours, bayou-borne’s climax incorporates a reference to Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston just weeks before the piece was premiered in 2017. Lockwood asks the players to darken their tone color as they recall the hurricane, realizing in sound “how the bayous change under storm conditions — from languorous, slow-flowing rivers into overwhelmingly powerful, stormy waterways.”
With Marcos Balter’s genre-defying Pan, we move from environmental memory to another kind of transformation — one rooted in myth and its truth-telling about the human condition. While Ojai audiences witnessed a shorter preliminary version of the work in 2017, tonight’s performance is of the fully realized and staged Pan, the fifth part of Claire Chase’s epic — and ongoing — Density 2036 project.
Balter suggests thinking of Pan as “a musical gathering based on storytelling.” He designed the narrative by juxtaposing various legends associated with the demigod, casting a musical drama in nine short tableaux. Instead of English, Balter opted to tell the story using the lingua ingnota (“unknown language”) invented by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen — “a celestial language she used to communicate with the angels when she was writing her prophecy.”
The first tableau shows Pan’s agonizing death as he is tortured, having dared to
challenge Apollo to engage in a musical competition. Inwardly, he mourns what has been lost and, as if in a series of nonlinear flashbacks, relives his story. Pan’s discovery of music reflects his connection with nature, but it also stems from his unwanted advances on the nymph Syrinx, who flees and is metamorphosed into a cluster of reeds — through which Pan breathes to create the first panpipes.
Pan’s music confers power because it allows him to enchant a band of followers. Manifesting the complex protagonist, Chase plays a wide array of electronically processed flutes, underscoring Pan’s central theme of transformation. But as his followers come to understand how Pan’s acts of violence have wronged his lovers — Echo, Selene, and Syrinx — his power begins to unravel.
Condemnation by the community triggers “the moment when Pan becomes human,” according to the Irish musician and philosopher Jenny Judge, who has written extensively on Density 2036. In the final tableau, he seeks forgiveness. “But it is too late,” Judge observes. “Pan has spent his entire existence as an outcast, shunned by the worlds of god, man, and beast alike. At the very end, he proves that he belongs in the human world. But the very moment at which he does so is the moment of his final, and irrevocable, banishment.”
For Balter, the myth of Pan involves not only art and music but “the abuse of power, greed, oppression, violence, tendencies toward tyranny.” Crucial to his presentation is the part played by the community — the followers shown to interact with Pan as well as the audience, who, in lieu of a Greek chorus, are called to go “beyond the act of witnessing and be part of the action itself.”
—THOMAS MAY
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Abby Sher
The Festival appearances of JACK Quartet are made possible with the generous support of Ruth Eliel and William Cooney
There is no intermission during the concert
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 8:00am
JACK Quartet:
Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell cello
OJAI DAWNS
Eduardo AGUILAR
Liza LIM
Tania LEÓN
ZALK THEATER, BESANT HILL SCHOOL
8585 OJAI SANTA PAULA ROAD
Vicente ATRIA
HYPER (West Coast premiere)
Cardamom (U.S. premiere)
Christopher Otto violin
Abanico
Austin Wulliman violin
Maddie Baird and Nathan Grater interactive computer
Roundabout (West Coast premiere)
About the Round At midnight the dance Yet again
Last night’s opening concert posed openended questions about what it means to make music in community, culminating in the expansive ritual of Pan. This morning, we begin anew — with the intimacy of chamber music at dawn.
Written on a commission from the JACK Quartet, the New York–based Mexican composer Eduardo Aguilar’s HYPER explores the intricate relationships among physical motion, sonic energy, and perception. He points to the title’s connotations as a prefix suggesting “excess; over; beyond; above” — an apt description indeed for music that pushes the players to extremes not only of sound but of physical gesture.
Aguilar even goes beyond conventional notation to convey his ideas, employing a system of detailed spatial-temporal grids that resemble seismic charts, which he calls topochronography — a method of mapping movement and sound in precise coordinates across time and space. The result is music that is enacted through physical gesture as much as it is played, a kind of kinetic sculpture shaped in real time. Zooming in on the micro-movements of quartet playing,
Tania LEÓN (b. 1943) Abanico (2007)
Vicente ATRIA (b. 1992) Roundabout (2024)
Aguilar’s highly original score becomes “a complete deconstruction of what a string quartet is,” according to JACK violinist Austin Wulliman.
More than just music, HYPER, in the composer’s words, is “a continuous flow of energy” that is “driven by an ethereal force, like the iridescent reflection on a CD; it spreads out radiant in a spacetime continuum, like the laser beam; it fragments explosively, like chemical reactions inside a pyrotechnic device; it is structured in memory, like the architecture of a firework, like the tension in a dense knot of hair; it perpetuates itself into nothingness, like intangible particles, like air, like space impossible to reach.”
Cardamom (2024) is a short piece for solo violin that its composer Liza Lim describes as “an unfolding of an attunement — a sort of offering through resonance.” Its material is modest, presenting a figure that “floats into the air, tracing and retracing a rising scale and elaborating it.” Like the slow blooming of scent from its namesake spice,” Cardamom takes shape, says Lim, “the way that a lot of raags unfold,” offering a meditative, spacious beginning to the day.
The sound of a solo instrument is expanded and multiplied in Tania León’s 2007 piece for violin and interactive electronics. Abanico takes its name from the Spanish word for “fan” — a reference both to the decorative folding fans found throughout Spanish and Cuban culture and to the swirling motion at the heart of the piece. “An abanico is a handheld Spanish/Chinese fan, a semicircular ‘instrument’ that opens and closes like the tail of a peacock,” writes the composer. “The Spanish abanico is sometimes decorated with paintings and laces.”
That sense of motion and elegance informs the music, which León describes as “a bouncing scherzo of images, using sound as a mirror of physical motion. It is built of emerging lines that sometimes mutate into rhythmical pulses. Juxtapositions of bouncing textures become echo effects; memories, associations, and images of abanico dancing in mid-air.” With a nod to her Cuban roots, León incorporates a brief quotation from a 1920s song by Eusebio Delfín.
CONTINUED }}
Certain violin pitches and dynamics trigger pre-recorded material processed electronically, blurring the boundaries between memory and enactment. As Claire Chase observes, Abanico is “a tour de force for the sound engineer and the violin,” with virtuosic writing that calls on the full expressive range of the instrument.
A Chilean composer and drummer currently based in Santiago, Vicente Atria explores hybrid musical vernaculars and microtonality in his artistic practice. Roundabout was commissioned by JACK as part of their Modern Medieval program and is loosely inspired by the ars subtilior — which Atria defines as “a late medieval tradition of rhythmic and notational complexity.” Most significantly, from Atria’s contemporary perspective, these techniques entail “a deep sensibility for and appreciation of play and humor.”
This is immediately apparent in the layered wordplay and personal associations behind the title. “Rounds are simple musical canons, whose more academic cousins (prolation canons) feature prominently in the piece,” Atria explains. “Rounds are also a kind of dance (which inspires the urban version of a roundabout). If read all at once, the titles of the three movements — ‘About the round, at midnight the dance, yet again’ — are a kind of psychedelic, self-referential short verse about dance, rounds, and their repetitive nature.”
Opening with highly contrapuntal textures, Atria bases the rhythmically propelled second movement on the technique known in medieval music as hocketing — distributing the line so that it alternates rapidly among different voices. A spiral canon (where the melody repeats at different pitches with each entrance to
create a “spiral” effect) forms a chorale in the last movement that “drifts ever so slowly downwards with each repetition.”
Alongside medieval counterpoint, Roundabout draws on influences as diverse as bagpipe ornamentation and Chilean organ-grinders and contains two hidden “Easter eggs”: extensive quotation from Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight at the end of the first movement and the sensibility of the progressive rock anthem Roundabout by Yes — “whose spirit infuses a lot of my music,” Atria says, including his earlier JACK-commissioned piece Seasons Will Pass You By
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman
The Festival appearances of Craig Taborn are made possible with the generous support of Carolyn and Jamie Bennett
There is no intermission during the concert
Add to your day!
Ojai Chats with Marcos Balter & Music Pop-Up, 12pm, Libbey Park Gazebo
Ojai Films: 32 Sounds, 1pm, Ojai Playhouse Ojai Afternoons, 3:30pm, Greenberg Center
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 10:30am
Alex Peh harpsichord and keyboard | Cory Smythe and Craig Taborn piano
Terry RILEY (arr. Alex PEH) Pulsing Lifters (World premiere of trio arrangement)
Alex Peh, Cory Smythe, and Craig Taborn keyboards
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR Impressions
Alex Peh prepared harpsichord
John COLTRANE/Cory SMYTHE Countdowns
Cory Smythe piano
Craig TABORN and Cory SMYTHE Duo Improvisation for Ojai
Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe piano
Terry RILEY (b. 1935)
arranged for keyboard trio by Alex PEH (b. 1979)
Pulsing Lifters (2024; arranged 2025)
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR (b. 1977)
Impressions (2015)
John COLTRANE (1926-67)/Cory SMYTHE (b. 1977)
Countdowns (1960; 2025)
Craig TABORN (b. 1970) and Cory SMYTHE (b. 1977)
Duo Improvisation for Ojai (2025)
Making music often involves an act of reimagining — taking a source that inspired the performer/composer and transforming it into something newly alive. The source might live in a piece of music that already exists, or even the concept of an earlier music separated by a gulf from the present world; it might be a memory, a dream, a fragmentary found sound from the natural world. The works on this morning’s program reflect that impulse to reimagine and rearrange. The three keyboard artists who perform this morning — Cory Smythe, Craig Taborn, and Alex Peh — have each collaborated closely with Claire Chase, whose own work exemplifies the same spirit of boundlessly curious transformation.
Terry Riley, one of the “elders” being honored in this edition of the Festival, is currently immersed in an expansive new project he calls The Holy Liftoff (see the program note for this evening on page 51 for more background). Open-ended by design, The Holy Liftoff unfolds across a series of modular scores that invite myriad realizations and improvisational approaches. Pulsing Lifters is one such section — a page from the larger work that has previously been arranged for multiple flutes and string quartet. Alex Peh introduces a new version he has created
for a trio of keyboards of unspecified variety, reimagining Riley’s material in collaboration with his fellow performers.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Impressions, written in 2015 for fellow Icelandic artist Guðrún Óskarsdóttir — a frequent artistic partner — opens a very different window into transformation. Thorvaldsdottir, best known for her vast orchestral landscapes, here turns to one of Western music’s oldest keyboard instruments, reimagining the harpsichord from the inside out. The title hints at fleeting perceptions, but also at the physical act of imprinting sound on silence. The performer is required to generate these impressions both from the side of the instrument and from the conventional position at the keyboard.
Thorvaldsdottir develops a novel timbral vocabulary using six small superballs, a superball mallet, a small metal object for sliding along the strings, and two electronic bows (E-bows), which produce continuous, bowed-like tones without percussive attack. Comprising three brief movements that flow together without interruption, Impressions incorporates chance elements arising from the specific properties of these materials, and features passages without fixed pitch. In the third movement, the performer attempts to
keep all six superballs moving over the strings for the duration — an act that is both physical and ephemeral.
The bizarre and unexpected sounds produced through these preparations blend and interact with the “period” timbre we associate with the harpsichord, creating a flexible sonic sculpture that feels simultaneously ancestral and experimental, familiar and strange, as Thorvaldsdottir presses against the fragile boundaries of sound itself.
Cory Smythe describes his practice as an improvising pianist as involving “growing and mutating identities” as he seeks to invent “a personal and compelling approach to the piano’s peculiar sonic constraints.” His reimagining of John Coltrane’s “Countdown” is part of an ongoing effort “to make music in meaningful conversation with that of my heroes … and, like them, to make possible a flowering of unique, powerful, thick, collective experiences of sound and substance in the world.”
“Countdown,” a composition from Coltrane’s landmark 1960 album Giant Steps, is itself a reimagining of “Tune Up,” a jazz standard from the early 1950s traditionally credited to Miles Davis.
Coltrane’s hard-bop classic is celebrated for its rapid-fire harmonic changes — socalled “Coltrane changes” — and tightly coiled form.
To transform the piece, Smythe augments the acoustic piano with a microtonal detuning mechanism to create what he calls “a kind of fantasized piano.” To his left, a small table holds two MIDI keyboards resting on felt pads, allowing him to simultaneously control a virtual piano tuned a quarter-tone sharp from the real one. Its tones radiate from three transducer speakers — two attached to the soundboard and one to the lowest strings — each vibrating a small disc fitted with a protective silicon pad. These transmit sound directly into the body of the instrument, blurring the line between “real” and “fictional” piano tones.
The result is a piano recast as a site of layered inquiry — both homage and
reinvention — filtered through Smythe’s kaleidoscopically surreal lens. He has described his recent projects as involving “an element of (auto)fiction,” through which he aims “to conjure speculative musical cultures, each with sonic affinities, texts, and subtexts that defamiliarize American musical idioms.”
Smythe then joins with the like-minded experimental improviser Craig Taborn to perform a brand-new duo improvisation created especially for Ojai. This morning’s offering continues an evolving series of exploratory performances the pair have undertaken in recent years. Taborn describes their approach as an “information-rich, improvisational process” shaped by structural elements proposed in advance. Their music emerges through an unpredictable interplay of preparation and freedom — an ever-shifting dialogue that reimagines the possibilities of real time.
—THOMAS MAY
In Collaboration With The Ojai Playhouse
For tickets, visit OjaiPlayhouse.com or visit their box office at 107 S. Signal Street (directly behind the Ojai Playhouse)
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 1:00pm
32 Sounds
Director: Sam Green
Featuring Annea Lockwood, JD Samson, Edgar Choueriri, Joanna Fang, Phillip Glass, Sam Green
An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. The film premiered in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival. Produced by ArKtype, The Department of Motion Pictures, Impact Partners, Wavelength Productions and Free History Project. Running time: 97 minutes
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Hope Tschopik Schneider
OJAI CHATS with Festival composers & MUSIC POP-UP at Libbey Park, 6pm
There is no intermission during the concert
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 3:30pm
Claire Chase flute | Levy Lorenzo sound design and electronics | Nicholas Houfek lighting design
Liza LIM
Sex Magic (West Coast premiere)
Pythoness
Oracle i: Salutations to the cowrie shells
Oracle ii: Womb-bell
Oracle iii: Vermillion: On Rage
Oracle iv: Throat Song
Oracle v: On the Sacred Erotic
Oracle vi: Telepathy
Skin-Changing
The Slow Moon Climbs
Claire Chase contrabass flute, kinetic percussion, alto ocarina, Aztec death-whistle
Levy Lorenzo sound design and electronics
Liza LIM (b. 1966)
Sex Magic (2019-20)
“Ritual appears everywhere in human life,” observes Liza Lim. “It’s one way of holding states of attention and ways of knowing the world that are part of the way in which we as humans process things that we don’t know and that we can’t understand immediately. We need rituals to hold the known and the unknown in some kind of balance.”
For her contribution to Claire Chase’s Density 2036 — Part VII of the ongoing project, which premiered in 2020 — Lim imagined a 45-minute ritual exploring various traditions of the sacred in women’s spiritual lineages. She describes Sex Magic as “a work about the sacred erotic in women’s history … an alternative cultural logic of women’s power as connected to cycles of the womb — the life-making powers of childbirth, the ‘skin-changing,’ world-synchronizing temporalities of the body, and the womb center as a site of divinatory wisdom.”
A key source of inspiration was the totemic aspect of musical instruments as generators of whole environments — specifically, the magnificent contrabass flute that holds pride of place in Chase’s collection, and that her mentor Pauline Oliveros affectionately dubbed “Bertha.” Lim points out that Chase relates to Bertha “not just as an instrument, but as a living being, a partner to music making.” In addition to reflecting on — and perhaps activating a sense of — ritual, Sex Magic opens a space in which this
living relationship between performer and instrument becomes an act of communion, transformation, and soundmaking as embodied knowing.
A similar treatment is accorded the other instruments and sound-producing objects with which Chase interacts, including an ocarina and an Aztec “death whistle.” Just as Bertha conjures ancestral memories of giant bass wind instruments from Indigenous cultures — such as the didgeridoo from Lim’s Australian homeland — the alto ocarina that Chase plays and sings into during one of the central “oracles” evokes the clay flutes found in both Mesoamerican and ancient Chinese traditions. Visually, the contrast between the contrabass flute and the tiny, handheld ocarina is particularly striking.
Sex Magic additionally calls for an installation of “kinetic rotary percussion instruments” that are positioned on two vibrating “altars.” Custom electronics designed by Levy Lorenzo using multiple transducer speakers on membranes transform the live sounds of flute keys and breathing, providing a rhythmic pulse and a feedback system. In collaboration with Chase and Lorenzo, Lim developed performance techniques to enhance these interactions, such that “the whole environment becomes an instrument.”
Structurally, Sex Magic unfolds in nine short movements, with lighting design by Nicholas Houfek to articulate a
journey that begins by invoking the ancient figure of the Pythoness through gestures of awakening. Lim refers to the Greek priestess of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi, who would fall into a trance as she channeled the divinity’s voice through her ambiguous prophecy.
“The flute and flutist become channels for oracular utterance,” writes Lim and “flute becomes drum” through the elaborate feedback system. Six oracles ensue, ranging widely in expressive vocabulary and dimension. Lim weaves in allusions to diverse cultural legacies — such as cowrie shells symbolizing fertility and wealth in Arabic and African traditions; an “intense red” associated in Chinese cosmology with “blood, life force, and eternity”; and menstrual cycles interpreted by matriarchal societies as a “skin-changing” that confers a kind of semi-immortality. Sex Magic also summons the “pure primal power” of Kali the Destroyer Goddess.
The final and longest movement, “The Slow Moon Climbs,” quotes a line from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses that also serves as the title of a book about the cultural significance of menopause that explores “the importance of post-reproductive women and female wisdom to human evolution.” Through this vast range of such references, Sex Magic pays homage to female spiritual power.
—THOMAS MAY
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Don Pattison
The Festival appearances of Leilehua Lanzilotti are made possible with the generous support of Chris Hacker and Will Thomas
The Festival appearances of Seth Parker Woods are made possible with the generous support of Drs. Bruce Brockman and Bridget Tsao Brockman
Friday, June 6, 2025 | 8:00pm
Claire Chase flute | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
Jay Campbell, Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cello | USC Cello Ensemble
Steven Schick conductor
Leilehua LANZILOTTI ko‘u inoa
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
Sofia GUBAIDULINA
Mirage: The Dancing Sun
Seth Parker Woods cellos
USC Cello Ensemble: Ernie Carbajal, Isabelle Fromme, Joe Kim, Peter Ko (guest artist), Samuel “Cole” Leonard, Kaya Ralls, Elaina Spiro
Steven Schick conductor
Julius EASTMAN
Terry RILEY
The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc
Jay Campbell, Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cellos
USC Cello Ensemble: Ernie Carbajal, Isabelle Fromme, Joe Kim, Peter Ko (guest artist), Samuel “Cole” Leonard, Kaya Ralls, Elaina Spiro
Steven Schick conductor
INTERMISSION
from The Holy Liftoff
A selection of movements adapted for this performance
Realization by Samuel Clay Birmaher for Density 2036 part xi (2024)
Claire Chase flute
JACK Quartet
Leilehua LANZILOTTI (b. 1983)
ko‘u inoa (2017)
Sofia GUBAIDULINA (1931-2025)
Mirage: The Dancing Sun (2002)
Julius EASTMAN (1940-90)
The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981)
Terry RILEY (b. 1935)
The Holy Liftoff (2024-ongoing)
A Kanaka Maoli composer, violist, interdisciplinary artist, and music writer based in Hawaii, Leilehua Lanzilotti creates open spaces for deep listening and connection — with the natural environment, language, and community. Her music often emerges from a broader practice of storytelling and stewardship, centering Indigenous values to repair erasure and reimagine the concert experience. She has frequently collaborated with the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, for example, performing ko‘u inoa amid a group of Isamu Noguchi sculptures.
In the Hawaiian language, ko‘u inoa translates as “my name” or “is my name,” according to the composer — a simple phrase that carries the weight of identity, ancestry, and presence. Lanzilotti’s own first name, Leilehua, signifies “a garland of lehua blossoms” — “the first plant to grow back after the volcano destroys all vegetation,” she explains. “Looking beyond the direct translation, it means ‘creating beauty out of destruction.’”
Lanzilotti calls this piece, which is of flexible duration, “a homesick bariolage” — referring to the rapid alternation between strings to produce a shimmering effect –based on Hawai‘i Aloha. With lyrics written in the 19th century by Makua Laiana, the anthem is “usually sung at the end of large
concerts or gatherings, with everyone joining hands and swaying side to side as they sing,” but here, as Lanzilotti notes, it serves to invite introductions. “Hawai‘i Aloha evokes not only a homesickness for place and sound, but this action of coming together — a homesickness that we’re all feeling right now, where music and human interaction are home.”
From a ceremonial, communal greeting rooted in Indigenous practice and intimate sound, we proceed to a pair of works that come from vastly different worlds yet form a striking diptych for cello choir. The late Sofia Gubaidulina’s Mirage: The Dancing Sun, scored for eight cellos, treats sound as spiritual metaphor, evoking the interplay of light and shadow, faith and uncertainty — an expression of her preoccupation with the sacred and the unseen.
Intersecting cello lines form metaphoric crosses, pitting phrases low in the register that allude to the apocalyptic Last Judgment chant, the Dies irae, against the ethereal sound of natural harmonics — tones produced by lightly touching a vibrating string at precise points — to suggest “the shape of a dancing sun.” The first two-thirds of the piece prepare for the radiance of the culminating section, which Gubaidulina likens to “a sun disc spinning very rapidly around its own stationary center, throwing ‘flaming arrows’ in
different directions.” For Music Director Claire Chase, the cello choir evokes “a suspended heart throb” as it moves toward the ineffable, just around sunset in this evening’s performance.
Chase adds that Gubaidulina’s music “sets us up for the longing and release” that follow in Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Trained through church singing in his youth and formal studies at the Curtis Institute, Eastman emerged in the 1970s as a celebrated composer and performer, collaborating with Meredith Monk and even singing under Pierre Boulez. But during the 1980s, amid personal struggles, Eastman became unhoused and died in 1990 at the age of 49. A long period of neglect of his music followed.
The resurgence of interest in Eastman’s legacy in recent years has helped restore a singular and incendiary creative voice — one that complicates prevailing narratives of American Minimalism and experimentalism. A gay Black composer who both embraced and redefined Minimalist aesthetics, Eastman confronted racism and homophobia in life and through his music. His compositions are urgent, militant, and spiritual, demanding total engagement from performers and listeners alike.
CONTINUED }}
This concert is made possible with the generous support of City of Ojai Arts Commission and Susanne Wilson
There is no intermission during the concert
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 8:00am
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet
M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Susie Ibarra percussion
Susie IBARRA
(arr. Aleks PILMANIS)
OJAI MEADOWS PRESERVE OFF HIGHWAY 33 PAST NORDHOFF HIGH SCHOOL.
SEE FESTIVAL MOBILE APP FOR DIRECTIONS AND PARKING
Pauline OLIVEROS
Sunbird (West Coast premiere)
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute
Joshua Rubin clarinet
M.A. Tiesenga saxophone
Kolubrí
Susie Ibarra percussion
Horse Sings from Cloud
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute
Joshua Rubin clarinet
M.A. Tiesenga saxophone
Susie Ibarra percussion
Susie IBARRA (b. 1970)
(arranged for wind trio by Aleks PILMANIS (b. 2001)
Sunbird (2020; new version 2025)
Kolubrí (2020)
Pauline OLIVEROS (1932-2016)
Horse Sings from Cloud (1975)
The recently rewilded landscape of Ojai Meadows Preserve invites quiet reflection: walking paths wind through native plants, a small pond glints in the morning light, and a natural clearing opens like a miniature concert hall. What better setting could there be for this morning meditation program?
The music, you will have noticed, has already begun. “Birds are some of our oldest drummers on the planet. I think we’ve been singing and playing their songs and their rhythms for a long time,” says the remarkable Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra. Her work emerges from a practice informed by wide-ranging research — whether into environmental soundscapes in the Philippine rainforests, Himalayan glaciers, or the polyphonic dusk of nightingale season in Berlin, where she is currently based.
“The purple Philippine sunbird,” writes Ibarra, “often has an olive back and underneath is bright yellow, sometimes with metallic green or blue.” Celebrated for its strikingly beautiful songs, she adds, the sunbird is often found “in tropical rainforests and also in open woodlands.” Ibarra originally composed Sunbird for Claire Chase and her many-voiced flute persona, creating a solo that overlays solo piccolo, flute, and bass flute, with moments of percussive breath and
vocalization folded into the texture. We hear the piece in a brand-new arrangement for a quartet of two flutes, clarinet, and saxophone — with ad libitum accompaniment by the birds of Ojai, who transform the ensemble into a kind of open aviary.
Kolubrí — a solo percussion piece that Chase singles out on her desert-island list of solo performances — was inspired by one of the smallest of songbirds, the hummingbird, an avian marvel that hums not only with its wings, but with song. “They are one of three bird orders to have evolved their song and vocal learning,” Ibarra notes. She translates their delicate vibrations into lower frequencies, using the language of drums and cymbals.
Ibarra’s compositions share a spirit of radical attentiveness that resonates with the practice pioneered by Pauline Oliveros in works like Horse Sings from Cloud Instead of reproducing a fixed set of notes, performers realize a text score built around this deceptively simple, openended instruction: “Hold a tone until you no longer desire to change it. When you no longer desire to change the tone then change it.”
“This is a sounding in which control is relinquished, in which ‘the composer’ bestows the music not only into the hands of the performer, but into the force of
the non-desire, the will of the non-will,” muses the sound artist and poet Sharon Stewart. “At that moment, when one note is held, one can become lost in the endless variety, the subtle variations of dynamics and tone color, the intricate ways in which that single pitch colors each moment that it passes, intersects with each breath, each twitch of a muscle, each sound that merges with it from the surrounding environment.”
Ever since Oliveros introduced the profoundly meditative, dream-inspired Horse Sings from Cloud nearly half a century ago, it has taken countless forms — from her own renditions with accordion and voice to mixed ensembles and electronics, even an iPhone app (as longtime Ojai audiences might recall). Claire Chase, who was mentored by Oliveros and is one of her most passionate advocates, has performed the work in many contexts and credits it with transforming how she listens, collaborates, and thinks about musical time.
For this morning’s manifestation, the ensemble will begin the piece with four wind players and percussion, then invite the audience to join in — handing out instruments before gently leading everyone back down the trail. Another first for Ojai.
—THOMAS MAY
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Carol and Luther Luedtke
There is no intermission during the concert
OJAI CHATS
with Leilehua Lanzilotti & Music Pop-Up, 12pm, Libbey Park Gazebo
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 10:30am
Claire Chase flute | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods cello
Cory Smythe piano | Levy Lorenzo electronics
Marcos BALTER Chambers
JACK Quartet
Leilehua LANZILOTTI ahupua‘a
JACK Quartet
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR
Ubique (West Coast premiere)
As part of Density 2036 part x (2023)
Claire Chase flute
Cory Smythe piano
Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello
Levy Lorenzo electronics
All three composers sharing the bill on this morning’s program have a close creative affinity with Claire Chase. Both Marcos Balter and Anna Thorvaldsdottir create abstract sonic spaces in their respective works — from intimate chambers to awe-inspiring expanses that transform perception — while Leilehua Lanzilotti’s music celebrates her Hawaiian heritage by delineating the interconnectedness of a particular ecosystem.
Each of the three short movements comprising Chambers, Balter’s only foray into the string quartet to date, constructs a sonic environment that might indeed be likened to a chamber with its own architectural and atmospheric properties. The focus of the first movement, according to Balter, is on “attentive listening,” inviting the listener to become immersed in “seemingly static textures that in return gradually unveil their many complexities and hidden hyperactivity, primarily through timbre.” The delicate textures of the opening — including instructions for the players to almost imperceptibly whistle their own lines in the viola-cello register — contrast strikingly with the rapid-fire, scherzo-like interchanges of the second movement, where Balter plays high and low registers off each other. Dancing pizzicato rhythms
and flickers of melody drive the intricately crafted dialogue of the third movement.
Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti wrote her string quartet ahupua‘a as part of a larger educational project designed to teach children about the water cycle. The traditional Hawaiian ahupua‘a system refers to land divisions that extend from mountain to sea, designed so a single community could sustain itself through shared care of ecosystems. “Within any community, you had people that were farming taro in the middle of the ahupua‘a, or fishing in the ocean and creating freshwater ponds,” according to Lanzilotti. “Through these community connections, you had everything that you needed within one community.”
Lanzilotti’s piece adapts the ahupua‘a concept into sonic metaphors for the water cycle that unites these ecosystems, each of its three movements representing a different stage. The first movement evokes the “air sound” of wind in the mountains, where water builds up and the wind at times resembles “the ocean rumbling,” while the clouds then give way to stars. The playful second movement conveys the sounds of the community
Anna
and its activity at daytime, with children running about and “people pounding poi,” the traditional Hawaiian paste made from taro. The final movement takes us into the sea level stage, depicting the ocean and how these varied elements “drift in and out of each other.”
ahupua‘a was created in collaboration with the self-taught fashion designer Manaola Yap, whose vibrantly multilayered designs are based on traditional bamboo cutting patterns used for tapa cloth. For Lanzilotti, this partnership centers Indigenous ways of knowing.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s endlessly spacious compositions resonate with a gorgeous austerity that tempts listeners to anchor them in the natural beauty and powerful forces of her Icelandic homeland. But a profoundly introspective quality also comes to the fore in Ubique, her largescale contribution to Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project. The title — a Latin adverb meaning “everywhere” — directs our attention toward the infinite, the omnipresent. But ubiquity extends inward as well as outward, encompassing infinity in both directions: “Throughout the piece,” notes the composer, “sounds are reduced to their smallest particles” while “their atmospheric presence [is] expanded towards the infinite.”
CONTINUED }}
Thorvaldsdottir was inspired by “the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle.” Fragments and interruptions commingle with aspects of a sonority that are sustained “beyond their natural resonance.”
Ubique unfolds in 11 seamlessly connected parts and is scored for an unusual quartet consisting of solo flutes (one performer), piano, and two cellos (Thorvaldsdottir’s own instrument), together with electronics. Incorporating some surprising contrasts in material — particularly in the second, lengthiest part — the work is anchored by deep, persistent drones. A descending motif — almost suggesting a lamentation — proceeds by steps against shifting background gradations of darkness and light. The piece “lives
on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion,” says Thorvaldsdottir.
An unmistakably “organic” sensibility emerges from the impression she creates, on a vast scale, of inhalation and exhalation — the gesture of blowing into a flute that generates tremulous music as the material is presented in and out of focus. According to Thorvaldsdottir, “the flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction — of various kinds and durations — as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure.” Through this evolving ecology of sound — porous, breathing, expansive — she attunes us to both the infinite and the infinitesimal.
We miss Lowell Hill whose friendship, warm presence, loyal support, and contagious enthusiasm brightened the Ojai Music Festival.
1947 THOR JOHNSON
1948 THOR JOHNSON
EDWARD REBNER
1949 THOR JOHNSON
1950 THOR JOHNSON
1951 WILLIAM STEINBERG
1952 THOR JOHNSON
1953 THOR JOHNSON
1954 ROBERT CRAFT
1955 ROBERT CRAFT
IGOR STRAVINSKY
1956 ROBERT CRAFT
IGOR STRAVINSKY
1957 AARON COPLAND, INGOLF DAHL
1958 AARON COPLAND
1959 ROBERT CRAFT
1960 HENRI TEMIANKA
1961 LUKAS FOSS
1962 LUKAS FOSS
1963 LUKAS FOSS
1964 INGOLF DAHL
1965 INGOLF DAHL
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
INGOLF DAHL
PIERRE BOULEZ
ROBERT LAMARCHINA
LAWRENCE FOSTER
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
MICHAEL ZEAROTT
STEFAN MINDE
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
PIERRE BOULEZ
GERHARD SAMUEL
MICHAEL ZEAROTT
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
AARON COPLAND
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
CALVIN SIMMONS
LUKAS FOSS
LUKAS FOSS 1981
DANIEL LEWIS 1982 ROBERT CRAFT 1983
DANIEL LEWIS
PIERRE BOULEZ
2003
1985
KENT NAGANO 1986
KENT NAGANO
STEPHEN MOSKO 1987
LUKAS FOSS 1988
NICHOLAS MCGEGAN
SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
DIANE WITTRY 1989
PIERRE BOULEZ 1990
STEPHEN MOSKO
JOHN HARBISON
SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
PIERRE BOULEZ
ADAMS
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS
NAGANO
PIERRE BOULEZ
EMANUEL AX, DANIEL HARDING
MITSUKO UCHIDA
DAVID ZINMAN
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
SIR SIMON RATTLE
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
EMERSON STRING QUARTET
PIERRE BOULEZ 2004
2005
KENT NAGANO
OLIVER KNUSSEN 2006
ROBERT SPANO 2007
PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD 2008
EIGHTH BLACKBIRD
DAVID ROBERTSON 2009
GEORGE BENJAMIN
DAWN UPSHAW
LEIF OVE ANDSNES
MARK MORRIS
JEREMY DENK
STEVEN SCHICK 2016
PETER SELLARS
VIJAY IYER
PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA
BARBARA HANNIGAN
2020 MATTHIAS PINTSCHER
2021 JOHN ADAMS
2022 AMOC* 2023
RHIANNON GIDDENS
2024 MITSUKO UCHIDA 2025
CLAIRE CHASE
In Collaboration With The Ojai Playhouse
For tickets, visit OjaiPlayhouse.com or visit their box office at 107 S. Signal Street (directly behind the Ojai Playhouse)
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 1:00pm
Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros
Director: Daniel Weintraub
Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator, and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the few females amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians, a gateway to music and sound for non-musicians, and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with severe disabilities to create beautiful music. Oliveros was on the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades. Her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes
OJAI PLAYHOUSE
145 E. OJAI AVENUE
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Meg Bates and Scott Johnson
There is no intermission during the concert
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 3:30pm
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Susie Ibarra percussion
Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics | Nicholas Houfek lighting and production design
Craig TABORN
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms (West Coast premiere)
As part of Density 2036 part ix (2022)
Claire Chase flute
Joshua Rubin clarinet
Susie Ibarra percussion
Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics
Craig
As an outside-the-box composerperformer and musical thinker, Craig Taborn was bound to come up on Claire Chase’s radar. Always on the lookout for visionary collaborators for her ongoing new-music initiative Density 2036, Chase found in Taborn an ideal partner for its ninth annual commission. Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms celebrates the boundary-defying imagination and spirit of improvisational co-creation that align perfectly with the ethos of the Density project.
The Minneapolis-born, Brooklyn-based Taborn moves fluently across jazz, electronic, experimental, and art-pop contexts. Acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble work, he is equally at home as a pianist and as an electronic musician — he plays both roles in Busy Griefs — crafting immersive soundscapes and expanding the dimensions of improvisation across formats.
The imaginative seed for Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms was planted by a dream. “I was inspired by a weird, fantastical dream of Claire moving through some kind of garden,” recalls Taborn. “Just as she approached each of the plants and flowers it contained, they opened up, and there was a sense of a conversation happening.” That vision evolved into a performance concept in which Chase, playing a family of flutes (from piccolo to her contrabass flute,
nicknamed “Bertha”), initiating musical dialogues as she physically and sonically engages with each of the three other performers stationed around her. Upon her prompting, “the flower opens up.”
Conceived as “a flute protagonist piece,” Busy Griefs takes shape as a series of through-composed solos and duos that are radically different in mood and material. The duet with Susie Ibarra’s array of percussion, for example, develops into a microcosm of its own. The interactions expand to include several ensemble pieces as well. Bridging these sections are improvised extrapolations on the pre-composed material, for which the musicians draw from a palette of improvisational gestures that serve as a kind of “kit” to build the piece.
The musical architecture — or narrative — is similarly aleatory and modular rather than predetermined. Each of Chase’s interactions is triggered by how she responds to the continually changing sonic environment. Another layer of interaction is the one between acoustic and electronic sounds, including live processing of the former, which Taborn performs from his position at the keyboard. This further intensifies the sense of aural proximity and interaction that is central to the piece.
Alongside his image of a musical kit, Taborn likens the structure to the
unpredictable interactions of a game: the path traced by Busy Griefs differs with each iteration. “I’m an improviser at heart and don’t cling to the authorial position too tightly,” he says. (Ojai audiences have an opportunity to compare and contrast the experience, with performances on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.)
While Taborn had no specific narrative in mind, he points out that the poetic title reflects the emotional undercurrents at play. The dream that initially prompted the work — a source of inspiration he says is not usually part of his process –was unusually vivid and involved “some sense of grief work. When each flower was approached and opened, there was an element of healing and love. It’s not a piece about grief but a piece about surmounting grief.”
More than a fixed composition, Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms is a living framework that invites transformation, presence, and unpredictability. “There is no ultimate, final realized version… it’s supposed to be performed and continually worked with,” says Taborn. The musical process of improvisation, movement, and interaction becomes a metaphor for this process of healing. “The openness of encountering an experience musically always feels that way for me,” he adds. “Each performance is a working through of something towards some kind of healing, in more abstract ways.”
—THOMAS MAY
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Nancy and Barry Sanders
The Festival appearances of Steven Schick are made possible with the generous support of Rachel Blanchard and Jeremy Turner
OJAI LATE NIGHT
Spirit Catchers
10:45PM, Ojai Playhouse
Limited ticketing. Visit the Box Office
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 8:00pm
Wu Wei sheng | JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Festival Artists | Steven Schick conductor
J.S. BACH
Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668
(arr. Samuel Clay BIRMAHER) Wu Wei sheng | Christopher Otto violin | John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell cello
Sofia GUBAIDULINA
Meditation on the Bach chorale Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668
Alex Peh harpsichord | JACK Quartet | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Steven Schick conductor
Tania LEÓN
Liza LIM
Hechizos
Michael Matsuno flute | Claire Brazeau oboe | Joshua Rubin clarinet
M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Danielle Ondarza horn
Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Ross Karre and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Cory Smythe piano/celesta/harpsichord
Colin McAllister guitar | Christopher Otto violin | John Pickford Richards viola
Seth Parker Woods cello | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Steven Schick conductor
INTERMISSION
How Forests Think
Tendril & Rainfall
Mycelia
Pollen
The Trees
Wu Wei sheng | Michael Matsuno flute | Breana Gilcher oboe
Joshua Rubin clarinet | M.A. Tiesenga alto saxophone
Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Katinka Kleijn cello
Ross Karre percussion | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Steven Schick conductor
J.S. BACH (1685-1750)
arr. Samuel Clay BIRMAHER (b. 1988)
Chorale Vor deinen Thron, BWV 668 (c. 1750, reworking of earlier setting)
Sofia GUBAIDULINA (1931-2025)
Meditation on the Bach chorale Vor deinen Thron (1993)
Tania LEÓN (b. 1943)
Hechizos (1994)
Liza LIM (b. 1966)
How Forests Think (2016)
Ever since music co-evolved with humanity, it has forged paths to transcend the limits of human perception — whether through prayers or spells — and connect us to forces beyond our everyday confines.
Though it was programmed before Sofia Gubaidulina’s death in March 2025 at the age of 93, her Meditation on J.S. Bach’s so-called “deathbed chorale” now takes on the character of a final benediction, befitting a composer whose entire body of work was shaped by spiritual quest.
In 1993, soon after resettling in Germany following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina received a commission from the Bach Society in Bremen. It offered her a platform to express her lifelong “deep reverence” for that composer in the form of a musical meditation on the chorale prelude for organ Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (“Before Your Throne I Now Appear”).
We hear the source work at the outset in a special arrangement Claire Chase commissioned from Samuel Clay Birmaher, who parses the chorale’s four parts into an ensemble of violin, viola, cello, and sheng — an instrument featured in Liza Lim’s work on the second half that can evoke the sonority of an organ.
Much lore surrounds the manuscript of BWV 668. Bach’s heirs popularized the story that the blind, dying composer had dictated this version of a chorale prelude reworked from his early Weimar years as a final testament. It was even printed (with a different title) as the capstone to the unfinished Art of the Fugue and thus has a special status as the “closing chorale” of Bach’s life and career. The 18th-century German theologian Johann Michael Schmidt wrote that “everything the advocates of materialism might come up with collapses in the face of this one example.”
Gubaidulina scored her reflections on the chorale for string quintet (with double bass) and harpsichord. Fragments of the chorale tune are interspersed among increasingly dissonant clusters and clouds. She explained that her highly rational system of numbers and proportions to organize musical events within the score’s 189 measures is modeled after Bach’s own “virtuoso use” of number sequences encoding his name as well as theological concepts. “The four development sections, each concluding with a line from the chorale, are steps in the direction the music must go before the chorale can finally be heard in its entirely,” Gubaidulina writes. The process at the same time traces “the ascent of
Bach’s soul” toward the divine throne “like the visible and invisible parts of a soul awaiting an encounter with God.” For all the meticulous abstraction of her design, a sense of personal fantasy and emotional connection emerges from the live sounds of Gubaidulina’s music.
In the wake of the Russian composer’s solemn colors and prayerful contemplation of last things, Tania León’s Hechizos bursts forth with exuberant vitality. Composed in 1994 for Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Hechizos represents one of her most Modernist scores in its harmonic language, textural experimentation, and rhythmic complexity. It offers a glimpse into León’s eclectic fusion of styles from the period when she was rapidly gaining recognition in Europe.
The title, Spanish for “spells” or “enchantments,” may hint at an otherworldly subtext; however, the true magic of Hechizos lies in its spellbinding and continual metamorphosis of musical elements — gestures, timbres, fleeting instrumental licks, and shifting meters evolving with the speed of thought. Léon, who dedicated the piece to her mother, characterizes it as “something that transforms constantly.”
CONTINUED }}
León instructs the ensemble to play the first 50 measures three times, but with a difference: first with percussion and keyboards alone, then with brass added on, and, for the third round — following these two “prologues,” as Léon calls them — with the entire ensemble joining. Hechizos then proceeds as an ever-evolving landscape of highcontrast episodes, propelled by a restless momentum and a kaleidoscopic energy that vividly attests to León’s unbounded and distinctive musical imagination.
In his 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn challenges the anthropocentric Western assumption that humans are the sole possessors of thought, sentience, and agency. Liza Lim drew on her own experiences of the presence of nearby rainforests in Borneo, where she was raised, to give musical voice and form to the “living matrix” of forest ecosystems Kohn explores — a network of interconnected communities extending from invisible roots through lofty canopies. Lim’s work traces a sonic journey that seeks to alter our understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world, emphasizing its interdependence and interconnectedness. “The way in which the musicians offer energies to each
other and interact — and how that flows out into the audience — is the basic premise,” she says, How Forests Think is scored for a diverse ensemble that allows for individual instrumental personalities as well as unusual timbral combinations to emerge from this immersive, symbiotic tapestry. Lim also expands the vocabulary of sounds with special instructions: dried peas are dropped onto a variety of surfaces, and the cello and bass use specially prepared bows — with the hair wound around the wood — to create what Lim describes as an “uneven, serrated, gnarly playing surface.”
Wu Wei not only plays his sheng (an ancient Chinese mouth organ that doubles as a symbol of the phoenix rising from its ashes) but performs low Tibetan throat singing and recites a poetic fragment in ancient Chinese. The other musicians are also asked to sing and vocalize; at the end of the second movement, a love story is whispered into the flute and saxophone. Lim imagines the ensemble as an organism, Wu Wei’s sheng serving as its “lungs.”
With the expansive dimensions of a symphony, Lim’s dynamic canvas unfolds in four movements. She likens the tiny “grains of sound” in “Tendril & Rainfall” to “proto-words” for a grammar that is developed in this first and longest
movement. “These single drops, which start off like raindrops, become an overwhelming, metallic tsunami of sound” in the second movement. Titled “Mycelia,” this movement evolves “a more singing texture woven into more continuous phrases” in a process Lim imagines as “tree roots and fungal mycelia intertwining and exchanging — a language of enzymes, and an exchange of minerals.”
The “very bright, potent, high-keyed, and rhythmic” third movement (“Pollen”) presents a striking contrast: “like particles flying in the air.” Lim employs a technique of irregular repetition, “where you pass through the same points in slightly different ways each time” to convey how we experience time “not as a smooth, linear unfolding, but as something much more glitchy and textured — a much more unpredictable flow of time.”
In the meditative conclusion of the final movement (“The Trees”), as the score becomes more open, the conductor joins the other musicians as they softly sing and whistle, becoming mindful of their own breathing. “By the end,” says Lim, the music is “listening to itself” and the experience of time is transformed from a transient phenomenon into “something that is breathing and emergent, present and growing.”
—THOMAS MAY
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Rachel Sater and Thomas McNalley
There is no intermission during the concert In Collaboration With The Ojai Playhouse
Limited seating. For tickets, visit OjaiPlayhouse.com or go to their box office at 107 S. Signal Street (directly behind the Ojai Playhouse)
Saturday, June 7, 2025 | 10:45pm
Ojai Playhouse
OJAI PLAYHOUSE
145 E. OJAI AVENUE
Katinka Kleijn | Leilehua Lanzilotti | Bahar Royaee | Steven Schick | Annea Lockwood sound diffusion
OJAI LATE NIGHT
Annea LOCKWOOD Spirit Catchers for four speaking voices, microphones, mixer, and four channels
Spirit Catchers (1974) eavesdrops on the memories of four people, each of whom has brought along an object they have had for many years, something which evokes and holds part of its owner’s history, a spirit catcher.
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Mechas and Greg Grinnell
There is no intermission during the concert
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 8:00am
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola | Seth Parker Woods cello | Ross Karre percussion
Leilehua LANZILOTTI the embryology of the heart i resources for healing the voice ii there are only so many breaths iii if this should be Seth Parker Woods cello and reciter brooke smiley reciter (section i)
Bahar ROYAEE
A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture (World premiere) Ross Karre percussion
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR Sola
Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
Leilehua LANZILOTTI (b. 1983) the embryology of the heart (2023)
This final day of the 2025 Festival begins with a trio of works that invite the audience into the intimate, often interior world of the solo instrument. Leilehua Lanzilotti developed the embryology of the heart — in which the cellist not only plays the instrument but has a substantial speaking role — during a residency at the Tusen Takk Foundation, an idyllic retreat on an isolated peninsula in Northwest Michigan. She composed it for Andrew Yee, the cellist and composer known for their work with the Attacca Quartet. This morning’s performance by Seth Parker Woods marks the first public presentation of the piece by another cellist.
Comprising three brief sections, the embryology of the heart sets texts by three Americans – two of them contemporary, the third a classic Modernist – to what Lanzilotti describes as “timbral commentary” by a solo cellist. The first section draws on a 2021 talk given by Ojai-based poet, movement artist, and activist brooke smiley, titled “Learning to Speak: Resources for Healing the Voice From Embodied Social Justice Summit.” An Indigenous dance and somatic movement practitioner, smiley described her session as “centering an Indigenous perspective”
Bahar ROYAEE (b. 1986)
A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture (2025)
to explore “what embodied resources support one’s personal relationship to speaking with the possibility to invite new choices,” and how we might “look to the elements of the earth, ourselves, and one another to inspire a relationship of harmony, interconnectedness, and homeostasis.” The second section turns to the poem “feelings are biological facts” from the pandemic-era collection Your Wound/My Garden by the nonbinary poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor Alok Vaid-Menon. In the third section, Lanzilotti sets a line from e.e. cummings’s “it may not always be so; and I say,” which originally appeared in the section titled “Sonnets – Unrealities” in his first book of verse, Tulips and Chimneys, published in 1923.
Commissioned by Claire Chase for Ojai Music Festival 2025, percussionist and instrument builder Ross Karre worked in close collaboration with Royaee, providing her with “sound objects — some broken, some fully embodied” to explore “the tension between determined and indeterminate sonic patterns,” in the composer’s description. “Each object contributes to a kind of memory-in-themaking: a desired recollection for a future not yet lived.”
Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR (b. 1977) Sola (2019)
The program closes with Sola, a work for solo viola and pre-recorded electronics by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir that presents Lanzilotti in her guise as a performer. The piece was “inspired by abstract structural elements of solitariness in the midst of turmoil — by the desire for calm and focus in chaos,” Thorvaldsdottir explains. She complicates the gesture of “solo-ing” by entangling viola and electronics as “different sides of the same being,” with the viola serving as a constant while the electronics slip in and out of focus, shadowing the solo line.
The musical materials expand and contract across the span of the piece, juxtaposing unity with fragmentation, stillness with unease. “As with my music generally,” Thorvaldsdottir writes, “the inspiration behind Sola is not something I am trying to describe through the piece ... The qualities I tend to be inspired by are often structural, like proportion and flow, as well as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move in perspective between the two — the details and the unity of the whole.”
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation
The Festival appearances of Susie Ibarra are made possible with the generous support of Claire and David Oxtoby
The Festival appearances of Wu Wei are made possible with the generous support of the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics, Ventura County Community Foundation
There is no intermission during the concert
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 10:30am
Claire Chase flute | Susie Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo percussion | Wu Wei sheng | Alex Peh piano
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello
Christopher OTTO
Austin WULLIMAN
Susie IBARRA
Tania LEÓN
Susie IBARRA
Angelorum Psalat, after Rodericus
JACK Quartet
Dave’s Hocket: For Guillaume and Arvo
JACK Quartet
Nest Box (World premiere)
Commissioned by Ojai Music Festival and Music Director Claire Chase in honor of Steven Schick’s 70th birthday
Wu Wei sheng
Susie Ibarra percussion
Rituál
Sky Islands (West Coast premiere)
Claire Chase flute
Susie Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo percussion
Alex Peh piano
JACK Quartet
Add to your day!
Community Concert, 12pm, Libbey Park
Ojai Films: 32 Sounds, 1pm, Ojai Playhouse
Housatonic Sound Installation 2-5pm, Move Sanctuary
Christopher OTTO (b. 1983)
Angelorum Psalat, after Rodericus (2011)
Austin WULLIMAN (b. 1982)
Dave’s Hocket (2024)
The JACK Quartet’s “Modern Medieval” programming concept forges new connections with the “neglected, though not forgotten, musical rites of the Medieval arts” by considering some of the most intriguing figures of early music through a contemporary lens. The examples we hear are by two of JACK’s own members. Christopher Otto offers a reworking of music by a late-14th-century French composer about whom little is known. Even his name is ambiguous. The ballad Angelorum psalat (“The Angels Are Singing”) is the sole extant work attributed to Rodericus, who is credited in the manuscript by his anadrome (“S. Uciredor”). It is often cited as an example of the ars subtilior (“subtler art”), a style involving greater rhythmic complexity that developed around Paris and other centers.
In Dave’s Hocket, Austin Wulliman turns to Guillaume de Machaut, a pivotal 14thcentury composer in the period leading up to the emergence of the ars subtilior Wulliman uses as his point of departure Machaut’s instrumental piece Hoquetus David, which illustrates the technique of “hocketing” — a kind of hiccup effect created by divvying a melody among multiple voices. “The tiling of notes over the cantus firmus made me think
Susie IBARRA (b. 1970)
Nest Box (2025)
Tania LEÓN (b. 1943)
Rituál (1987)
of light coming through the individual glass panes of a church window,” he says. “Light and darkness and the ecstatic religious vision made me reread Umberto Eco’s astounding scene at the church door from The Name of the Rose, and then suddenly my brain was mashing up the sound of Machaut with Arvo Pärt’s Fratres.”
While JACK bridges the gap from medieval to present, Susie Ibarra homes in on the timeless music of birds in Nest Box. The Filipinx American composer, percussionist, and sound artist dedicates her Ojai Music Festival–commissioned piece to fellow percussionist Steven Schick — with whom Ibarra performed for the first time during the opening concert — and salutes the impact of his “generous and inspiring artistry” on the community.
Following her two pieces on Saturday’s morning meditation program inspired by birds from the Philippines, Ibarra continues the avian thread with a playful homage to birds in Ojai Meadows Preserve as well as in Berlin, where she is currently based. Among the specific bird calls she cites are Cassie’s Kingbird, California Towhee, House Finch, House Wren, and Bewick’s Wren. Ibarra additionally wanted to highlight the
Susie IBARRA (b. 1970)
Sky Islands (2024)
extraordinary musicianship of Wu Wei and his 37-reed sheng by shaping Nest Box as a duo for sheng and percussion.
“Much like a nest box which nurtures and protects birds, the piece is a home for these musical motifs,” explains Ibarra. “While acting as a launching point, performers also venture out. It also is a play between different birds who live in it, want to move in and out, or cannot move in and out of the box.” The score embeds passages open to improvisation on given motifs and rhythmic patterns. As the duo performs, their rhythm and pacing at times depart from the established tempo, instead being guided by their own natural breath cycles, Ibarra remarks — much like the irregular rhythms of birds themselves.
On one level, Tania León’s widely performed Rituál from 1987 is a vibrant homage to the creative spirit itself. She dedicated the score to Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, who together founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem at the height of the civil rights movement. They encouraged León, who became the company’s first music director, to find her path as a composer and conductor. Rituál, she has said, “is about the fire in the spirit of people who encourage other people, because they see something that
CONTINUED }}
the person doesn’t see themselves. It’s the fire that initiates something.”
An image that inspired León, she recalls, was “seeing the embers jumping” while watching the fireplace one evening. Another was the powerful physicality of conga drummers in performance: “the way they sometimes have to move their torsos and spread their arms to reach the drums.” Compact but teeming with events, Rituál begins in a mood of slow, ruminative fantasy and proceeds to accelerate with a gradual but relentless drive. The performer must steer a longrange sense of “constant propulsion” while navigating the keyboard’s span with wide leaps and displaced rhythmic accents. The frenzy turns rhapsodic, igniting a sense of ecstasy that quickly dissolves in a final moment of reflection.
The title Sky Islands refers to the isolated high-altitude rainforests found in Luzon, Philippines. These are biodiversity hot spots abounding in rare species — and their associated musics — where evolution itself becomes accelerated. Susie Ibarra’s expansive composition, premiered last summer in New York by the Asia Society, celebrates this stunningly varied — yet fragile and endangered — ecosystem with a musical variety that mirrors its rich textures and complex interconnections. When Sky
Islands was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Music last month, the jury praised how Ibarra “challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisatory skills of a soloist as a creative tool.”
To undertake the project, Ibarra expanded her Talking Gong Trio (with Claire Chase and Alex Peh) into an ensemble of eight musicians by adding another percussionist and string quartet. The percussion duo presides over a vast array of instruments, forming what Ibarra dubs a “floating garden” of sonic marvels.
Along with traditional instruments of the Philippines and neighboring regions, such as kulintang and sarunay (related instruments consisting of a horizontal row of tuned, knobbed metal gongs — kulintang also referred to the percussion ensemble itself), as well as agong (large, vertically suspended gongs), this garden incorporates bells, large pans, sheet metal, and even live plants that are wired for sound and a water bucket supplied with hydrophones and koi. The collection of percussion also includes bespoke metal sound sculptures that come alive to the touch.
Sky Islands opens with a ritual dance as both percussionists, positioned at opposite ends of the stage, play
traditional Luzon rhythms with long bamboo sticks. The score instructs them to “introduce the sounds of the bamboo to the audience” and slowly converge at the center, settling into interlocking rhythms that prepare for our journey into the heart of the sky islands.
Throughout the performance, Ibarra incorporates pockets of improvisation, highlighting the unique coloristic possibilities of her ensemble. Extended duos for kulintang and sarunay and for drum set and agong, respectively, showcase the virtuosity of imagination inherent in her musical conception of this unique setting.
In another passage, the members of the JACK Quartet improvise around the contours of Claire Chase’s embellished flute line, with the piano then adding “small sounds within strings and flute.” In the final section, Chase performs an improvisation on bass flute and is then joined by bells and “small forest sounds.” In the closing moments, Ibarra instructs the entire ensemble to form a line, one by one, each musician picking up a small percussion instrument to play. They proceed in a ritualistic procession through the space, underscoring that the aesthetic experience is at the same time a communal rejoicing and a call to action.
—THOMAS MAY
In Collaboration With The Ojai Playhouse
For tickets, visit OjaiPlayhouse.com or visit their box office at 107 S. Signal Street (directly behind the Ojai Playhouse)
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 1:00pm (repeat film)
32 Sounds
Director: Sam Green
Featuring Annea Lockwood, JD Samson, Edgar Choueriri, Joanna Fang, Phillip Glass, Sam Green
An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us. The film premiered in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival.
Produced by ArKtype, The Department of Motion Pictures, Impact Partners, Wavelength Productions and Free History Project.
Running time: 97 minutes
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Meg Bates and Scott Johnson
There is no intermission during the concert
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 2:30pm (repeat performance)
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Susie Ibarra percussion
Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics | Nicholas Houfek lighting and production design
Craig TABORN
See page 63 for program notes
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms (West Coast premiere)
As part of Density 2036 part ix (2022)
Claire Chase flute
Joshua Rubin clarinet
Susie Ibarra percussion
Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, and electronics
This concert is made possible with the generous support of Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt
Sunday, June 8, 2025 | 5:30pm
Claire Chase flute | Festival Artists | Steven Schick conductor
Leilehua LANZILOTTI
ko‘u inoa
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola
Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello | Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Pauline OLIVEROS
The Witness
Claire Chase flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Wu Wei sheng | M.A. Tiesenga saxophone
Dan Rosenboom trumpet | Mattie Barbier trombone | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre,
Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Alex Peh and Cory Smythe piano
INTERMISSION
Tania LEÓN
Singsong (World premiere of new version for solo flute)
(arr. for solo flute by Singsong (solo bass flute)
Claire CHASE)
Terry RILEY
The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude (solo alto flute)
Scarf (solo flute)
The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude (solo flute)
Claire Chase flute
Pulsefield
Pulsefield 1
Pulsefield 2
Pulsefield 3
Realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher (World premieres of Pulsefield 2 and 3)
Claire Chase and Michael Matsuno flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Wu Wei sheng
Danielle Ondarza horn | M.A. Tiesenga saxophone | Dan Rosenboom trumpet
Mattie Barbier trombone | Susie Ibarra, Ross Karre, Levy Lorenzo, Steven Schick, and Wesley Sumpter percussion | Alex Peh, Cory Smythe, and Craig Taborn piano
JACK Quartet | Leilehua Lanzilotti viola | Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods cello
Kathryn Schulmeister double bass
Leilehua LANZILOTTI (b. 1983)
ko‘u inoa (2017)
Pauline OLIVEROS (1932-2016)
The Witness (1989)
Previously heard in a solo version at the start of Friday evening’s The Holy Liftoff concert, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s ko‘u inoa now serves to launch the Festival’s closing performance. Her arrangement of the piece for string ensemble sets the tone for a communal celebration — and poignant farewell. The Hawaiian title, translating to “my name” or “is my name,” carries the weight of identity, ancestry, and presence and is associated with both greetings and leave-takings (see p. 53 for additional discussion).
From the communal embrace of Lanzilotti’s opening, we turn to a performance piece in which Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of Deep Listening seeks to instill a state of profound mindfulness that has far-reaching implications. The legendary American composer was staunchly committed to democratizing music and dismantling barriers between professional musicians and audiences. Yet that mission did not preclude her text scores, which consist of verbal instructions rather than written notes, from varying significantly in complexity. Claire Chase, who worked closely with Oliveros, considers The Witness one of her “most demanding and sophisticated text scores” and places it at the far end of the spectrum
Tania LEÓN (b. 1943); arranged for solo flute by Claire CHASE (b. 1978) Singsong (2023; new version, 2025)
of difficulty in comparison with a piece like the dream-inspired Horse Sings from Cloud (experienced by those present for yesterday’s site-specific morning meditation program at Ojai Meadows Preserve).
The Witness is open to performance not only as music, movement, or drama — or any combination of these media — and in a limitless range of spaces or environments. The text score prescribes three “strategies” of focus: (1) “attention to oneself,” which, Chase notes, “can feel anti-musical, because you are not allowed in this strategy to respond to anybody and try purposely not to have a relationship between what you and other people are doing”; (2) “attention to other” by reacting not to what is heard in the present but “according to the past or future of a partner’s playing”; and (3) “attention all over,” which Oliveros clarifies as trying to perform “inside of the time, exactly with the time, or outside the time of a partner’s performance sound.” Chase recalls once asking with puzzlement how this is possible, to which Oliveros responded — “dead serious, but with a smile” — “You just need to be telepathic.”
It was while collaborating on a project related to The Witness during the
Terry RILEY (b. 1935)
Realized by Samuel Clay BIRMAHER (b. 1988)
Pulsefield (2024-25)
Pulsefield 1 (2024)
Pulsefield 2 (2024)
Pulsefield 3 (2025)
pandemic that Chase struck up a friendship with Eduardo Kohn, an influential anthropologist who researches Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Kohn has developed a particular fascination with The Witness and compares the piece to “Amazonian strategies of using dreams and visions as a form of deep listening. Like these, it is a psyche-delic, literally mindmanifesting practice.” Bearing witness in this way becomes “both an ecological and ethical practice” that can encourage attunement to “the fragile ecology that holds and sustains us.” For Chase, the goal is to become “maximally attuned to each other and to our environments — which is what we want to happen throughout Ojai Music Festival.”
Tania León first collaborated with Rita Dove to create the song cycle Singin’ Sepia in 1995, when Dove was completing her term as U.S. Poet Laureate. León again turned to the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet for Reflections (2006) and, more recently, for Singsong, a cycle for choir and solo flute; the complete Singsong will receive its world premiere at Carnegie Hall next spring. Chase has created an arrangement of four of its movements for solo flute (alternating among bass, alto, and C flutes).
CONTINUED }}
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
León sets five poems by Dove in Singsong Four of these were published in the 2021 collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, which contemplates the role that art should play in these chaotic times. “Like music itself,” writes fellow poet and critic Brian Brodeur, Dove “provides readers with a salve for traumas both historical and contemporary.” She adopts the voice of a spring cricket in several of these poems to offer ironic reflections on marginalized voices and the Black American experience. Commenting on the significance of the blues, Dove’s cricket announces in one of the poems that “all wisdom/is afterthought, a sort of helpless relief.”
While León composed her settings of these poems to be sung by the chamber choir The Crossing in the original version of Singsong, Chase introduces bits of
the text during the improvised cadenzas that feature prominently in the score. Occasionally, this involves simultaneously playing and singing excerpts from an entire sentence, such as “It’s just what we do. No one bothered to analyze our blues” (from “The Spring Cricket Repudiates His Parable of Negritude”). For the most part, she plays with words, vowels, and fragments of phrases, such as the vowel sounds in the sensual “Scarf” (“the music silk makes settling across a bared neck”).
Just weeks shy of his 90th birthday, Terry Riley has gifted Ojai audiences with the most recent addition to The Holy Liftoff, his ongoing epic contribution to Chase’s Density 2036 project. Continuing the modular graphic scores of the larger project (see p. 51 for a description), Pulsefield 3 features musical fragments
embedded within vividly colorful drawings — in this case, invigorating flames illuminating recumbent, baseball-capped figures, with rays emanating from a central eye.
The musical material primarily outlines rhythmic patterns and a fundamental harmonic progression, leaving instrumentation and organization open to interpretation. “The piece is in so many ways an invitation to listen unconditionally to one another, in delighted deference to the surprises and unexpected outcomes that such listening conjures,” Chase says. “At the end of Pulsefield 3, the newest of the scores, Terry asks the players to return to the oldest and most urgent mode of music-making known to humankind: song. We’re not singers, but we’re going to sing for you!”
—THOMAS MAY
The Ojai Festival Women’s Committee (OFWC) is the largest donor to the internationally acclaimed Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education and Community Program. Through their philanthropic and volunteer activities, the OFWC has raised more than one million dollars over the past 70 years!
An active 100+ member volunteer committee, the OFWC presents unique events throughout the year, including the annual Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace, Art & Music Trips, Concerts, Lectures, and fun Socials, all fostering lasting friendships and the continued gift of music to the community.
Join us!
For more info about the OFWC visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or call Anna Wagner at the festival office 805 646 2094.
MATTIE
BARBIER
trombone
Mattie Barbier is an LA-based musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, latent acoustic environments, and the physicality of their instrument. Their playing has been described by the LA Times as “intense, brilliant, virtuosic growling”; by The Wire as “exploring the nooks of instrumental tone far beyond the reach of most mortals”; and by The New Yorker as a “diabolically inventive trombonistcomposer.”
Barbier collaborates with artists such as Weston Olencki, Ellen Arkbro, Clara Iannotta, Sarah Davachi, Michelle Lou, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Katherine Young. They have premiered works by George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Lester St. Louis, Kevin Drumm, Kaori Suzuki, Raven Chacon, Nate Wooley, and even British pop icon Scott Walker. As a soloist, they’ve performed with the Helsinki Philharmonic, SWR Symphonieorchester, and Wild Up.
A member of RAGE Thormbones, Wild Up, echoi, Diapason, and an active soloist and improviser on low brass and bagpipes, Barbier teaches at CalArts. They have created and presented work for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Getty Center and Villa, Monday Evening Concerts, Roulette, San Francisco Exploratorium, Indexical, RedCat, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and others, including a collaboration with holographer Tristan Duke. Festival appearances include Borealis (Norway), Darmstadt and Donaueschinger (Germany), Musica Nova
Helsinki (Finland), MaerzMusik (Germany), Ojai Music Festival (U.S.), and more.
Barbier has held guest residencies at institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, UCSD, and University of Chicago. Their recordings appear on labels such as Sofa Music, Dinzu Artifacts, Carrier, Populist, Mode, Hat Hut, New Focus, Kairos, and Domino.
SUSIE IBARRA percussion and composer
Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats including performance, mobile soundmapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. She has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such as musika katatubo from the North and South Philippine islands; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with the Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.
She is a 2025 Pulitzer-Prize winning composer for Sky Islands; a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award in Music/Sound (2022), a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and a TED Senior Fellowship (2014).
Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.
Her album Talking Gong (New Focus Recordings 2021) features soloists and ensemble members Claire Chase and Alex Peh, with its title piece commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and by birdsongs of the region. Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Michele Koppes. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020).
Ibarra’s Fragility Etudes was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video, which premiered in June 2021.
As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heartbeats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).
ROSS KARRE percussion
Ross Karre is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, Ohio, and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Karre formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival, Ojai Music Festival, LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears in Tennessee, MONA FOMA in Tasmania, Diskotek in Greenland, and Music Today Biennial in Brazil. 10.67 Cycles, Karre’s solo album featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the
National Gallery of Art. Karre’s archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICEensemble, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Groups.
KATINKA KLEIJN cello
Hailed by the New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive practice at the intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.
A featured VIP contemporary artist at EXPO Chicago, Kleijn performed her feminist work Scratching in April 2025. In October 2025, The Momentary at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, will showcase her sitespecific audiovisual installation, utilizing
the museum’s 80-foot-tall LED tower. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised work Water on the Bridge. Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) similarly probes the parallels between human and cello bodies through a shared-circuit synth. Her collaborations with performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves, which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.” Kleijn’s situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), was presented by Ensemble Dal Niente at Big Ears Festival.
A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Kleijn has presented solo multimedia shows at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Her recordings include Dai Fukijura’s Cello Concerto with ICE, David Baker’s Cello Concerto with the Chicago Sinfonietta, and an avant-folk record on Drag City with guitarist Bill MacKay.
LEILEHUA LANZILOTTI
viola and composer
Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Kanaka Maoli composer, artist, and curator. By worldbuilding through multimedia installation works, nontraditional concert experiences, and sound interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect.
Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.” Other prestigious honors include Creative Capital, 2025 USA Fellow, and Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts awards. Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships and residencies through the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, among others.
As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works have been presented at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Thailand International Composition Festival, and Australia’s post-genre music and arts series Dots+Loops. Lanzilotti has written new
works for ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, ETHEL (with guest Allison LoginsHull), and Sō Percussion. As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk’s Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne’s Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti has premiered many works including Wayfinder, a viola concerto by Dai Fujikura inspired by Polynesian wayfinding, and Sola by Anna Thorvaldsdottir featured here at Ojai. in manus tuas, Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut, was featured in Bandcamp’s “Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019,” and the Boston Globe’s “Top 10 Classical Albums of 2019.
ANNEA LOCKWOOD composer and sound diffusion
Aotearoa (New Zealand)–born American composer Annea Lockwood brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.
In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in the New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.
Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang on a Can; baritone Thomas Buckner; pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer; the Holon Scratch Orchestra; Essential Music; Yarn/Wire; and Issue Project Room.
Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.
LEVY LORENZO percussion
Born in Bucharest, Filipino American Levy
Marcel Ingles Lorenzo Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology.
On an international scale, his body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Lorenzo designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to largescale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with nontraditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, the New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the NY Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Lorenzo earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Lorenzo holds a position as professor of creative technologies at The New School’s College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Michael Kento Matsuno is a flutist whose work traverses the classical canon, contemporary music, improvisation, music psychology, and 20thcentury history. He can be heard performing throughout Southern California and holds positions as lecturer at Chapman University and flute studio instructor at CalArts and Pierce College.
Matsuno has appeared with a wide range of ensembles throughout the U.S., including the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, ECHOI, red fish blue fish, San Diego Symphony, Slee Sinfonietta, [Switch~ Ensemble], and Wild Up. He has been featured as a guest artist at the Center for 21st Century Music at SUNY Buffalo, Harvard University, Jacaranda Music, June in Buffalo, Monday Evening Concerts,
and Neofonía Festival de Música Nueva Ensenada. Matsuno has also performed his own solo compositions, which explore long forms and emergent musical structures in physical decay, on experimental series such as Weirdo Night, High Desert Soundings, and La Rara Noche.
As a researcher, Matsuno is concerned with human relationships to music and their narratives. His dissertation is a biography of the California E.A.R. Unit (1981-2012), one of Los Angeles’ first standalone groups dedicated to avant-garde chamber music. It examines institutional developments in Los Angeles beginning in the 1980s, including the creation of a contemporary music curriculum at CalArts. Matsuno also published an original study in Psychology of Music exploring personalized music-listening strategies by autistic adults. His writing also has appeared in Naxos Musicology International and Now That’s What I Call Poetry. Most recently, Matsuno served as a co-editor for Letters to Home: Art and Writing by Nikkei LGBTQ+ and Allies, a volume of community reflections on acceptance and belonging, self-published by Okaeri.
Matsuno is a graduate of UC San Diego (MA, DMA) and the University of Southern California (BM). He gratefully received mentorship from Nadine Asin, Anthony Burr, John Fonville, Jann Pasler, and Jim Walker.
COLIN MCALLISTER guitar
Colin McAllister is director of humanities and an associate professor of music at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His performances have been hailed as “sparkling...delivered superbly” (San Francisco Chronicle), “ravishing” (San Diego Union Tribune), and “an amazing tour de force” (San Diego Story). His research interests include contemporary music performance and pedagogy, musical modernism, and the apocalyptic paradigm as manifested in varying phenomena— literature, music, and art. McAllister is the guitarist and conductor for the ensemble NOISE and a co-founder of the soundON Festival, held annually since 2007 in La Jolla, California. His most recent publications are Music in the Apocalyptic Mode (Brill) and Aeneas in the Underworld (MicroFest Records). He is endorsed by PRS Guitars and is an Artist Partner with Taylor Guitars. He earned his DMA from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with guitarists Stuart Fox and Celin Romero.
DANIELLE ONDARZA horn
Danielle Ondarza is a highly soughtafter French hornist, educator, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. With a career spanning orchestral performance, chamber music, education, and media recording, she creates works that reflect both artistic excellence and a deep commitment to music education.
Ondarza performs regularly with ensembles such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and holds tenured or contracted positions with the Los Angeles Ballet Orchestra, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Opera Santa Barbara. Her freelance career has included performances with nearly every major Southern California orchestra, as well as chamber appearances with Forte Brass, Jacaranda, Ensemble Green, and the Hear Now Festival.
As a studio musician, Ondarza’s horn playing can be heard on a wide range of film, television, and video game scores, including Coco, Finding Dory, Man of Steel, Nope, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft, as well as albums by Daft Punk, Sia, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen, and Mitski. She has performed live with artists including Andrea Bocelli, Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish, Alicia Keys, and Josh Groban, and has appeared on major televised events such as The Academy Awards, The Voice, and MTV Video Music Awards.
An experienced educator, she serves on the faculties of Pomona College, Occidental College, the Colburn School, and the Pasadena Conservatory of Music, where she also chairs the winds, brass & percussion department. She has designed and taught music courses at Cal Poly Pomona, the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and numerous summer and outreach programs
ALEX PEH piano and harpsichord
A 2021 Fulbright Global Scholar and 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, Alex Peh has worked with notable musicians and
composers such as Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Anna Clyne, U Yee Nwe, Hafez Modirzadeh, Senem Pirler, and Phyllis Chen.
Peh is a member of Talking Gong, an improvising trio with Susie Ibarra and Claire Chase. They released their debut album in 2019, Talking Gong, on New Focus Recordings, available on all major streaming platforms. The trio has performed at Carnegie Zankel Hall, Public Theater, Roulette Intermedium, and BRIC in New York City.
In 2021 Peh received a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship that allowed him to connect with Greek pianist and musicologist Nikos Ordoulidis in Naoussa, Greece; Burmese pianist Ne Myo Aung in Bangkok, Thailand; and Pooyan Azadeh in Halle, Germany. Together they created a new album of piano music, Attune, on Habitat Sounds, and a companion ethnographic film Intermittent Attunement in collaboration with Lauren Meeker, Alyson Hummer, and Madelyn Colonna. Excerpts of the film and album were premiered at National Sawdust, Brooklyn NYC. Intermittent Attunement was selected for screening by the Ethnografilm festival in Paris, France, at the Club D’Etoile.
Peh received his musical training from Indiana and Northwestern Universities, where he worked with Arnaldo Cohen, Menahem Pressler, Sylvia Wang, and Evelyne Brancart. He attended the Banff, Aspen, and Tanglewood music festivals, where he worked with Emanuel Ax, Pamela Frank, Claude Frank, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, and Peter Serkin. He performed Stravinsky’s Les Noces under the baton of Charles Dutoit and the Tanglewood Festival Choir. He is an associate professor of piano at SUNY New Paltz, and associate chair of the music department.
JACK QUARTET
CHRISTOPHER OTTO violin
AUSTIN WULLIMAN violin
JOHN PICKFORD RICHARDS viola
JAY CAMPBELL cello
Undeniably our generation’s “leading newmusic foursome,” JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-25. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for two GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. Among the highlights of the 2024-25 season, JACK premieres new commissions by Anthony Cheung, Juri Seo, and Ellen Fullman; releases John Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records; and
performs internationally at Wigmore Hall and Pierre Boulez Saal, as well as appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland. The quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Berlin Philharmonie, Muziekgebouw, The Louvre, Kölner Philharmonie, the Lucerne Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, Suntory Hall, Sydney Opera House, Bali Arts Festival, Festival Internacional Cervantino, and Teatro Colón, among many others. Included in their honors are an Avery Fisher Career Grant, Fromm Music Foundation Prize, and Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year.”
JACK Quartet created JACK Studio in 2019 to support commissions, recordings, and workshops with emerging music artists who are interested in exploring and expanding the repertory for string quartet. As JACK marks its 20th anniversary season, JACK Studio will
grow to include a full range of commissions including prominent composers who will also serve as mentors to JACK Studio’s earlier-career collaborators.
JACK Quartet makes their home in NYC, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School. They teach at summer music festivals such as the Lucerne Festival Academy, Banff Centre for the Arts, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and New Music on the Point. Learn more at www.jackquartet.com.
Christopher Otto is a composer and violinist living in the Bronx, New York. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and mathematics at the University of Rochester. In addition to his work as a founding member of the JACK Quartet, he has performed with such groups as Alarm Will Sound, the Cellar and Point, Ensemble Signal, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Knights, Ne(x)tworks, Talea, and the Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble. He has premiered and recorded numerous solo and chamber works by John Zorn and performed as a soloist in Zorn’s violin concerto Contes de Fées and in Brian Ferneyhough’s Terrain. Otto’s compositions have explored harmonic possibilities in an expanding universe of just intonation. JACK has been a laboratory for some of these experiments, performing several of his quartets, and recording his rag‘sma for two or three string quartets, which was released in 2021. He has also made arrangements for JACK of several medieval and Renaissance works notable for their rhythmic and harmonic complexity. His music can be heard at christopherotto.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/ottotelic.
CONTINUED }}
JACK QUARTET (continued)
AUSTIN WULLIMAN violin
Violinist, composer, and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, he searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world. His debut album as composer, The News From Utopia, which Wulliman wrote, recorded, and mixed himself, was released in 2023.
Wulliman has played in such renowned venues as Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and the Wiener Konzerthaus, and featured at festivals such as Tanglewood, Ojai, Spoleto, and Lucerne. His work with JACK Quartet has included premieres by John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey, and John Zorn, as well as collaborating with Barbara Hannigan, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Helmut Lachenmann, Igor Levit, Julia Wolfe, and leading a chamber orchestra of members of the Berlin Philharmonic. He has received awards from Musical America (“2019 Ensemble of the Year” JACK Quartet), Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award in 2024, and was presented with Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2019.
Wulliman has taught violin and musicianship on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, the Lucerne Festival Academy, and New Music on the Point in Vermont. Additionally, he has given guest instruction and
presentations at such institutions as the Curtis Institute, The Juilliard School, New World Symphony, University of Michigan, and Northwestern University.
JOHN PICKFORD RICHARDS viola
Violist John Pickford Richards has gained a reputation for performing new and mystical music around the globe. He was a founding member of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound before founding the JACK Quartet, where he continues to serve as violist. Richards, who the New York Times described as “wholesome-looking,” has appeared with artists including Björk and David Byrne and has performed as soloist with the Pasadena Symphony, Armenian Philharmonic, Wordless Music Orchestra, OSSIA, and with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra playing the solo part to Luciano Berio’s Chemins II under the direction of Pierre Boulez. He holds degrees from the Interlochen Arts Academy and Eastman School of Music where his primary teachers were David Holland and John Graham, and currently serves on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program.
JAY CAMPBELL cello
Jay Campbell has been recognized around the world for approaching both old and new works with equally probing curiosity and emotional commitment. His performances have been described as “brilliant and insatiably inquisitive,” “electrifying,” and “prodigious” by the New York Times, and “gentle, poignant, and deeply moving” by the Washington Post. A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, Campell performed with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and was a curator for the New York Philharmonic’s 2016 Biennale. He has soloed in major venues around the globe including Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, Avery Fisher Hall, and Lucerne’s KKL,
and performed recitals in Carnegie’s Weill Hall, the Kennedy, Mondavi, and Krannert centers. Dedicated to introducing audiences to the music of our time, he has worked closely with some of the most creative minds of the 20th/21st centuries including Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Matthias Pintscher, Kaija Saariaho, and countless others from his own generation. His close association with John Zorn has resulted in over a dozen works written for him including The Aristos, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up, resulting in the release of Hen to Pan (Tzadik), listed in the New York Times’ “Best Recordings of 2015.” Campbell is the cellist of Junction Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao and is a member of American Modern Opera Company (AMOC). He has been a guest at the Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Moab, Heidelberger Frühling, DITTO, and Lincoln Center festivals.
Ben Cortez Richter, originally from Pleasanton, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, has worked internationally as an opera stage director and assistant director. Having received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and completed his master’s degree work at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, both in voice/opera, he decided to leave the stage and pursue a career as a stage director. While living in Germany before relocating to Boston in 2020, Ben held several first assistant director positions
CONTINUED }}
at Oper Frankfurt, Badisches Staatstheater, where he assisted and remounted beloved productions. He also served as and continues his work as a freelance assistant director and scenic staging choreographer at such theaters as Oper Köln, Staatstheater Berlin, and Tiroler Festspiel.
Richter has assisted Barrie Kosky, Lydia Steier, David Herrmann, and Katharina Thoma, among other notable European and American stage directors. In 2023, he joined the San Francisco Symphony in scenically coordinating performances of Pan by Marcos Balter with flutist Claire Chase in San Francisco and Cité de la Musique in Paris. During those performances, Richter led community members of both cities through staging called for in Balter’s moving piece. He has also created and stage directed numerous condensed operas for children featuring German language dialogue including La bohème, L’elisir d’amore, and Don Giovanni. Currently serving as director of artistic operations at Boston Lyric Opera, Richter is thrilled to continue his scenic collaboration work with the BSO.
Dan Rosenboom is an internationally recognized trumpet player, composer, and producer. He is known as a prolific member of the Los Angeles creative music scene, having released more than 25 albums of original music as a solo artist and bandleader. He has supported over 60 artists across over 100 releases on his label, Orenda Records. Rosenboom is a proud member of the Hollywood studio musician community and has recorded for over 200 major film and television soundtracks with such notable composers as John Williams, Danny Elfman, James Newton
Howard, Alan Silvestri, Alexandre Desplat, and many more. He has also performed with the LA Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Opera. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, CalArts, and UCLA, where he earned advanced degrees in music.
As a composer, Rosenboom has been recognized by the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, the Meet the Composer Foundation, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. As a bandleader, he has brought his music to the Monterey Jazz Festival, Angel City Jazz Festival, Jazzfestival Saalfelden, and Jazz em Agosto. Rosenboom’s band Burning Ghosts has drawn international attention for their rousing blend of experimental jazz, punk, and metal as response to modern socio-political ills. To date they have released four albums, including one on John Zorn’s legendary Tzadik label, and have toured in the U.S. and Europe.
Rosenboom is an advocate for progressive music education. He currently teaches at UCLA and his trumpet pedagogy book, The Boom Method: Universal Fundamentals for Trumpet and Other Instruments, Vol. 1, was published by Balquhidder Music in 2019. His writing has also been published in John Zorn’s Arcana IX: Musicians on Music on Tzadik. Rosenboom is proud to be an endorsing artist for Yamaha Trumpets, Bob Reeves Brass Mouthpieces, AEA Microphones, Horn FX, and Kirlin Cables.
RUBIN clarinet
Joshua Nathan Rubin is the founding clarinetist, and served as program director and coartistic director of the International Contemporary
Ensemble (ICE), where he oversaw the creative direction of more than 500 concerts in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.” He has performed with ensembles such as the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Nagoya Philharmonic, ICE, Wild Up, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tesserae Baroque. In the 2024-25 season he will perform on the stages of Carnegie Hall, the Rose Theatre at Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, the Ojai Music Festival, The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, and Disney Concert Hall. He was an artist-in-residence at University of California, Santa Cruz, and The City College of New York in 2024, and in 2025 will perform at invited artist residencies at Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, Barenboim-Said Akademie, and Universities of California in San Diego, Irvine, and Riverside.
Rubin holds degrees in biology and clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a master’s degree from the Mannes School of Music at The New School. His passion for technology in arts led Rubin to develop LUIGI, management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management, as well as his ongoing work to make electronic music technologies easier to use for performers and composers.
Highlights of his time at the Ojai Music Festival include featured performances as a soloist in Pierre Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double and performances with Claire Chase, Vijay Iyer, Caroline Shaw and Roomful of Teeth, Steven Schick, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Sellars, Kaija Saariaho, and Rhiannon Giddens.
STEVEN SCHICK
conductor and percussion
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for nearly 50 years, and in 2014 was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
Schick is music director emeritus of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, serving as its music director from 2006–22, and the artistic director of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He has guest conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/ Schönberg Ensemble. He was artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2010–18) and directed programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from 2009–19, the last three as co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Classical Music program. He was the music director of the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.
In 2020, Schick won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University for commitment to the performance of American music. Schick’s publications include a book, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams; and numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis and its companion The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). The latter received Germany’s award for the best new music release of 2015.
Steven Schick is distinguished professor of music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.
Praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com), Hawai’i-born bassist Kathryn Schulmeister enjoys a creative music practice as a versatile performer, educator, and researcher. Recent honors include a 2020 GRAMMY® Award nomination as a collaborating artist featured on Susan Narucki’s The Edge of Silence, a contemporary classical album of chamber works by György Kurtág on AVIE Records (2019). Schulmeister has appeared as a soloist with leading international contemporary ensembles including Klangforum Wien, the ELISION Ensemble, and Ensemble Vertixe Sonora. She has given solo performances at venues and festivals around the world including the Melbourne Recital Centre, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, ECLAT Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart, San Diego Museum of Making Music, soundSCAPE Festival, Vértice Festival, and the Clive Davis Theater at the GRAMMY® Museum. She is a member of the ELISION Ensemble, Fonema Consort, and Echoi Ensemble and has performed as a guest artist with various adventurous ensembles including Delirium Musicum, Ensemble MusikFabrik, SWR Experimentalstudio Freiburg, Wild Up, and Ensemble Dal Niente. In fall 2023, she joined the faculty of the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music as assistant professor of practice in string bass.
CORY SMYTHE piano
Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multiinstrumentalistcomposer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Darmstadt festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with composer-improvisors Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), of which he is a longtime member. Smythe’s recent critically acclaimed albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of The Shifting Foundation. He received a GRAMMY® award for his work with Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.
percussion
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s
CONTINUED }}
leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic; San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies; Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra; the Cabrillo Festival; Lakes Area Music Festival; and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played under renowned conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta, and many more. During his time with the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music: Christina Aguilera, H.E.R., Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, and Snarky Puppy. He has also performed in some of world’s most iconic venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Zankel Hall & Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, and more.
Sumpter received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and started his master’s at the University of Southern California before beginning the inaugural Resident Fellows program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His teachers include Timothy Adams Jr., Kimberly Toscano, James Babor, Joseph Pereira, and Matthew Howard.
CRAIG TABORN piano
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over 25 years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant-garde contexts.
Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music, and electronic music, including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Mahanthappa.
Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley Is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics. Taborn lives in Brooklyn.
M.A. TIESENGA saxophone and hurdy-gurdy
M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels
between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains. As a composer, visual artist, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga merges these creative identities by embracing the potential of expanded notation systems as an inquisition into new sonic possibilities.
Tiesenga approaches sound-making as a collaborative exchange; central to Tiesenga’s artistic inspiration is the creation of works that cultivate connection and reciprocity in contemporary music. As an ardent experimentalist, they find inspiration and excitement in exploring improvisation and indeterminacy, elevating and weaving performers’ agency by inviting personal interpretation into the fabric of a composition.
Tiesenga’s compositional collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
M.A. Tiesenga holds an MFA in composition – experimental sound practices and an MFA in experimental animation with a concentration in integrated media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Chien-Kwan Lin.
WU WEI sheng
The artistry of sheng virtuoso Wu Wei reaches far beyond the traditional boundaries of his more than 3,000-year-old Chinese instrument and brings it well into the 21st century. Wu Wei’s radiant and transparent tone as well as the infinite possibilities offered by his instrument in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, and polyphony have led him to collaborate with many artists and ensembles in traditional, chamber or orchestral settings, improvising in solo concerts, or with jazz big bands, playing electronic music as well as taking part in minimal, baroque music performances.
Wu Wei’s desire to experiment with new sound and types of musical expression and his extraordinary capacity to create an individual world out of each performance are reflected in his collaborations with distinguished composers writing concertos for sheng and orchestra especially for him: Huang Ruo (The color of yellow –2007), Guus Janssen (Four Songs – 2008), Unsuk Chin (Su – 2009), Jukka Tiensuu (Teoton – 2015), Bernd Richard Deutsch (Phaenomena – 2019), Ondrej Adamek (Lost Prayer Book – 2019), Donghong Shin (Anecdote – 2019), Enjott Schneider (change – 2003 and several other concerti).
Wu Wei has performed with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic under Kent Nagano, the Seoul Philharmonic under Myung Whun Chung, the LA Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, BBC Symphony under Ilan Volkov, the Cabrillo Festival and
Sao Paulo Symphony under Marin Alsop, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki, and many others. With Martin Stegner (viola) and Matthew McDonald (double bass), both members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he founded the Wu Wei Trio, which appears each season in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. As a founder of the Berlin-based Ensemble AsianArt, he likes to share transcultural programs with instrumentalists from all around the world.
Wu Wei has recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, Pentatone, and several of his CDs and DVDs have been distinguished by international Awards: International Classical Music Award 2015 and BBC Music Magazine Award 2015 for the Unsuk Chin concertos CD with Deutsche Gramophon, the German Critics Award in 2012 for the AsianArt Ensemble CD, to note a few. He also received the Best Sheng Soloist Award China in 2017, the Herald Angels Award 2011 at the International Festival Edinburgh, the Global Root German World Music Prize 2004 in Rudolstadt (Germany).
Wu Wei was born in 1970 in Gaoyou, China. He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and started his career in 1993 as a sheng soloist in China, where he performed with the Chinese Music Orchestra Shanghaï, among others. In 1995, he was selected by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and FNS (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) to take part in a four-year scholarship which brought him to Berlin, where he is currently living. Since 2013, Wu Wei has been a professor teaching the sheng at the Shanghaï Conservatory of Music.
Two-time GRAMMY®nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across
multiple genres, prompting the New York Times to write “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California since 2022 and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.
Among the highlights of his 2024-25 season, Woods performs in the world premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s new cello concerto, Had to Be, at Spoleto Festival USA, later performing its New York premiere in his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in the world premiere of a new cello concerto by Julia Adolphe. A core member of the music collective Wild Up, Woods is featured as soloist in the group’s Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence, released June 2024 on New Amsterdam Records, and was nominated alongside the group for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award.
During the 2023-24 season, Woods brought his GRAMMY®-nominated, autobiographical tour-de-force Difficult Grace to San Diego and Philadelphia, following the world
CONTINUED }}
premiere at 92NY and performances at UCLA and Chicago’s Harris Theater. Difficult Grace was released as an album on Cedille Records in 2023 and nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Highlights of last season include performances with Hilary Hahn at Konzerthaus Dortmund in Germany and touring a new version of John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC).
In addition to his post at USC, Woods serves on the artist faculty of the Music Academy of the West each summer. He holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, as well as a PhD from the University of Huddersfield.
EDUARDO AGUILAR
Eduardo Aguilar (or Eduardo Ángel Aguilar Vásquez) is a music composer whose work explores process, concepts, ideas, imaginations, perceptions, representations, thoughts, designs, and realities. Aguilar work tends to the investigation and exploration of specific ordinary phenomena by abstracting its elements, specifically by configuring a compositional synthesis between what could belong to the realm of visual and/ or sound, to understand them indistinctly in a more fundamental but equally detailed way in terms of energy. Honors and awards include: Talea Ensemble, recording (USA, 2024); Banff Center, Independent binational project (Canada, 2019/2022); JACK Studio, resident (USA, 2019); Geophysics Institute UNAM and National Seismological Service SSN –“Tectonic” and “Volcanic”–Seismicity Awards (Mexico, 2019); Impronta NEW Special Ensemble Prize (Germany, 2019); SORBONNE UNIVERSITÉ - UNAM, collaborative project on new approaches to pedagogy, technology and creation (France-Mex 2018-2019); Arditti Quartet FIMNME workshop composer selected (Mexico, 2018); Prize of Research and Artistic Creation of the Science and Art University Museum MUCA-UNAM (Mexico, 2017); Toluca Philharmonic Orchestra Composition Contest Winner Prize (Mexico, 2016); 15 Best of SBALZ International Brass Composition Competition (Spain, 2015); among others.
VICENTE ATRIA
Vicente Atria is a Chilean composer and drummer. His music riffs on a wide range of idioms, from microtonal renaissance dances to Korean sanjo, creating playful, vibrant sonic worlds. A Deutscher Jazzpreis recipient, Atria’s work has been commissioned or performed by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Proton Bern, Yarn/Wire, and International Contemporary Ensemble. He has been featured in venues and festivals including Moers Festival (Germany), Skanu Mezs (Latvia), MATA Festival (NY), Wigmore Hall (UK), The Shed, Roulette Intermedium, The Jazz Gallery, and The Stone (all NY). He is a recipient of a 2025 Fondation des Treilles Musical Composition Prize, a 2024 Busoni Komponistpreis (nominated), a Wet Ink Ensemble AIR residence (2023), a MacDowell Fellowship (2023), an ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award (2022), an ACF Create award (2021), The Shed Open Call commission (2019), Chilean Ministry of Culture Fondo de la Música grants (2022 and 2020), and an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2016 finalist). He holds a DMA in Composition from Columbia University.
The 2025 Ojai Music Festival residencies of composers Eduardo Aguilar, Vicente Atria, Marcos Balter, Susie Ibarra, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Craig Taborn, and Bahar Royaee are made possible with the generous support of the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund.
MARCOS BALTER
The music of composer Marcos Balter is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance. Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, among others. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary
Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records. He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
TANIA LEÓN
Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s next Composer-inResidence—a post she held for two seasons, She also held Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for its 2023-2024 season.
Recent premieres include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Modern Ensemble, Jennifer Koh’s project Alone Together, and The Curtis Institute. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others.
CONTINUED }}
A founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers.
Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by New York City Mayor, and the MadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).
León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and The Curtis Institute of Music, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award.
LIZA LIM
Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works. Her work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally. Extensively commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Lim’s catalogue ranges from solos and chamber music embedded in essential repertoire lists worldwide, to five strikingly different operas. Her music is published by Ricordi Berlin.
Born and raised in Iran, Bahar Royaee is a music educator and a composer/ sound designer who works within the field of concert music and various media arts. The Boston Arts Review praised Royaee’s “haunting sound design” in her work with live theatre. Royaee’s work has been performed at prominent events such as the Time:Spans 2020 Festival and the 2020 Fromm Foundation Composer Conference, 2022 Tehran Electroacoustic Music Festival, and has won awards such as the Pnea Award, the Roger Session Memorial Composition Award, and the Korourian electroacoustic music award. She has worked with Claire Chase, Suzzane Farrin, International Contemporary Ensemble, Loadbang, Composer Conference Ensemble, Contemporary Insights of Leipzig, Ensemble der gelbe Klang, Guerrilla Opera, Longleash, Mazumal, Kimia Hesabi, Splice Ensemble, to name a few. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition from City University of New York.
The Ojai Music Festival shines because of you—our Festival family. Your generosity inspires us to dream boldly, take artistic risks, and create transformative musical experiences.
As an audience-supported organization, we are deeply thankful for the support that fuels each Festival. Your gifts make possible our free BRAVO music education programs in Ojai public schools, internships for college students, digital offerings, and year-round events that reach far beyond Libbey Bowl.
Thank you. With your support, you help bring some of the most influential artistic work to be found anywhere to this iconic setting— each gift a light guiding the way. We are truly grateful for every member of the Festival family.
For more information on becoming an Ojai Music Festival donor, please contact Anna Wagner at awagner@ojaifestival.org or use the QR code.
$75,000+
Audre Slater Foundation
Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund
Ventura County Arts and Culture Fund
$50,000-74,999
Michele Brustin
Cathryn and Thomas Krause
Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation
$25,000-49,999
Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman
Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt
Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney
Carol and Luther Luedtke
Ida and Glenn Mercer
Nancy and Barry Sanders
$10,000-24,999
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music
Anonymous (2)
Ann Barrett
Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson
Carolyn and Jamie Bennett
Elisa and Eric Callow
NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke
Kathleen and James Drummy
Constance Eaton and William Hart
Stephan M. Farber
Lisa Field
Mechas and Gregory Grinnell
Chris Hacker and Will Thomas
Holy Cross Lutheran Church
David and Kathy Leeds
The Ojai Vineyard
Claire and David Oxtoby
Pacific Harmony Foundation
Donald Pattison
Rachel Sater and Tom McNalley
Hope Tschopik Schneider
Abby Sher
Shelley and Gregory Smith
Smith-Hobson Foundation, Ventura County Community Foundation
Drs. Bruce Brockman and Bridget Tsao
Rachel Blanchard and Jeremy Turner
Susanne Wilson
Cathy Zoi and Robin Roy
$5,000-$9,999
Amphion Foundation
Sasha and William Anawalt
Barbara Barry
Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff
Sue Bienkowksi and Wang Lee
Judy and Merrill Blau
Susan Bowey
Lily and Thomas Brod
Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz
Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer
Jill Cohen
Barbara Cohn
Nancy and Herb Conley
Michael Dunn
Bill Duxler
Carol Ann Dyer
James Freeman
Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman
Elizabeth A. Greenberg
Stephanie and Bruce Hearey
The Lenny Bruce Lee Memorial Groove Fund
Linda Joyce Hodge
Mary and Jon Hogen
Howard Jelinek
Kathleen and Raul Kottler
Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot
Raulee Marcus
Geneva Martin and Patrick D. Garvey
Sharon McNalley
Thomas W. and Jane Morris
Diane Williams Murphy
Joan Oliver
Linda and Ron Phillips
Sandy Robertson and Marshall Donovan
Peter Schneider
Anne-Marie Spataru
John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation
Christine Upton
Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics
Ventura County Community Foundation
Barbara Delaune Warren
Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner
Joan Wynn
Christine Yano and Scott Wilson, BRAVO Program in memory of Ginger Wilson
$2,500-$4,999
Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi
Betsy Bachman and Bob Tallyn
Barney and Kate Barnhart
Kyle and Rodney Boone
City of Ojai Arts Commission
E.J. Harrison and Sons
Jan and Arnold Friedman
Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation
Kathleen Howe and Jerome Burstein
Ana and Stefan Kozak
Janet Levin and Frank Gruber
Dr. Cheryl Lew
Dorothy Loebl
Montecito Bank And Trust
Ann and Harry Oppenheimer
Rotary Club of Ojai West
Catherine and Barry Schifrin
Nancy and Michael Stallings
Ann and Steven Sunshine
Dee Dee Dorskind and Bradley Tabach-Bank
Debra Vilinsky and Michael Sopher
The Bruce and Barbara Lee Woollen Foundation
Emilia Yin and Emmanuel Sharef
$1,000-$2,499
Susan and Jim Acquistapace
Susan and Michael Addison
Joyce and Ron Allin
Margaret and Danilo Bach
Mary Baiamonte
June Behar
Jean and John Berghoff
Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly
Burnand-Partridge Foundation
Lynne Carmichael
Sue-Ellen Case
Kerri Climer and Tara Jeffrey
Janet Clough and Ara Guzelimian, in honor of Lawrence Morton
Robert Calder Davis Jr.
John B. Dean
Hung Y. Fan and Michael Feldman
Doris and Caleb Finch
Gloria and Thomas Forgea
Susan Foster
Nancy Gallagher
Fariba Ghaffari
Gina Gutierrez and Gary Richardson
Katie and Jeffrey Haydon, in honor of Joan Kemper
Lauren Hobratsch and Charlie Chang
Susan and Steven Hodges in memory of Cheree Edwards
Diane and Louis Jackson
Olga and Trent Jones
The Kilman Family
Thomas Kren and E. Bruce Robertson
Leslie Lassiter
Carolyn McNight
Pamela Melone
Christian Perry
Frederick Peters
PK Righthand Fund, East Bay Community Foundation
Rotary Club of Ojai
Joyce Avery Robinson
Mel and Howard Rosenberg
Georgia Bragg and Harvey Rosenfield
Heather and Bob Sanders
Sandy and Richard Schulhof
Lucinda Setnicka
Anita Rae Shapiro and Mark Howard Shapiro
Stephanie Shuman
Christine Steiner
Peter Strauss and Rachel Ticotin Foundation
Mark Summa
Sandra Wagner
Jane and Richard Weirick
Soni Wright
$500-$999
Edna R.S. Alvarez
Kay Austen and Craig Houx
Marsha Berman
Diane Bertoy and Jerome Maryniuk
Bruce and Marie Botnick
Scott Brinkerhoff
NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke, in memory of Esther Wachtell
Fiona Digney and Michael Lee Parker
Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen
Karen and Don Evarts
Kathan and Anthony Glassman
Janet Greenberg and Mark Kempson
Susan and Kim Grossman
Martha Groszewski
Barbara and Dr. Anthony Hirsch
Susan H. and David L. Hirsch III
Carole and Charles Magnuson
Margaret and Fredrick Menninger
Susan and Joseph Miller, in honor of Barbara and Tony Hirsch
Judith Hale Norris and Bill Norrris
Diana and Bijan Rezvani
Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano
Jane Salonen
Elizabeth J. Sampson and Robert D. Eisler
Marisa Silver and Ken Kwapis
Pamela and Richard Smith
The Steele Family
Susan Suriyapa and Luca Ferrero
Anne and Tony Thacher
Libby and Sandy Treadwell
Anna and Bill Wagner
Robin* and James Walther
$250-$499
Lisa and John Adair
Mary Bergen
Aviva Bergman and Garett Carlson
Leni and Jon Boorstin
Priscilla Lambert Brennan
Edward Casey
Vivian and Eric Chiel
Madeline Grass Doss
Arlene and Larry Dunn, in honor of Claire Chase
Sharon and Robert Eaton
Thom Elkjer
Diana Feinberg
Andrew Gilman
Barry Gold
Herbert Hemming
Judith and Sandor Holly
Jeff Ingram
Marlene Pitkow & Mark Kalow
Hannah and Marshall Kramer
David Lea
Susan Marki
Peggy and Gerald Matchin
Siobhan McDevitt
Lisa McKinnon
Gillian McManus and Chris Newell
Trisha and Todd Mills
Rex Moser
Weston Naef
Caroline Norris
Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye
Ellen and Alan Penchansky
Bruce Piner
Stephen M. Rochford
Kenneth Titley and John Schunhoff
Margaret Seligson
Noreen Stimac and Thomas Powers
Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers
Anna Thomas
Bruce Walker
Glen Wallick
Ann W Wang
Richard Watkins
Betsy Watson
Ralph E. Wiggen
Fortune Zuckerman and Kenneth Fry
$150-$249
Charles and Maryan Ainsworth
Susan Anderson
Patricia and Martin Angerman
Anonymous
Ginny Atherton
Carl and Roberta Weiser Blau
Francisco Bracho
Ruth and Steve Bramson
Lisa Cervantes
Pradeep and Ranjit Dhillon
Pamela Drexel
Cynthia and David Dunlop
Susie Edberg and Allen Grogan
Anne and James Edwards
Gail Eichenthal
Olivia Erschen and Steve Starkey
Ojai Library Ukulele Club
Gloria Gerace
Jocelyn Gibbs
Nicholas Gitomer
Tim Griffin
Les Guthman
Louis Hedgecock
Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk
Eric Hughes
Cathy and Eric Kadison
Lynn Kuttnauer and Richard Lewis
Jason LaPadura and Gary Murphy
Brett Larsen
Mary Ann Makee
Myrna and Raffi Mesrobian
Ann and David Millican
Robert Muller
Jennifer Ollestad
Suzy Parker
Maureen Robinson
Kristy Santimyer-Melita
Janet Schwartz
Ginny Siegfried and Barry Verga
Rebecca Sokol Smith and Jeff Smith
Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince
Ellie and Dan Thomas
Arthur and Judith Vander
$75-$149
Carolyn Albiston
Lisa and Leslie Anderson
Anonymous
Robert S. Attiyeh
Philip Baer
Frances and Bela Ballo
Roy Barris
Susan Bjerre
Tony Boyd and Jill Wright-Boyd
Kathy Broesamle
Dianne Bullard
The Chalifour Family
Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney, in memory of Esther Wachtell
Dianne Ellsworth
Chris Fielder
Aden Fine
Judy Fish
Jan and Mark Fisher
Pat Foster and Mark Ahlstrand
Carol Garramone, in memory of Shed Behar
Ronald Garrity
Peter Garst
Carol Gillam
Karen Goodman
Maureen Gupta
Roger and Carole* Hale
Jeff and Pat Hall
Terry Hoffman
Deborah Horak
Essie and David Horwitz
Joan Huang-Kraft
Robert Huebsch
Molly Joseph
Marion Joy
Lynn Julian
John Kaliski
Cynthia Kaplan
Daisietta Kim
Ann Kindberg
Robin Kissell and George Kushner
David Kuehn
Carol and Ed Lane
Dittany Lang
Karen Lewis
Chere Lott
Mary McConnel
Sue McDonald
Angela and Jeffrey McGregor
Carla Melson
Ann and Harry Oppenheimer, in memory of Merrill Williams
Jennifer O’Toole
Linda Peterson
Jay and Elise Rossiter
Irina Sayn-Wittgenstein
Ruth Sayre
Danner and Arno Schefler
Barbara Schwartz and Thomas Moore
Leah and Norm Schweitzer
Marjorie Shapiro and Ian Hinchliffe
Diana Sells
Jane Silver
Sandra and Charles Sledd
Elizabeth Spiller
Cynthia Ulman and Lyle Novis
William Ulrich
Denise Weyhrich
Geoffrey Winterowd
Bonnie Wright
Anne Zimmerman
Deborah Alton
Kay Austen and Craig Houx
Kimberly Beard
Mouris Behboud
Jeanette and Joel Berkovitz
Caryn and Charles Bosson
Claire and Brad Brian
Carol Castanon
Susan Chooljian
Timothy Coles
Licity Collins
Martha and Chris Davidson
Jane Deknatel and John Seddon
Jodi Grass and Kevin Doss
Lore and Ted Exner
Gerald Faris
Linda S Fitz Gibbon
Rodica & Michael Fortner
Celeste Gabriele
Carol Garramone, in memory Lavonne Theriault
Andreas Georgi
Judith Herman
Ellen and William Ireland
Larry Isberg
Victoria Kahn
Richard Kaller
Kathy Kelly
William Kleidon
C.M. Kruse de la Rosa
Susanne Lammot
Bryan Lane and Christina Kim Lane
Deborah Maddis
Elizabeth and Lawrence Memel
Gail Motyka
Regina Neuman
Elizabeth O’Brien
Karen, Farley and Kazu Ohta
Caitlin Praetorius
Faith Raiguel
Sue Rose
Quinn Rosenberg
Gerald Sato
Penelope Scandalios
Sarah Skuster
Susan Tova and Lawrence Clevenson
Patricia Valiton
Rob and Ria Vermaas
Sheila Wald
Michelle Wells
Andrea and Bernard White
Martha Wilson
Joann Yabrof
Kathy and Larry Yee
Patti and Stephen Yoshida
Many thanks to all our generous donors. Every effort has been made to accurately list Festival donors (5/13/2024-5/5/2025).
If you have any questions or a correction, please contact Anna Wagner at 805 646 2094.
Ojai Festivals, Ltd. Is a 501 c3 non-profit tax exempt organization.
*In Memoriam
Holy
John
THANK YOU, our longtime Festival patrons, attending year after year for a decade or more. You are why we exist. We are grateful for your longstanding appreciation of adventurous music.
SINCE 1940s
Diane and Louis Jackson
The Steele Family
SINCE 1950s
Elisa Callow
Tony Thacher
SINCE 1960s
Betty and Robert* Emirhanian
Caroline and Ralph Grierson
John May
Mark Swed
SINCE 1970s
Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly
Barbara and John Cummings
Robert C. Davis
Richard Ginell
Anthony Glassman
Ara Guzelimian
Judith Holly
Patrick Scott and Mark Hilt
Eric and Cathy Kadison
Susan and Joseph Miller
Mark Summa
SINCE 1980s
Marsia Alexander-Clarke
Kate and Barney Barnhart
Maureen Bauman and Isaac Malitz
Elisabeth Clark
NancyBell Coe
Michael Dunn
William Duxler
Diane and Allen* Eisenman
James Farber
Jan and Mark Fisher
Gloria and Tom Forgea
Moey and Bruce Gilman
Peggy Grossman and Josef Woodard
Linda Joyce Hodge
Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson
Joan Kemper
Lorraine Lim and Glenn Fout
Margaret and Fredrick Menninger
Annat Provo
Stephen Rochford
Jonathan Said
Helen and Justus Schlichting
Jill and William Shanbrom
Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson
Noreen Stimac and Thomas Powers
Anna Thomas
Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman
Roberta Weiser Blau
Susanne and Blake* Wilson
SINCE 1990s
Lisa and John Adair
Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi
Lisa Anderson
Patricia and Martin Angerman
Ginny Atherton
Kay Austen and Craig Houx
Margaret and Danilo Bach
Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff
June and Shed* Behar
Jeanette and Joel Berkovitz
Caryn and Charles Bosson
Marie and Bruce Botnick
Diana Burman
Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz
Eric and Elisa Callow
Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl
Francine T. Cooper
Peter Corrigan
Kathleen Crandall
Donald Crockett
Edward and William Deloreto
Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen
Richard Dolen
Sharon and Robert Eaton
Diane Eisenman
Ruth Eliel and William Cooney
Gerald Faris
Diana Feinberg
Frank Finck
Susan Foster
Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman
Linda Granat
Lennie and Bernie Greenberg
Rave Gunewardena and Frank Escher
Camille and Kingsley Hines
Barbara and Anthony Hirsch
Mary and Jon Hogen
Gary Hollander
Essie and David Horwitz
Cynthia Kaplan
Joan Huang-Kraft
Cathryn and Tom Krause
Susan and David Kuehn
Karen Lewis
Hannah Maclaren
Lisa McKinnon
Tom McNalley
Raffi and Myrna Mesrobian
Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris
Wyant Morton
Mary* and Weston Naef
Victoria Nightingale
Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye
Ann and Harry Oppenheimer
Nancy Pepper
Nancy Perloff and Robert Lempert
Joan Passell and Peter Peters
Daniel Petry
Linda and Ron Phillips
Paris Poirier
Stephen Pope
Sylvia and Shlomo Raz
Emilie Robertson
Linda Rudell-Betts and John Betts
Barry and Nancy Sanders
Heather and Bob Sanders
Catherine and Barry Schifrin
Barbara Schwartz
Anita Rae Shapiro and Mark Howard Shapiro
Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver
Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke
Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince
Christine Steiner
Kit Stolz
Ann and Steven Sunshine
Kenneth Titley and John Schunhoff
Christine Upton
Glen Wallick
Barbara and Deric Washburn
Susan and Michael Weaver
Ed Yim
*In Memoriam
Caroline Allen
Joyce and Ronald Allin
Sasha and William Anawalt
Susan Anderson
Barbara Aran and Lawrence Hawley
Elizabeth Bachman
Karen Bailey
Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff
Mary Bergen
Susan Bienkowski
Rosalyn Bloch
Susan Bloom and Dirk Farner
Kyle and Rodney Boone
Francisco Bracho
Bret Bradigan
Lily and Thomas Brod
Joseph Bulock
Betye Burton
Cindy Pitou Burton
Lisa Cervantes
Nancy Bankoff Chalifour
Tina Chappel and Thomas Lane
Maurice Singer and Hyon Chough
Brooks Cochran
Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl
Sheila Cohn
Annete Colfax and Tom Wilson
Ross Conner and Emmett Carlson
Kyle and Stuart Crowner
Nava and Gabriel Danovitch
Juanita J. Davis and Dan Saucedo
Barbara Delaune Warren
Carin Dewhirst and William Knutson
Kathy and Jim Drummy
Jerry Eberhardt
Karen and Don Evarts
David Falconer
Judy Fish
Barry Forman
Kimberly Fox and Robert Fink
Pablo Frasconi
Jan and Arnold Friedman
Carol Garramone
Berta and Frank Gehry
Andreas Georgi
Martha Groszewski
Gina Gutierrez and Gary Richardson
Herbert Hemming and Ruth Hemming
Sasha Heslip
Mary Ann Hill and Laszlo Engelman
Susan and Steven Hodges
Terry Hoffman
Farzaneh and Brian Hulan
Naomi and Michael Inaba
Jeff Ingram
Diana Kelly
Ruth Lasell and Robert Bonewitz
Lydia and Scott Lawson
Lynda and Stan Levy
Cheryl Lew
Daniel Lewis
Mary and Robert Lynch
Raulee Marcus
Geneva Martin and Patrick Garvey
Morency Maxwell
Christina and Todd McGinley
Carolyn McKnight and Rajeev Talwani*
Gillian McManus and Chris Newell
Sharon McNalley
Pamela Melone
Carla Melson
Elizabeth Memel
George Mood
Thomas and Jane Morris
Nomi Morris
Lena Muniz
Sara Munshin
Stacey Nakasone
Jennifer and Richard Niles
Victoria and Thomas Ostwald
Claire and David Oxtoby
Donald Pattison
Christian Perry
Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano
Peggy and John Russell
Louise Sandhaus and Michael Shapiro
Ruth Sayre
Leah and Norm Schweitzer
Susan Scott
Lucinda Setnicka
Abby Sher
Marianne and James Short
Thomas Moore and Barbara Schwartz
Shelley and Gregory Smith
Jane Spiller
Nancy and Rob* Stewart
Susan Suriyapa and Luca Ferrero
Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers
Alice Terrell and Alex Matich
Susan Tova and Lawrence Clevenson
Hope Tschopik Schneider
Judy and Art Vander
Anna Wagner
Jill and John Walsh
Robin* and James Walther
Leslie Westbrook
Andrea and Bernard White
Geoffrey Winterowd
Kathy and Larry Yee
Charles Zeltzer
Anne Zimmerman
Susan and Michael Addison
Elizabeth Alvarez
Lani Asher
Mary Baiamonte
Ann Barrett
Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson
Carolyn and Jamie Bennett
Richard Bentley
John Berezney
Judy and Merrill Blau
Scott Brinkerhoff
Edward Casey
Nova Clite and Neil Schleimer
Barbara Cohn
Jared Dawson
Jane Deknatel and John Seddon
Stuart and Beverly Denenberg
Pradeep and Ranjit Dhillon
Charles Donelan
Cynthia and David Dunlop
Carol Ann Dyer
Adrienne Edgar
Edan and Carla Epstein
Hung Y. Fan and Michael Feldman
Doris and Caleb Finch
Bonnie Freeman
Jocelyn Gibbs
Robina and Rene Goiffon
Susan and Kim Grossman
Kate Hatmaker
Susan and David Hirsch
Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk
Ellen and William Ireland
Anne Johnstone
Clare Kiklowicz
Kathleen and Raul Kottler
Hannah and Marshall Kramer
Diane Kravif
Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot
Janet Levin and Frank Gruber
Sheila McCue
Sue McDonald
Christina McPhee
Maxine Meltzer and Douglas Whitney
Ida and Glenn Mercer
Ann and David Millican
Helen Milner
Rusti and Steven Moffic
Rex Moser
Anthony Parr
Lori Pond
Krisanto Pranata
Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher
Diane Reynolds and Robb Brown
Joyce A. Robinson
Nikki Scandalios
Catherine Sharkey
Kathy Solomon and Bob Burchman
Eva Soltes
Elizabeth St. Clair
Libby and Sandy Treadwell
William Ulrich
Ginny Siegfried and Barry Verga
Sandra Wagner
Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner
Joann Yabrof
The Luminary Circle honors those who have included the Ojai Music Festival in their estate plans or endowment giving. Their visionary generosity sustains bold, adventurous programming and ensures extraordinary musical experiences will continue to inspire future generations. Their generosity lights the way to the future.
We gratefully acknowledge the following Luminary Circle members who have included the Ojai Music Festival in their estate plans:
Betsy Bachman
Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson
Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff
Carolyn and Jamie Bennett
Judy and Merrill Blau
NancyBell Coe
Sheila* and Don Cluff
Lynne Doherty
Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt
Theresa and Jeff Ferguson
Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman
Richard S. Gould
Frank* and Linda Granat
Cathryn and Tom Krause
Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk
Russ Irwin
Raulee Marcus
Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris
David Nygren
Don Pattison
Laura and William* Peck
Hope Tschopik Schneider
Leslie Westbrook
Nita Whaley and Don Anderson
If you’ve included the Ojai Music Festival in your estate plans or endowment giving, we hope you’ll let us know. Whether you prefer to be recognized or remain anonymous, sharing your intentions allows us to express our thanks and plan confidently for the future.
Making a planned gift is a wonderful way to support the Ojai Music Festival while achieving your own philanthropic goals. Your generosity helps sustain bold programming, music education, and artistic discovery for generations to come. There’s no minimum to join the Luminary Legacy Circle, and your plans remain confidential.
Contact Anna Wagner, Director of Philanthropy (805) 646-3178 | awagner@ojaifestival.org
Our heartfelt thanks to the following supporters of the Ojai Music Festival Endowment:
Barney and Kate Barnhart
Betsy Bachman
Meg Bates and Scott Johnson
Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff
June and Shed* Behar
Karen Marie Bellavita
Jamie and Carolyn Bennett
Lerie Bjornstedt*
Judy and Merrill Blau
Barbara Bowman and Sol de la Torre Bueno
Witold Brabec
William H. Brady, III*
Marion and William Burke*
Lainie and Peter Cannon*
Ara Guzelimian and Janet Clough, in memory of Lawrence Morton
Don and Sheila* Cluff
NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke
Colburn Foundation
Jennifer Coleman
Molly Cook
Joan Davidson
Robert C. Davis, Jr
Carlos Diniz*
Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen
Christine and Sanford Drucker*
Constance Eaton and William Hart
Merilee* and Samuel Eaton
Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt
Mercedes H. Eichholz*
Yvette Ellis*
Betty and Robert* Emirhanian
Harriette and Robert Erickson*
Evans Foundation
Theresa and Jeff Ferguson
Lorraine Holve Finch
Frank and Maudette* Fink Fund
Frances Fitting
Ernest Fleischmann*
Kate and Richard Godfrey
E. Louise Gooding*
Helene Gordon and Bill Blackburn
Richard S. Gould
Dennis Gould
Virginia and Richard Gould*
Linda and Frank* Granat
Caroline and Ralph Grierson
Ginger Harmon*
Philip Heckscher
Janette and Richard Hellmann
Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk
Natalia and Michael Howe
Carolyn Huntsinger*
Nancy Huntsinger
Russ Irwin
Betty Izant*
Barbara Jackman
Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey*
Edith and Jack Jungmeyer*
Jorjana and Roger Kellaway
Joan Kemper
Pat Kennedy*
Margaret Krauss
Muriel Lavender
Robert M. Light*
Andree Lindow
Dorothy Loebl
Jon Lovelace*
Carol and Luther Luedtke
Raulee Marcus
Elise Marvin*
Martha and Thomas May
Zelda and Dennis McCarthy
Quentin McKenna*
Pamela Melone
Margaret and Fritz Menninger
Lolita and Joe Metscher
Charles Millard III*
Rachael and Philip Moncharsh
Thomas W. and Jane Morris
Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris
William Myers*
Sandi Nicholson
Marianne and Philip Nielsen
Victoria Nightingale
Maj. Gen. Frank Norris
David L. Nygren
Donald Pattison
Laura and William* Peck
Barbara and Martin Pops
Ruth and Rodney Punt
Claire Rantoul
Alice and Robert* Rene
John Rex*
Susan and Mark Robinson
Merle and Hans Schiff
Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation
Helen and Edward Shanbrom*
Dorothy and Richard Sheahan*
Harry Sims*
Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke
Paula Spellman
Melody and John Taft
Sheila Tepper
Margaret Thomas*
Charlotte and Charles Thompson
Glenda Tippett*
Hope Tschopik Schneider
Ventura County Community Foundation
Joan and William Vogel
Patricia Weinberger*
Jane and Richard Weirick
Harriet Wenig*
Joyce and Allan West
Leslie Westbrook
Nita Whaley and Don Anderson
Julia and Marc Whitman
Margaret and Philip Williams
Susanne and Blake* Wilson
Helen Wolff
Constance Wood
Willard Wyman
*In Memoriam
1,766 Children Served 100+ Seniors at Assisted Living Facilities 1,049 Workshops
Public Schools
BRAVO EDUCATION COORDINATOR
Laura Walter
EDUCATION COMMITTEE
Bridget Brockman, Co-Chair
Judy Fish, Co-Chair
Joann Yabrof, Secretary
Kathy Broesamle
Kerri Climer
Laura Denne
Lynne Doherty
Alex Fager
Rosanne Forgette
Audrey McPherson
Ray Reich
Jane Roberts
Kathleen Robertson
Michelle Sherman
Lillian Tally
For over 30 years, the Ojai Music Festival’s BRAVO program has been leading students in the Ojai Valley on a journey of music education. Over the course of each year, the BRAVO program offers free workshops, residencies, concerts and musical events through the Ojai public schools.
Children involved in music gain impulse control, team building, and learn quick decision making and analysis. Empathy grows. They practice big-picture thinking and gain healthy social-emotional skills. Reading skills improve. We hear how the world is wide enough for all of us.
“Every child moved by art is a victory, inspired to learn history but also to make it, to shape it, to speak it, until the world glows with sound.”
—AMANDA
GORMAN
INSTITUTIONAL FUNDERS
Holy Cross Lutheran Church
John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation
Montecito Bank and Trust
Ojai Festival Women’s Committee
Ojai Valley School
Rotary Club of Ojai West
Santa Barbara Symphony Music Van
ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
Alex Fager
Rosanne Forgette
Ray Reich
Ruben Salinas
Julie Tumamait-Stenslie
BRAVO VOLUNTEERS
Helen Allen
Betsy Bachman
Fern Barishman
Jim Bell
Hitesh Benny
Karen Bernscott
Eilam Byle
Caressa Cowan
Laurel Crary
Lynne Doherty
John Donaldson
Kim Eck
Ken Eros
Michael Estwanik
Alex Fager
Deborah Finley
Jackie Francis
Donna Freiermuth
Andy Gilman
Eru Godfrey
Bonnie Griffin
Anne Grupp
Gretchen Hayes
Martha Highfill
Sophie Holt
Laurie Johnson
George Lemire
Melanie Link
Madrigali
Fran Malinoff
Leigh Ann McDonald
Liz Memel
Mood Swing
Cathy Newman
Bill & Judy Norris
Ojai Library Ukulele Group
Nancy Pepper
Cindy Pitou-Burton
Razzberry Jam
Dori Riggs
Jackie Ringhoff
Jane Roberts
Kathleen Robertson
Joyce Robinson
Jimmie Rogers
David Roine
Kate Russell
Santa Barbara County
Flute Ensemble
Gail Smith
Starlight Quartet
Ray Sullivan
Morgan Swaidan
Tracy Sweetland
Randee Vasilakos
JB White
Kendra Yoes
Fereschta Zamadi-Sinclair
Learn more about the BRAVO program at www.OjaiFestival.org.
The Ojai Music Festival BRAVO program brings music and joy to local students and the Ojai community through educational workshops, interactive demonstrations, and free concerts.
BRAVO PROGRAMS INCLUDE:
EDUCATION THROUGH MUSIC brings interactive song and play to students in grades TK-3, building empathy, intelligence, and cooperation. Experiences with pitch and rhythm prepare students for further musical experience and increase language and math literacy.
IMAGINE Concert is presented for fourth-sixth grade students. In collaboration with Ojai Valley School and the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund, more than 700 students and 100 adults enjoy music and dance from around the world. Audience members were recently treated to a performance of Ojai O’Daiko Drummers at Libbey Bowl.
Our MUSIC VAN visits Ojai elementary and Venturaarea schools to encourage students to choose their favorite instrument to learn in their own school music programs. Students blew, plucked, and bowed, all to great laughter, inspiring our future citizens! Special thanks to the Santa Barbara Symphony Music Van.
BRIDGE Program enriches our world through interactions of third grade students with Ojai seniors through music and song games. Children invite the residents to join them in walking or skipping, or even just staying in their place and having a turn in the songs!
SCORE is BRAVO’s newest music composition enrichment class for public high school students, coordinated by Emily Praetorius with Nordhoff High School’s music teacher Bill Wagner. The class provides tools and guidance necessary for the students to compose their own work, culminating in an end-ofyear performance.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE Program conduct workshops including Chumash song and dance, violin, saxophone, and drumming, teaching students about history, geography, and world cultures through music.
SUMMER MUSIC AND ARTS CAMP gives children an opportunity to sing, play, and explore art and storytelling in an interactive environment. Through music and movement, the camp encourages imagination, questioning, collaboration, and determination.
“It is exciting to see modern music and a large audience interested in new things. I enjoyed hearing such versatile musicians. Nice balance of density of events. I learned so much!”
—QUINN ROSENBERG, TUFTS UNIVERSITY, INTERN ALUM 2024
Each year, the Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program welcomes a dozen college students to go behind the scenes working closely with the staff and production team, providing critical support, and gaining invaluable hands-on experience for their future careers.
Festival interns have gone on to have successful careers in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Those who have gone on to work in the arts have done so at organizations across the country, including AMOC*, Ojai Music Festival, San Diego Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Early Music Guild of Seattle, and Voices of Change, as well as forged new paths as entrepreneurial performing artists and composers.
Colleges and universities represented have included Berklee School of Music, Boston University, CalArts, California Lutheran University, Cal State University-Long Beach, Manhattan School of Music, Occidental College, San Diego State University, Stanford University, UCLA, USC, Moorpark College, and Westmont College
The Ojai Music Festival wishes to express our deepest gratitude to the following:
Ashly Piano Crafts
Besant Hill School/Alex Smith
Barbara Bowman
Ed Brooks City of Ojai
Jill Cohen
Custom Printing
Gold Coast Ambulance
Joan Kemper
Kathie Kottler
LA Percussion Rentals
LS Promotions/Linda Schimmel
Music Academy of the West
Nordhoff High School Music Department/Bill Wagner
Ojai Citrus Growers
Ojai Presbyterian Church
Ojai Valley School/Tracy Wilson
Ojai Wesleyan Church/Pastor Lyn Thomas
Steinway & Sons LA/Benjamin Salisbury
Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, Ojai Station
Ventura Rental Center
Ventura Water Store
Westridge Market
Security provided by SB Global Security and the Ojai Police Department
OJAINEXT is Ojai Music Festival’s free program to welcome and build community for new audience members – from college students, recent college grads, to young professionals.
OJAI FESTIVAL WOMEN’S COMMITTEE
Heartfelt thanks to the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee for all they do in support of the Festival throughout the year. Special thanks to those members who host the Festival Lounge.
FESTIVAL HOUSING HOSTS
An important part of the Ojai Music Festival community is the housing hosts. They graciously open their homes every year to visiting artists, interns, and the production crew. Their wonderful hospitality makes each visit a memorable occasion for Festival guests. If you are interested in being a Housing Host, call Deirdre Daly at 805 646 2094 or email ddaly@ojaifestival.org.
Whether you’re a long-time classical music lover or simply curious about this yearly Ojai staple, look at our various perks to help welcome you to the Ojai Festival community.
• Invitations to special events throughout the year
• Discounts on select Festival concerts
• Drink voucher for the Green Room in the Park
• An invitation to the OJAINEXT member event during the Festival
Learn more about OJAINEXT at OjaiFestival.org/OJAINEXT or ask our Box Office staff how to get involved.
Since the Ojai Music Festival’s founding in 1947, volunteers have ensured the enduring success of the organization, from our renowned four-day Festival to our acclaimed BRAVO music education program. Many thanks to this year’s wonderful community of volunteers for their tireless efforts and kindness.
Kaelynn Adams
Rick Bloom
Bradly Bourget
Tom Boyles*
Ursula Britton*
Dianne Bullard
Susan Carpenito
Kelly Carrol
Daphne DiFrancesco
Ana Droscoski
CJ Farrar
Wendy Gray
Susanna Grigsby
Amber Hair
Sandra Hamlett
Jodine Hammerand
Sandra Han
Gretchen Hays*
Jill Helson
Ray Hennessy
Silke Hilger
John Houghton
JJ Jones
Ann Koons
Carol Ann Koz
Marie Lakandula
Sophie Loire
Julie Martin
Tracy Miller
Allison Monahan
Susan-Marie Moody
Kasey Moore
Yovani Navarrete
Karen Nelson
Aliana Nuno
Daphne April Palmer
Peter Parziale
Vickie Peters
Rose Pinter
Kate Russell
Beverly Schuberth
Carla Sherman
*Special thanks to our long-time volunteers who have been volunteering for 10-plus years.
Virginia Siegfried
Viktoriya Sinitsa
Toni Solis
Mesalina Sugmad
Tracy Sweetland
Theresa Theresa
Rosalind Tyson
Barry Verga
Ruth Walker
Christine White
Betsy Wise
Kari Worden
Mary Ann Zalokar
list as of May 14, 2025
If you are interested in volunteering at next year’s Festival, please email info@ojaifestival.org.
ARA GUZELIMIAN Artistic and Executive Director
GINA GUTIERREZ Managing Director and Director of Marketing
ANNA WAGNER Director of Philanthropy
FIONA DIGNEY Producer and Artistic Administrator
AMBER YOUNG Operations and Events Manager
ELIZABETH SPILLER Patron Relations Manager
MELISSA GORRIS Producing Stage Manager
MADDI BAIRD Associate Artistic Producer
LANDON WILSON Assistant Artistic Producer
JONATHAN BERGERON Stage Manager, Libbey Bowl
YAESOL JEONG Stage Manager, Greenberg
DALTON SMITH Production Assistant
NICK MACKIE Production Assistant
MARK GREY Sound Designer and Head Audio Engineer
NATHAN GRATER Associate Sound Designer
TOBY TITTLE Monitor Engineer
CHRISTINA GASPARICH Sound Assistant
LETICIA CASTENEDA Front of House Technician
NICHOLAS HOUFEK Lighting Designer and Light Board Operator
MOMENTUM MEDIA/ VINCE PECCHI Lighting Provider
KEITH FENTON
DAVID GUTHRIE
ALEX HALL-MOUNSEY
KIRK ZAHARRIS Lighting Techs
CLAIRE CLEARY Associate Lighting Designer
MIKE’S TECHNICAL SERVICES/ MIKE TREGLER Ancillary Event Engineer
LUKE TAYLOR Steinway Piano Technician
RICHARD NEWSHAM Green Room Manager
MICHAEL COOLEY Rigger
DOOJIE SELINGER Production Assistance
TRISTAN COOK Live Stream Director
GROPIOUS PRODUCTION/ WALTER PARK Live Streaming Production Company
RAY SULLIVAN Operations Team Leader
EDDIE CALDWELL EMILY DEL SIGNORE
PJ SANGER
SHANE SCHAFER Operations Team
CARISSA CORRIGAN Assistant Operations Manager
DEIRDRE DALY Housing Manager
CAITLIN PRAETORIUS House Manager
JUDITH PIAZZA Associate House Manager
MATTHEW ARAT
SABRINA HENDERSEN
JANE ROBERTS
TERRY WRIGHT Head Ushers
LORI ECKBERT Patrol Manager
SAM CICERO
DANIEL GARZA
ROD GIVAN
KENNETH NIGHT
LINDA NIGHT
MARK TOVAR Patrol Team
KATHERINE HARTLEY GEORGE
DOMINIQUE WRIGHT Retail & Concessions Team
LYNN DUBOUX Finance Operations Manager
MADELINE DOSS Patron Relations and Development Coordinator
LAURA WALTER BRAVO Education Coordinator
SHEILA COHN Festival Concierge
TIMOTHY TEAGUE Photographer
JOE NORRIS
JOHN BOWMAN Parking
NIKKI SCANDALIOS Public Relations
KERI SETNICKA Social Media Coordinator
JERRY MARYNIUK, MD Medical Tent Volunteer Coordinator
TARA SAYLOR Volunteer Coordinator
BODHI YOUNG Craft Services
JENELLE MARTINEZ Suppers in the Park Coordinator
MIMI ARCHIE Festival Creative Art Direction
KATHLEEN KENNEDY Program Book Graphic Design
BITVISION TECHNOLOGY IT Providers
DOMINIQUE WRIGHT Assistant Intern Coordinator
NICHOLAS BALDWIN
MILO BRODY
GENNA EBERHARD
CHARLES EHEMAN
ALEXANDER FAN
CHRISTIAN GALLOPE
LIZZY GONZALEZ
HECTOR JIMENEZ
ASHLEY NEGRETE
ROUEN NELSON
JOEY O’NEILL
QUINN ROSENBERG
ZOLA SAADI-KLEIN
EVAN SMEDLEY
JEREMY WRIGHT Interns
Design + Planning, Interiors) 45 Move Sanctuary 37 Ojai Valley Land Conservancy
BC Patty Waltcher/Berkshire Hathaway
28 Sharon Maharry/Berkshire Hathaway
108 Santa Barbara Travel/Sheila Cohn SHOPPING
108 Barbara Bowman Boutique
IBC Bart’s Books
25 Beato Chocolates
25 Magic Tea Hour/Ojai Tea Salon
31 Noted
5 Ojai Olive Press
