Listening With and To the Sounds and Sites of Ojai

Last weekend’s Ojai Music Festival, Designed by Flutist Claire Chase, Was a Nature-leaning Contemporary Music Garden of Delights and Challenges

Music director Claire Chase performs 'Pan' by Marcos Balter at the 2025 Ojai Music Festival | Photo: Timothy Teague

Musical pairing for this review: Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening link.

By its very ever-changing nature, year after year, the Ojai Music Festival (OMF) means many things to many people and involves many musical –isms, 79 years into its internationally acclaimed adventure. This year’s model, unfolding in a passionate and striking way over four days last week, holds the distinction of embracing a certain Ojai-ness of its host community, where mysticism, alternative life-styling, and eclectic spiritualities have never feared to tread.

Nature herself had an unusual degree of sway in this program, and not only in the usual presence of bird songs and insect choirs coating the concert experience, mostly in the outdoor Libbey Bowl. On opening night, scores of actual Ojai residents — about 50 of them — signed on as adjunct performers and “extras” in the pageantry of Marcos Balter’s Pan, with the inimitable flutist Claire Chase — this year’s OMF music director — as musical protagonist in the vulnerable center of her community horde.

Cut to early Saturday morning in the glorious and now protected expanse of the Ojai Meadows Preserve, and an al fresco gathering of audience and musicians situated around the meadow basked in a strong sense of a literally nature-connected performative experience.

Clare Chase, “Sex Magic” at Ojai Music Festival 2025 | Photo: Peggy Grossman

One of the films screened in between live music events, in the beautifully restored and state-of-the-art Ojai Playhouse Theater, was Sam Green’s unique and engrossing concept doc. 32 Sounds. (Its artful use of a good surround sound system in a theater setting made me think the Riviera Theatre would be a perfect place to see/hear this wonderful piece of cinema.) One of the recurring subjects in the film is the idealistic composer/thinker Annea Lockwood, who at one point makes the observation that it’s advisable for us to “listen with nature, as opposed to listening to it.” The notion seemed to refer back to this especially site-sensitive edition of OMF, a kind of accidental motto.

Surprisingly, this festival gave no performance time to the late, great conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, whose 100^th birthday year has given rise to tributes elsewhere. He was a powerful presence in Ojai, as a three-time music director whose programs were some of the most memorable I’ve attended. Boulez was the point of focus ten years ago, when conductor-percussionist Steven Schick directed the festival program in tribute to the then 90-year-old composer, too frail to travel at the time.

2025 Ojai Music Festival: Musicians Alex Peh, Cory Smythe, and Craig Taborn keyboards perform ‘Pulsing Lifters’ (World premiere of trio arrangement) by Terry Riley (arr. Alex Peh) | Photo: Timothy Teague

Then again, Boulez’s cool-headed and precision-geared approach to music, not to mention his audience-challenging post-serialist writing, might have seemed out of place in this year’s distinctly different roster. Among the features here were an abundance of improvisational energy, naturally addressed by important jazz-connected musicians Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe on piano and Susie Ibarra, a wonderful jazz drummer, among other virtues.

Jazz snuck into Ojai in the strongest way since Vijay Iyer was the music director, in 2017, with the apex being a Friday morning concert sporting Smythe’s unique quarter-tone piano/synth format of a reshuffled take on John Coltrane’s “Countdown” and a spectacular two-piano improvisation with the masterful Taborn.

Chase, who has graced Ojai with her charismatic presence a few times in past years and whom the festival’s artistic director Ara Guzelimian called both “our around the clock music director” and “a comet,” was very much a central whirlwind force, a galvanizing performer, and organizer over the weekend. This may well be the OMF with more flute in the soloist spotlight than any other in its storied history, and with more performance focus on the active “music director.” But she also cast the program wisely in terms of themes and featuring roles for resident musicians on hand.

A dominant thread of the festival program was devoted to Chase’s own ambitious “Density 2036” project, commissioning new major works for flute. Pan was one of these, along with Liza Lim’s hour-long “Sex Magic”, a ritualistic piece performed in the Greenberg Activity Center, with Chase commandingly navigating sound on her formidable contrabass flute — taller than she — and named, by Pauline Oliveros, “Bertha.” Meanwhile, two tables cradling percussive noise-makers are eerily set to shaking in select moments of the work.

Susie Ibarra at Ojai Music Festival 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

But the finest moment from her “Density 2036” sampler was Taborn’s thrilling hour-long piece “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms,” for flute, as well as Taborn’s insightful touch on piano and gently tinkling electronics, drummer Ibarra, and clarinetist Joshua Rubin. Elements of jazz, atmospherics, and a wavering line between structure and freedom come to life in a new and mesmerizing way in this music. A recording would be a valued addition to the world’s musical knowledge.

In the OMF according to Chase’s agenda, a welcome point of attention went to women composers and performers, chiefly the dynamic drummer-composer Ibarra, an artist-in-residence and a bringer of jazz energy to the festival menu. We heard Ibarra give an entrancing solo drum kit/percussion solo in the Ojai Conservancy–protected Meadow Preserve on Saturday morning and, as performer-composer with a particular vision, present her recent Pulitzer Prize winning Libbey Bowl highlight, “Sky Islands,” a percussion-driven chamber work with jazz and evocative rhythmic schematics in tow. No plants were harmed in this performance, but became part of the instrumental toolkit, from large bamboo sticks to transducer-equipped tropical plants in water buckets with actual koi along for the ride.

Tribute was paid to the environment-attuned Annea Lockwood and to her friend, the late, great Pauline Oliveros — who Chase dubbed the “fairy godmother” of the festival and of a certain faction of contemporary music and culture. A fascinating documentary, Daniel Weintraub’s Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, chronicled her remarkable life and philosophical visions, and her conceptual thinking fed into the musical programming: Saturday morning’s audience-reliant piece “Horse Sings from Cloud” transfixed the meadow-ing crowd, and the mutable, flexibly interpretable ensemble piece “The Witness” was an improvisatory blast of energies on Sunday evening.

Well-established Cuban composer Tania León was clearly a heroine of the weekend, as first heard in her solo violin and tape (Latin percussion fragments and looping violin) piece “Abanico” on early Friday morning’s JACK Quartet concert. Her powerful and highly detailed atonal chamber ensemble work “Hechizos” was gripping, the closest thing we got to a Boulez sensibility all weekend.

That piece was tucked into perhaps the strongest program of the festival, a Saturday night special, dubbed “Prayers and Spells.” The evening opened reflectively, with Bach’s Chorale Prelude, “Vor deinen Thron,” as arranged for the JACK and the ear-opening sound of Wu Wei’s sheng, followed by the recently belated Azerbaijanian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s content-morphing meditation on the same Bach chorale. Liza Lim’s “How Forests Think” (another direct nod to mother nature) took up the second half, starting with the sound of alto sax and sheng, and shifting into a score full of textural intrigue and a measured dramatic sensibility.

Wu Wei on ‘sheng’ at Ojai Music Festival 2025 | Photo: Peggy Grossman

Another important woman composer making her presence known here was the famed Icelandic texturalist Anna Thorvaldsdottir, whose music Santa Barbarans know first-hand from her piece for the Danish String Quartet, at Campbell Hall two years ago. She also snuck into a fluke board public spotlight as a plot point in Todd Fields’ classical music satire Tár.

In Ojai, her musical imprint came through the west coast premiere of her large-scale flute-featuring piece “Ubique,” described as an ode to the “musical qualities of nature.” On the intimate end of the spectrum, Thorvoldsdottir’s delicate solo viola piece “Sola” was given due grace by Hawaiian violist-composer Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Although many of us are not morning people, it always pays to make the often more experimental 8 a.m. programs, a theory proven valid again this year. Friday’s coffee with the JACK Quartet included Mexican composer Eduardo Aguilar’s beguiling “Hyper” — entirely percussive, using the col legno technique of striking strings with the wood of the bow, ending with rhythmic whooshes of said bows and musicians retreating to separate corners of the stage.

We also heard JACK take on Argentine composer Vincente Atria’s “Roundabout,” a clever maze of early music references, and “rounds,” contemporary tactics and snatches of Monk’s “‘Round About Midnight” and Yes’s “Roundabout,” with microtonality in the mix. Atria’s piece is part of the quartet’s fascinating “Medieval Modern” project, also featured on Sunday morning’s concert, with quartet members retooling 14^th century music with microtonal pitches beyond the tempered 12-note scale we have known and loved. (JACK’s “Modern Medieval” project was heard in one of last year’s greatest classical concerts, at Music Academy of the West last December.)

Other early morning musical exploits took us to the meadow on Saturday, and to the charming downtown Chaparral Auditorium on Sunday, where the fare included Iranian composer Bahar Royaee’s quietly dazzling solo percussion work with the aptly evocative title “A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture,” for the ever-nimble percussionist Ross Karre. Karre worked his way, deftly and with wit, around a complex percussion setup which included Styrofoam bowls, radio static, a noisy lamp, and a large drum hosting a jumbo spring. The result was a lovely, contemplative mobile of sonic gestures with humor and household objects on the side.

2025 Ojai Music Festival: SUSIE IBARRA performs Kolubrí by SUSIE IBARRA, arr. ALEKS PILMANIS | Photo: Timothy Teague

For a finale, Sunday evening’s concert opened with Lanzilotti’s unpretentiously engaging “ko’u inoa,” an octet version of music she played in solo viola form earlier in the weekend. It’s a coloristic inward journey of a piece, minimal but not minimalist, per se. The minimalist cred of a world premiere by young-at-heart elder statesman Terry Riley closed out the concert/festival with a rugged bang. Virtually the entire festival cast joined the party for Riley’s “Pulse Field,” a delightfully funky and loose-jointed, three-part opus ruled by the power of riffs. It’s a bit of a mess, in the best way, counteracting the potentially robotic nature of other, Glass-y minimalism, with a kind of ruffian gameplan of “riff/resonate/recalculate/repeat.”

OMF 2025, a wild garden of contemporary-minded goodness, ended with a hypnotic riff laid out over four measures of 4/4 and one of 3/8. We left the Libby humming along with this odd-timed “hook,” duly hypnotized.

Next up, the 80^th OMF with the legendary conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director. We might hear some Boulez that weekend.