2023 Music Director Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

As Pitchfork once said, “Few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration” — a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”

For her highly anticipated third solo studio album, You’re the One, out August 18 on Nonesuch Records, she recruited producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Alicia Keys, Valerie June, Tank and the Bangas) to help her bring this collection of songs that she’d written over the course of her career — her first album of all originals — to life at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami last November. Together with a band composed of Giddens’s closest musical collaborators from the past decade alongside Miami-based musicians from Splash’s own Rolodex and topped off with a horn section making an impressive 12-person ensemble, they drew from the folk music that Giddens knows so deeply and its pop descendants.

You’re the One features electric and upright bass, conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section, and Miami horns, among other instruments. “I hope that people just hear American music,” Giddens says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock — it’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically.”

The album is in line with her previous work, as she explains, because it’s yet another kind of project she’s never done before. “I just wanted to expand my sound palette,” Giddens says. “I feel like I’ve done lots in the acoustic realm, and I certainly will again. But these songs really needed a larger field.”

Her song-writing range is audible on You’re the One, from the groovy funk of “Hen In The Foxhouse” to the vintage AM-radioready ballad “Who Are You Dreaming Of” and the string-band dance music of “Way Over

Yonder” — likely the most familiar sound to Giddens’ fans. Her voice, though, is instantly recognizable throughout, even as the sounds around Giddens shift; she owns all of it with ease.

Giddens also is exploring other mediums and creative possibilities just as actively as she has American musical history. With 1858 replica minstrel banjo in hand, she wrote the opera Omar with film composer Michael Abels, which received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and, with her partner Francesco Turrisi, she wrote and performed the music for Black Lucy and the Bard, which was recorded for PBS’s Great Performances; she has appeared on the ABC hit drama Nashville and throughout Ken Burns’ Country Music series, also on PBS. Giddens has published children’s books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She sang for the Obamas at the White House; is a three-time NPR Tiny Desk Concert alum; and hosts her own show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, as well as the Aria Code podcast, which is produced by New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR.

“I’ve been able to create a lot of different things around stories that are difficult to tell, and managed to get them done in a way that’s gotten noticed,” as Giddens puts it. “I know who to collaborate with, and it has gotten me into all sorts of corners that I would have never expected when I started doing this.”

For seven decades, the Ojai Music Festival has been a laboratory for the special chemistry that results from combining insatiable curiosity with unbounded creativity. The formula is simple: Each year a Music Director is given the freedom and resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. Some have approached their task with caution, fearing that Ojai might be like other places. But, of course, it’s not. More often this unique blend of enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of conductors, performers, and composers to push at boundaries and stretch limits.

At its inception in 1947, under the guidance of Festival founder John Bauer and conductor Thor Johnson, the Festival featured a balance of classics and more contemporary fare. By the time Lawrence Morton took over as Artistic Director in 1954 the emphasis had shifted to new music and Ojai soon became the showcase as well as a home-away-from-home for such 20th-century giants as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, and Olivier Messiaen, not to mention two Southern California “locals” — Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. It was Morton who established the tradition of rotating Music Directors and with this innovation each year’s Festival became the reflection of a succession of larger-than-life personalities, including Robert Craft (joined in 1955 and 1956 by Stravinsky), Copland, Ingolf Dahl, Lukas Foss, Boulez, and Peter Maxwell-Davies, as well as such rising stars as Michael Tilson Thomas, Calvin Simmons, Kent Nagano, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Vijay Iyer, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja.

Through the years Ojai’s Music Directors have invited distinguished soloists, firstrate chamber ensembles, and world-class orchestras to join them in exploring the intersection between new music and everything from jazz and improvisation to electronics and computers; dance, theater, and experimental staging to social and political issues, not to mention repertory that might go back to the Middle Ages or reach across the globe.

Looking back, it would be difficult to identify any overarching aesthetic premise, though from year to year there has been no shortage of agendas. Rather, the thread running through these past decades has been this Festival’s consistency in promoting creativity and innovation. Here in Ojai hallowed masterpieces and in-your-face experiments can be uneasy bedfellows sharing a berth that is a pedestal of repose for one, a trampoline for the other. And that rumble you hear? It is the steady grumbling from an audience whose outspoken views on any and every subject are the entitlement of its loyalty. Its passion is the true barometer of the health of this Festival. No smugness here; no indifference, either. This is a place for enthusiasms, often excessive, and opinions, sometimes vociferous, and a hunger for shared discovery that reaffirms, year after year, why music matters in the first place.

—CHRISTOPHER HAILEY

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 INGOLF DAHL

1967 PIERRE BOULEZ

1968 ROBERT LAMARCHINA

LAWRENCE FOSTER

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1969 MICHAEL ZEAROTT

STEFAN MINDE

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1970 PIERRE BOULEZ

1971 GERHARD SAMUEL

1972 MICHAEL ZEAROTT

1973 MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1974 MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1975 MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1976 AARON COPLAND

1977 MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1978 CALVIN SIMMONS

1979 LUKAS FOSS

1980 LUKAS FOSS

1981 DANIEL LEWIS

1982 ROBERT CRAFT

1983 DANIEL LEWIS

1984 PIERRE BOULEZ

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

1991 JOHN HARBISON

SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES

1992 PIERRE BOULEZ

1993 JOHN ADAMS

1994 MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS

1995 KENT NAGANO

1996 PIERRE BOULEZ

1997 EMANUEL AX, DANIEL HARDING

1998 MITSUKO UCHIDA

DAVID ZINMAN

1999 ESA-PEKKA SALONEN

2000 SIR SIMON RATTLE

2001 ESA-PEKKA SALONEN

2002 EMERSON STRING QUARTET

2003 PIERRE BOULEZ

2004 KENT NAGANO

2005 OLIVER KNUSSEN

2006 ROBERT SPANO

2007 PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD

2008 DAVID ROBERTSON

2009 EIGHTH BLACKBIRD

2010 GEORGE BENJAMIN

2011 DAWN UPSHAW

2012 LEIF OVE ANDSNES

2013 MARK MORRIS

2014 JEREMY DENK

2015 STEVEN SCHICK

2016 PETER SELLARS

2017 VIJAY IYER

2018 PATRICIA KOPATCHINSKAJA

2019 BARBARA HANNIGAN

2020 MATTHIAS PINTSCHER

2021 JOHN ADAMS

2022 AMOC*

2023 RHIANNON GIDDENS

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Ojai Valley School: Small in size, big on outcomes.

Here, you’ll find a friendly, fun-loving community that embraces our differences — and our similarities, too.

We do that through:

• A challenging college preparatory curriculum

• Small classes taught by supportive and dedicated teachers

• A robust College Counseling program that emphasizes the “college of right fit” for each individual student

• A diverse student body, hailing from five continents

• Equestrian and athletic facillities on-campus • A vibrant visual and performing arts program

• Numerous opportunities for hands-on learning through outdoor exploration and community service

OVS is proud to serve as a venue for the 2023 Ojai Music Festival and to support music education in the Ojai community.