Staying On It by Thomas May

Staying On It

“Speak boldly!” The soul-stirring exhortation from the saints to Joan d’Arc that launches the opening night concert might serve as the overall motto for the 2022 Ojai Music Festival. As conveyed by bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Julius Eastman’s musical imagining of this transcendent encounter is of an operatic intensity — a summons to explore the audaciously interdisciplinary and expanded vision that the artists of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) and their colleagues are bringing to Ojai for this 76th edition of the Festival.

There is no conventional opera on the program, though the archetypal love-death journey of Tristan and Isolde merges with borrowings from ancient Andean culture in Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi, which is being presented in a new semi-staging directed by AMOC* co-founder Zack Winokur. Instead, the events designed to unfold over the Festival’s four-day span could be parts of a grand, openended mega-opera that freely juxtaposes media, genres, and performance practices. In Harawi, for example, the musical performances by soprano Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick are amplified by the choreography of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. Tearing away the divisions that would relegate music theater, dance, instrumental music, art song, and poetry to separate realms, AMOC* is a collective of 17 artists who recombine and realign their fields of expertise to create revelatory new hybrids. Together with their like-minded associates from the early music ensemble Ruckus and various guest artists, AMOC*’s ways of “speaking boldly” during this long Festival weekend will traverse a spectrum from the solo singing voice and instrumental soliloquy through the spoken word to dancing bodies in motion, culminating in the realization of another rousing piece by Eastman, Stay On It: the raucously anthemic ode to determination that he wrote in an earlier era plagued by anxiety and violence.

The impetus for such boldness comes — as it often does in moments of radical reconsideration of what we want music to do, of how it can map a way into the future — from looking back, like Orpheus, to a utopian ideal that forever vanishes beyond the horizon. In his recently published book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, AMOC* co-founder Matthew Aucoin argues that “this maddening, outlandish, impossible art form” called opera emerges from the unfulfillable quest for “an imagined union of all

the human senses and all art forms.” Himself the composer of a uniquely compelling operatic version of the Orpheus myth, which he based on Sarah Ruhl’s perspective-shifting play Eurydice, Aucoin and his AMOC* colleagues are contributing an unprecedented chapter to the Festival: This is the first time in Ojai’s history that a multidisciplinary collective has acted as music director.

But rather than an updated Gesamtkunstwerk meant to overwhelm audiences with its demand for total submission to a single artist’s worldview, AMOC*’s amalgams are riotously adventurous and gloriously unpredictable — an alluring polyphony of voices and bodies, of styles and ideas, that is more akin to a feast or even a family dinner. Aucoin shines a light on the extraordinary assortment and intersections of the company members’ talents in the large-scale new work he has titled exactly that. He describes Family Dinner as a “polyvocal” celebration that interweaves concerto-like cameos and “confessions” with spoken toasts commissioned from an array of contemporary writers. Dance-like movements figure prominently. “Dance is central to AMOC*,” Aucoin remarks. “No matter how complicated things get, no matter how intense our discussions are, we always like to burn off the mist with dance.” Along with the family dinner metaphor for making the work of art (with its multiple chefs), another of the Festival’s most-anticipated world premieres, choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith’s Open Rehearsal, frames the synergies of dance and music in live performance with a meta-theatrical concept that opens up a hall of mirrors of unresolvable speculations, in keeping with our apprehensive, returningfrom-COVID era. This pivotal world premiere additionally considers the multiplicity of performative identities that are a signature of AMOC*’s artists.

An exuberant variety is on offer at this 76th Festival — from the “distant, unknown music” that characterizes the sound worlds of Messiaen and Michael Hersch alike to the contemporary accents Emi Ferguson and Ruckus bring to J.S. Bach. AMOC*’s creative ecosystem encourages such proliferation, as Zack Winokur explains: “This is not my company. This is our company, serving each core member. And that means not just spotlighting our members but also shape-shifting to support whatever their ideas are. So the guests come out of the particular projects and collaborations that they find interesting.” Inherently collaborative to begin with, AMOC* encourages its members to collaborate with their respective colleagues as well.

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STAYING ON IT

That doesn’t mean the 2022 Ojai Music Festival is a random smorgasbord. Although the opening and closing concerts present a menu of disparate selections, they include intersecting motifs that are threaded and echoed throughout the weekend, receiving in-depth consideration in particular performances. Take the practice of improvisation and its countless gradations, along with a corresponding philosophy of once-only realization of a work of art. We encounter the fascinating varieties of its manifestation in the oeuvre of Julius Eastman — himself a major thread uniting the program — and then in the work of George Lewis and an in-progress collaboration with Roscoe Mitchell.

This in turn is part of a larger theme of AMOC*’s Festival: the unique elusiveness of composers like Eastman whose music, as Winokur puts it, “demands to be played and performed differently every time, and sometimes in radically different ways.” All of Eastman, along with Hans Otte’s Book of Sounds, given a rare performance in toto by Conor Hanick, possesses an aura (in the Walter Benjamin sense) that could never be diminished — or faked — by technology.

Carolyn Chen’s How to Fall Apart, among AMOC*’s new commissions, reflects on the stories we tell about coming undone, from the cosmological to the everyday, and brings fresh perspective to the interchange between music and dance that is so central to the 2022 Festival program. The process of disintegration on a vast social scale is explored by AMOC* and Ruckus in Doug Balliett’s new opera Rome Is Falling. On the other hand, Anthony Cheung’s newly minted song cycle the echoing of tenses, focuses on the power but also ambiguity of individual memory to preserve identities. Chen represents a subtheme of Los Angeles–based composers, another of whom is Andrew McIntosh — “one of the best-kept secrets of our music world,” in Aucoin’s estimation. His Little Jimmy is a kind of “desert music” and preserves field recordings of natural sounds that have been burned out of existence by the recent wildfires.

Another defining element of the AMOC* aesthetic is what flutist Emi Ferguson calls “the synergy between early music and experimental music.” This informs her collaboration with Ruckus and was also the starting point for their cocommissioning of Roscoe Mitchell. An affinity between early and new music even determines the structure of the closing concert, which presents an opportunity to hear countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo performing Vivaldi and Philip Glass side-by-side. Aspects of Minimalism are likewise woven through the program. The overlooked contributions of Julius Eastman and Hans Otte share space not only with Glass but with the myriad appearances of this stylistic vocabulary among a new generation of postPostminimalist composers.

What could be a fitter rounding off of Ojai Music Festival’s 75th-anniversary year than this focus on the boldness of the new generation — particularly on the innovative processes of collaboration these artists are using to shape the art that will define a new century? “The members of AMOC*, as a collective, have a very different way of working and are ahead of their time,” says the Festival’s Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian. “They’ve taken their concept of multidisciplinary work further than many other groups. When you have all of these incredibly vibrant artistic atoms colliding with each other, what results is often the very surprising and very unexpected.”

—THOMAS MAY

Special thanks to the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne for their underwriting support to celebrate the Ojai Music Festival’s 75th anniversary season.