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Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Why this year's Ojai Music Festival was one of the best
OJAI — You can't escape nature in Ojai. That meant that flutist Claire Chase, this year's Ojai Music Festival music director who is often called a force of nature, fit right in. Chase is the proudest flutist I've ever observed. And the most expressive. She holds her head high whether playing piccolo or the 6-foot contrabass flute, as if her instrument were a magic wand used to activate her voice in the highest registers and the deepest. The activism is more than an analogy. Chase is also a joyous and entrepreneurial music activist, MacArthur 'genius,' educator, founder of New York's impressive International Contemporary Ensemble and commissioner of a vastly imaginative new flute repertory in her ongoing Density 2036 project. The current surge of interest in Pauline Oliveros is largely her doing. For Ojai, Chase collected concerned composers on a quest for a kind of eco-sonics capable of conjuring up the pleasure of nature and, in the process, saving our sanity. Over four days of concerts mostly in the rustic Libbey Bowl, the names of many of the works gave away the game. 'The Holy Liftoff,' 'Horse Sings From Cloud,' 'How Forests Think,' 'Spirit Catchers,' 'A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture,' are a few. The festival's proudest moment (30 minutes to be precise) was the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra's 'Sky Islands.' It was the last work in a resplendent Sunday morning program that Chase described as 'multi-spiritual' and 'multi-species.' The sun found its way through the trees as the composer and percussionist Levy Lorenzo stood in front of the stage and began with a ceremonial pounding of bamboo poles. 'Sky Islands' evokes the magical Philippines upper rainforests, where sounds scintillate in a thinned atmosphere that gives gongs new glories, where animals capable of great ascension exclusively live, where the mind is ready for enlightenment. Ibarra wrote the score for her Talking Gong Trio (which includes Chase and pianist Alex Peh) along with added percussion and a string quartet, here the Jack Quartet. To the head-scratching surprise of the music establishment that has thus far paid little attention to Ibarra, 'Sky Islands' won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for music. A Filipino American from Anaheim who is now based in New York, Ibarra is best known as a percussionist in experimental jazz and new music with a strong interest in environmental sound installations and Indigenous music. The head scratching stopped in Ojai. In the three works by Ibarra on the program, she proved a capacious sonic visionary. She is a superb mimic of nature's aural realm — the sounds of animals, of a river, of trees in the wind, of rocks falling down a hillside. She stirs spirits with the barely heard whooshes of drum brushes waved in the air. She connects with the underground as a resonant gong master. She stops to smell whatever there is to smell. She's often funny. Mainly, though, she simply entrances, whether she spread her percussive wares in 'Kolubri' or writing for other musicians in 'Sunbird' on a misty early morning at Ojai Meadows Preserve. Her lovingly sly Haydn-esque wit came out in the premiere of 'Nest Box,' a duo for her and Wu Wei on sheng, the Chinese mouth organ. Gauging by the audience response, 'Sky Islands' was the clear favorite of more than three dozen new or newish works. It is a complex piece that appears to set off on a well-apportioned journey led by Chase into the unknown. But at every turn, the music surprises with a melody that feels familiar until it suddenly doesn't. Ibarra leaves room for improvisation as a way for the performers to react to what they are encountering. Chase and Ibarra may, for instance, begin a dialogue as nervous chit-chat with staccato flute interjections with drummed responses that soon turn to broad expressions of wonder. At the end the musicians pick up percussion instruments and leave the stage in a slow, winding procession of dance steps, as if marching into the unknown. Chase brought together other composers from all over. And she brought together superb musicians from L.A. (particularly members of Wild Up) and New York. The music was all of our time with the exception of three small pieces of early music, but even that was modernized. There was long-winded indulgence and lovely itty-bitty works, over in a flash but suggestive of a full and lovely life, like that of an insect. The spirit of the Ojai festival need not be conveyed by a laundry list of composers and works or by value judgments. At its best, the event is a musical wilderness, like no other festival of its caliber. The audience goes on a walk in the woods, with nature calling for discovery. Around every corner you encounter a different musical voice. Hawaiian composer and violist Leilehua Lanzilotti rocked. Cuban composer Tania León added dollops of exciting modernism. Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir commanded long stretches of empty landscape. Brazilian composer Marcos Balter conjured up the mythological Pan in a sometimes outrageous nine-part theatrical extravaganza for Chase. New Zealander Annea Lockwood offered a 90-minute journey down the Housatonic River captured by loudspeakers in surround sound. In contrast, Australian Liza Lim, in raw instrumental outbursts, revealed the less agreeable possibilities of what forests may think (of us?). And then there was, at long last for Ojai, the elephant in the minimalism room, the iconic California composer Terry Riley. His 'In C' is the one piece Ojai has previously programmed. As Riley now approaches his 90th birthday (June 24), Chase unveiled three parts of an epic cycle of uncategorized pieces Riley has been working on since moving to the mountains of Japan five years ago. 'Pulsing Lifters,' in an arrangement for two pianos and harpsichord, is like a delicate dew. 'The Holy Liftoff' realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher for flute and string quartet, opens with Chase on all five of her flutes, one played live, the others prerecorded. The effect is that of being submerged in a lush wash of beauteous flute chords. Riley then softens the spectacularly rigorous Jack Quartet with Ravel-like melody. In 'Pulsefield' pieces numbered 1, 2 and 3, Riley returns to the modular roots of 'In C' a half century later. Here repeated rhythms are overlayed by a large ensemble featuring all the festival performers in ecstatic elaborations. If this, one of the best and truest Ojai festivals in recent years, is meant not for explication but discovery, please do so. The festival has been slowly evolving a system of outdoor amplification, and it captures excellent audio on streams of the Libbey Bowl concerts. They remain archived on the OJai festival YouTube page. Next year Esa-Pekka Salonen will return for the first time in a quarter century.
New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Corrections: June 12, 2025
An article on Wednesday about the Ojai Music Festival in California misidentified the piece by Susie Ibarra that featured the sheng player Wu Wei. It was 'Nest Box,' not 'Sky Islands.' Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@ To share feedback, please visit Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@ For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Most Open-Eared Festival in America Is Ojai
A crowd had gathered at the Ojai Meadows Preserve early Saturday morning. The nearby mountains were still shrouded in mist, and the cool, gray quiet was interrupted only by the sound of birds. Then a throaty quivering of flute emerged from behind the audience — and a stab of clarinet from another spot, a distant burr of saxophone, pips from a second flute. An almost avian quartet gradually coalesced from specks of song and chatter among the instruments, in conversation with the animals in the trees. This was Susie Ibarra's 'Sunbird.' That a couple of hundred people showed up at 8 a.m. for an experimental performance in the middle of a field speaks volumes about the Ojai Music Festival. Since the 1940s, this annual event, nestled in an idyllic valley in Southern California, has catered to audiences eager to be challenged. Each year, a different music director is invited to guide the programming. For this installment, which took place Thursday through Sunday, morning to night, the festival looked to the flutist Claire Chase, one of the most important nodes of creation and collaboration in contemporary music. Chase, a founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the instigator of 'Density 2036,' an ongoing 24-year commissioning project to create a new repertoire for her instrument, has an aesthetic well matched to Ojai. Her approach is rigorous yet relaxed, with an improvisatory, cooperative, nature-loving, even hippie bent — meditative, sunny and smiling, encouraging open minds and open ears. Two dozen musicians performed in shifting combinations throughout the weekend, so you had the feeling of being dropped in the middle of a joyfully bustling commune. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The late Pauline Oliveros is having her moment. How Long Beach Opera is making it even bigger
'Here's our slogan,' Long Beach Opera's interim managing director proudly announces during a recent conversation about the company's upcoming season, 'We're not the Met!' For an art form hardly accepting of understatement, such a slogan is insurgent understatement. The oldest opera company in the Los Angeles area and America's oldest purveyor of consistently progressive opera is about to embark on the most uncompromising season of any company of its size or supposed mission anywhere. Ever. Marjorie Beale may be interim in her role as managing director, but she had been board president before she stepped down to help find a new course for the company, which had gone through administrative turmoil over the last few years. A former professor of European intellectual history and critical theory at UC Irvine, she is now a revolutionary opera empowerer. I'm meeting with her, LBO artistic director and chief creative officer James Darrah and music director Christopher Rountree over a boisterous lunch, and my first question is: So whose idea was it to devote an entire season to Pauline Oliveros? Rountree: 'I don't know the answer.' Darrah: 'I don't know that there is an answer.' Beale: 'It's like it came from deep inside all of us.' Rountree: 'But there was a moment where it was in the air. And then Jim said to me, 'What if it's all Pauline and nothing but Pauline?' That would be a dream for me.' Darrah: 'Weirdly it felt like what we should be doing. It's why I came to Long Beach.' Beale: 'I was overjoyed.' Another question for Beale: So how many board members has she enraged when even a single production by so experimental a composer surely alarms even the most courageous opera board in this artistically and financially cautious day and age? 'We've only lost one board member,' Beale answers sunnily. She also notes that she spent the holidays sweet-talking patrons and donors with her Christmas cards. Many have apparently come around. 'I would say our board is pretty hardy,' Beale adds. The LBO team, moreover, is convinced that since Oliveros' death in 2016 at age 84, her relevance has grown to the point where we are in an obvious Oliveros moment. She was a pioneer composer of electronic music. She was a pioneering, shamanistic accordionist. She was a pioneering feminist and lesbian composer. She was a pioneering professor at Mills College in Oakland, at UC San Diego and elsewhere who inspired a significant number of today's venturesome musicians. She has such acolytes as star flutist Claire Chase, who will be music director of this year's Ojai Music Festival. A one-time outsider, Oliveros is taken seriously throughout the musical world. But opera? Oliveros was in no way, shape or traditional form an opera composer. She was, though, a brilliant maker of acoustic spectacle. Galvanized by sound in yawning subterranean caverns, she made her calling 'deep listening' as a way to overcome the world's ever-increasing surface noise. She discovered that once drones — be they calming or grating — resonate within our bodies they have the urgent power to alter our very sense of being. She further instructed us to tune into the little sounds of nature. By exploring situations in which musicians share their profound awareness of how these sounds operate, how they reach others and the pleasure gained from their response, her work proves startlingly dramatic in performance. Given Oliveros' delight in outrage, fine sense of humor, obsession with process and ability to anthropomorphize all sounds, no matter the source, it doesn't take much to turn works, especially those with texts, into full-blown theater. When Oliveros titled a piece 'Beethoven Was a Lesbian,' as she once did, she wonderfully stimulated (and stymied) the imaginations of performers and audiences alike. The next step becomes opera, whether she called it that (only a couple of times) or not. It's the kind of magical musical thinking, in fact, that led Rountree to form his revolutionary new-music ensemble Wild Up 15 years ago. It's exactly what Darrah, who also heads UCLA's opera program, believes opera needs to move forward. Beale's response to anyone who says this isn't opera: 'It doesn't matter.' She says that recalling the startling, sheer beauty of Oliveros' works at the Ojai festival nine years ago, when Peter Sellars programmed them at Meditation Mountain. She realized how much they said about healing, about coming together, about recovery. 'I knew we need to do something like this right now,' Beale said. That same sense of coming together and healing made Oliveros a favored composer among far-flung musicians for Zoom performances during the COVID-19 shutdown, as it did when Oliveros' 'Ringing for Healing' once became part of a street agitprop in New York. What does matter to Darrah and Rountree is the discovery of potential for opera. 'We need to build the Black Mountain College of opera in L.A.,' Darrah says, referring to the experimental North Carolina college that hosted noted artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. 'It's like Jamie Barton comes to us and doesn't sing Azucena but Oliveros,' Darrah says. Lest LBO be mistaken for New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Met mezzo-soprano who starred as the gypsy in Verdi's 'Il Trovatore' will sing whatever animal is needed in Oliveros' 'El Relicario de los Animales,' which will be mounted at Heritage Square Museum on Feb. 15 and 16. A graphic score for female vocalist and 20-member instrumental ensemble invites musical gestures for channeling the sonic wonderland of animal life and nature into mystical harmonic space. Darrah has added a second singer, Brenda Rae, a soprano also noted for her performances of more standard repertory, who will double as a percussionist. 'Relicario,' which was first given as a concert work at the 1979 CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, will be the first of LBO's so-called three Oliveros operas. As a preseason tryout of the Oliveros idea last summer, the company presented one of Oliveros' best-known works, 'bye bye butterfly,' a haunting eight-minute electronic piece from 1965 that uses a recorded bit of Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' and is often interpreted as a metaphor for women's place in society. Puccini's heroine here is overwhelmed by oscillating sine waves. LBO turned this into an enthusiastically engaging group improvisation. In December, as a preview to the season, LBO staged 'Earth Ears' in San Pedro at the Angels Gate Cultural Center. It began outdoors, and the first thing Darrah and Rountree discovered was an amazing five-second echo in which instruments resonated from the cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes miles away. For the performance inside, the room was decorated with shredded paper (Prairie T. Trivuth will be designer for all the Oliveros productions), and instrumentalists scattered about the room and among the audience interacted in rigorous ways indicated by the score but also with just enough freedom that anything could happen. Rountree says he was confronted with figuring out what Oliveros' rules allow. 'Do they force musicians toward introversion and introspection or push back against that? Is that tension even allowed to exist?' he asked himself. 'At the rehearsal, everyone was doing the rules, and the effect was a kind of shimmering. It felt like night music, like the piece was going to a place. But when we finished the rehearsal, it could not go to that place. I thought, if it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It would go where it wanted or always stay on the horizon.' But during the performance, a jazz-like solo here, a different kind of response there, led to what became a grand theatrical moment. You could feel a collective awe from the audience. 'The work is about commitment and presence,' Rountree concludes, 'so why not just commit completely to the work. The only way to engage is to go fully underwater.' The other two productions will be 'The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts,' a collaboration from 2001 with poet Moira Roth, more a concert piece to be turned into an opera in April on the Queen Mary in Long Beach; and 'The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera' in July (venue still to be determined). This is Oliveros' most operatic piece and was given as a work in progress by Yuval Sharon and the Industry at the Hammer Museum in 2013, when Rountree and Wild Up participated. The LBO production will be the West Coast premiere of a chamber (or pocket) version with a libretto by Oliveros' partner, Ione. Beyond that in the next two seasons, Beale says, the company will present the premiere of an opera by Shelley Washington as well as some traditional opera. Darrah is eager to stage Mozart's 'Così Fan Tutte.' There had been some talk of including 'Cosi' this season with Oliveros additions, but the company didn't want to compete with Los Angeles Opera's production of Mozart's opera in March or Yuval Sharon's Detroit Opera staging in April. Darrah promises his own innovations. In the meantime, Beale says she is determined to use Oliveros as 'a kind of giant reset.' Walking out of 'Earth Ears' with Darrah and Rountree, she saw the sun set over the ocean, and the three of them just stood and looked. 'I thought to myself, this is the first time that we've done something that wasn't in some way influenced by what was in the past,' she says. 'Now we're looking forward to what we're going to do together. 'We're really doing what we say we're about. We're not holding back. We're not hiding in the corner. We're just going for it.'
