13 minute read
Modern Opera in Ojai
a Modern Opera company comes to Ojai
by KAREN LINDELL
Composer-conductor-pianist Matthew Aucoin, co-founder of the American Modern Opera Company, known as AMOC (pronounced “amok,” as in “run amok”), describes opera as “the medium in which art forms collide and transform one another.” The moving parts in AMOC are its 17 artists: dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers who mesh and mash to create new musical works and reshape classic ones. AMOC, which formed in 2017, is the musical director for the 76th Ojai Music Festival, taking place June 9–12. This will be the first time an interdisciplinary collective holds the position of music director, which changes every year, and only the second time an ensemble rather than an individual curates the festival (after Eighth Blackbird in 2009). Several of the performers in AMOC are previous Ojai Music Festival artists, including soprano Julia Bullock, cellist Jay Campbell, violinist Miranda Cuckson, flutist Emi Ferguson, and bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Similar artists often work in a company together — singers in a chorus, musicians in a band or orchestra, dancers in a troupe — but these homogeneous groups don’t usually go the multidisciplinary route. For an opera or other production featuring multiple art forms, musicians, singers, actors, dancers, and others might come
A collision can be gentle, like two bubbles tapping skins in the air, or violent, like a speeding truck and train slamming together on a railroad track. In either case, all moving parties transfer energy and are transformed. Kind of like opera.
together for a few weeks or days for a rehearsal, then go their separate ways. AMOC has more holistic aims, gathering artists who work together over time and pay deep attention to words, music, sounds, visuals, movement, and how all the senses collide to create something more novel or complex. Ara Guzelimian, as the festival’s artistic director, each year chooses the music director. Many of AMOC’s members went to The Juilliard School, where Guzelimian was the provost and dean from 2007–20, so he knew many of the performers from their time as students. “Collisions between di erent disciplines happen routinely in the hallway at Juilliard,” Guzelimian said. “I can’t say every student picked up on it, but the artists in AMOC, even in their youngest days, had their antennae out for new and di erent experiences, and they have big curiosities.” However, any past school ties are not why he asked the collective to serve as the festival’s 2022 music director. “They have been taking the world by storm, individually and collectively, as artists,” he said. “The moment was right.” The choice unexpectedly ended up being “right” in another way. In 2021, due to Covid-19, the festival, with John Adams as music director, was postponed until September, but this year is back in its usual June time slot at Libbey Bowl. Guzelimian asked AMOC to be the festival’s music director before the pandemic began, but said he was touched by the idea of a collective leading the way during a year that celebrates emerging from a di cult time when so many have been or felt alone. “Any collaborative is anti-C, because it requires sharing space, creating trust and fi nding intimacy,” said choreographer, dancer, and AMOC co-founder Zack Winokur. “That is at the core of what we do, so this is really urgent. We need to reunite and bring people together again.”
Meet AMOC
Each member of AMOC has a fl ourishing individual career. Co-founder Aucoin, a MacArthur Fellow, was artist-in-residence at Los Angeles Opera from 2016–20, and his opera Eurydice premiered in L.A. in 2020. Zack Winokur produced The Black Clown, an adaptation of Langston Hughes’ poem starring Davóne Tines at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln. Soprano Julia Bullock sang the title role in Katie Mitchell’s critically acclaimed contemporary version of Handel’s Theodora at the Royal Opera House in London, and has served as artist-in-residence for the San Francisco Symphony and other institutions. Pianist Conor Hanick, a “fi erce advocate” for contemporary music, has premiered more than 200 scores, and collaborated with conductors Alan Gilbert, James Levine, David Robertson, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Anne Manson, Carlos Izcaray, Je rey Milarsky, and others. That’s just a recent sliver of the biographies of only four members. Winokur, Bullock, and Hanick described during a Zoom interview how the group initially came together. Winokur said he and Aucoin, who both attended Juilliard but didn’t cross paths there, were later introduced at a brunch by AMOC countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. They were interested in opera as “the place where all of these artistic disciplines can interact and transform each other in order to tell a story in the most compelling and unmitigated way possible.” When forming AMOC, the co-founders brought together artists they were deeply excited about as both performers and thinkers.
Left to right : Soprano, Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, stage director, choreographer, and dancer Zack Winokur and Taylor West perfoming a piece by John Cage.
AMOC, Winokur said, is “not founder-led,” but instead “shape-shifts” around each artist’s ideas and what each wants to say. AMOC is about “opening your mind to the possibility that music is and can be so much more than an abstraction of sound,” Hanick said. “Most of my conservatory brain was studying for and translating black and white symbols into air. But there are so many other layers to that process — getting from something that was notated, to understanding it, realizing it, re-realizing it, transforming it, and attaching meaning and emotion.” Bullock said AMOC acknowledges the very human origins of art. “It’s easy to forget that it’s human beings who developed music,” she said. “Most were grappling with large questions, and were trying to translate them in a way that could be understood by more people.” Opera, which literally means “work” in Italian, Bullock said, “is based on work that … exists within an ecosystem of other human beings who are aiming to communicate and connect with each other.” With such an abundance of creative minds, planning for the festival began with an overwhelming number of ideas. AMOC collectively curated the festival, with Guzelimian, and they made sure the diverse programming selections throughout echoed or spoke to one another. Here are a few ways artistic worlds will collide at this year’s Ojai Music Festival.
AMOC, everywhere
The festival’s opening concert is an introduction to AMOC, featuring all the members of AMOC performing individually or together to give audiences an idea of who they are. Then, throughout the next three days, they’re all over the place, in both the foreground and background. “You meet these artists in multiple perspectives,” Winokur said. “You see them leading a project that is straight from their brain and heart, then collaborating on other projects.” A cellist, for example, might suddenly become a dancer in another performance. “As you’re wandering from one performance to another, so are we,” Winokur said. “You’ll see someone leave one world, walk through the town, fi nd a new kind of world, and thread and build it together.” The journey might be chaotic or contemplative.
Poetry + music + dance
Words, sounds, and movement all get equal treatment at the festival, sometimes slamming together in unexpected ways. “One of the threads of the festival is the presence of poetry,” Guzelimian said. On the fi rst day, “A Passageway Between Shores” will feature a melding of music, songs, and poems, with tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Keir GoGwilt, composer Carolyn Chen, and poet Divya Victor. The next day, “the echoing of tenses,” a world premiere song cycle by Anthony Cheung, will feature poems by Asian American writers, sung, spoken, and performed by Appleby, Cuckson, and Hanick. On the fourth and fi nal day of the festival, the program will feature the premiere of AMOC member Bobbi Jene Smith’s Open Rehearsal, a dance theater piece set to music by Schubert, Bach, singer-songwriter Connie Converse, and folk singer Pete Seeger. “I hope the interrelationships between spoken and sung poetry, and even well-established classical music like Schubert, come to life,” Guzelimian said.
Dinner + toasts
A world premiere piece by Aucoin at the festival will be a potluck of sorts. For one month during the summer, AMOC members gather on a farm in Vermont where they live and work together 24-7. Many members of the group are excellent cooks, and mealtimes are key for ideasharing and camaraderie-building. Aucoin’s Family Dinner, a cycle of miniconcertos, is an attempt to capture the spirit of this time in Vermont. Each song o ers a portrait of each member (as interpreted by Aucoin), with spoken toasts in between. “These dinners are multicourse and elaborate,” Aucoin said. “And they are ebullient and full of argument.”
Love + death
French composer Olivier Messiaen’s 1945 song cycle “Harawi,” originally subtitled “Songs of Love and Death,” spans emotional extremes. Influenced by Peruvian folk melodies, French surrealism, the story of Tristan and Isolde, and love and tragedy in Messiaen’s own life, the work is usually performed by a soprano and pianist. The festival will feature a semi-staged version with singer Bullock and pianist Hanick, accompanied by dancers Smith and Or Schraiber. “It’s really shape-shifty and Freudian, and goes from the cosmic to the most intimate,” Winokur said. AMOC expands on Messiaen’s vision by adding dancers, movement, and other characters to create a visual world around the music. Movement is integral in AMOC’s pieces, by both dancers as well as musicians who don’t ordinarily incorporate such action or gestures on stage. “Among the many, many questions that Messiaen is asking himself is, ‘What does loss look like, and how would you move to it?’” Hanick said. “‘How would you move if you’re in a black hole?’” Perhaps you would collide, gently or violently.
The 76th annual Ojai Music Festival takes place from June 9–12 at Libbey Bowl and other Ojai venues. For tickets or more information, call 805-646-2053 or visit www.ojaifestival.org
Story by: Karen Lindell
SOLD SOLD
Cathy Titus
DRE 01173283
805.798.0960
ctitus@livsothebysrealty.com
Created in Ojai
Barbara Bowman Store, Ojai Ave.
Most people have some art form they either champion, collect, or produce. For Barbara Bowman and her husband Sol de la Torre Bueno it is the art of dressing. Fashion has been their calling since before they met. That fortuitous meeting in Capri years ago led to a collaboration in a shared love for textiles, fi ne leather and precious objects.
“What you wear is an expression of yourself, your mood, your likes and your personality. The one thing we consistently do is get up and get dressed each and every day of our lives,” according to Barbara. What this couple does is o er you their time, eye, and enthusiasm for how you may express yourself. They obviously love what they do and enjoy sharing with their customers what has been their a nity for dressing.
The Barbara Bowman Boutique a ords the couple an outlet for the curating and presentation of Barbara’s jewelry, handbags, shirting, T-shirts and jacket designs. Since the advent of internet shopping, the face of retail has been changing. The customer wants “special.” Prior to Covid, Sol travelled extensively in the Far East collecting unusual beads and medallions which Barbara turned into unique collectable necklaces.
Wanting to be able to direct a line of clothing for their store, they connected with a Los Angeles Manufacturer who produces their designs from fi nely woven Japanese fabrics. Their collection will soon include denim washes in a variety of styles with particular unusual detailing.
Having worked in Milan designing shoes for years, Barbara was thrilled when Sol was able to get her leather handbags designs produced in his native country, Peru. The bags are smart looking with minimal hardware, an attention to detail and color combinations.
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