2023 Ojai Music Festival Program

RHIANNON GIDDENS MUSIC DIRECTOR

works by

alfred wallis

april 20 – june 11

canvas and paper

311 n. montgomery street

thursday – sunday

noon – 5 pm

canvasandpaper.org

Festival Events

oakgroveschool.org/discover

“Education in the true sense is helping the individual to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and goodness.”

— J. Krishnamurti

A Message from the Chairman of the Board

Welcome back to our long-term supporters and patrons, and a special welcome to those attending for the first time. We are very pleased to gather again in magical Ojai for our 77th Festival with the extraordinary Rhiannon Giddens as Music Director.

The entire Ojai Music Festival organization is grateful for the support of all of you — audience members, donors, artists, and volunteers. We are especially appreciative of the Ojai community, whose gracious welcome and hospitality is a celebrated trait of each Festival weekend.

The Ojai Music Festival has a rich history of attracting the most creative and talented artists from across the globe. We are proud of the Festival’s international reputation as a creative laboratory for artists and a gathering place for curious audiences who share an appetite for Ojai’s signature open-minded and open-hearted programming. Thank you for being a part of our story as a new adventure unfolds each year.

Our beloved Festival continues to flourish artistically, and with institutional and financial stability, thanks to Ara Guzelimian’s exceptional leadership alongside a devoted staff. Ojai’s artistic ambitions are supported by a deeply committed Board of Directors who are engaged, energetic, and personally generous. Together, we are committed to securing the Festival’s ability to serve you — and to serve the music — long into the future.

To this end, I am pleased to report that the Future Forward campaign that we began during our 75th anniversary season is making excellent progress towards our goal. Please consider a gift to help ensure that we can continue to come together as a community, sharing defining musical experiences. The Ojai Music Festival is an audience-supported organization, with contributions accounting for 75% of the Festival’s budget. You are a part of our story — please join us!

Enjoy the Festival and enjoy one another’s company as we celebrate our story with a bright future ahead for our treasured Ojai Music Festival.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

JERRY EBERHARDT

Chair

BARRY SANDERS Vice Chair - Governance

DON PATTISON Vice Chair - Development

CATHRYN KRAUSE Secretary

HOPE TSCHOPIK SCHNEIDER Treasurer

MARGARET BATES, MD

JAMIE BENNETT

MICHELE BRUSTIN

NANCYBELL COE

LAUREL CRARY OFWC President

RUTH ELIEL

STEPHAN FARBER

FRED FISHER

GREG GRINNELL

LUTHER LUEDTKE

THOMAS MCNALLEY, MD

GLENN MERCER

NEIL SELMAN

MAURICE SINGER

BRIDGET TSAO BROCKMAN

Directors Emeritus

RICK GOULD, MD

JOAN KEMPER

STEPHEN J.M. MORRIS

ARA GUZELIMIAN Artistic and Executive Director

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

KATE BARNHART

WILLIAM J. SHANBROM Co-Chairs

SASHA AND BILL ANAWALT

ANN BARRETT

BARBARA BARRY

MARJORIE BEALE AND WILLIAM MEYERHOFF

SUE BIENKOWSKI AND WANG LEE

MERRILL AND JUDY BLAU

EVELYN AND STEPHEN BLOCK

SUSAN BOWEY

TOM AND LILY BROD

PAMELA BURTON AND RICHARD HERTZ

HYON CHOUGH

JILL COHEN AND NORMAN SIDEROW

BARBARA DELAUNE WARREN

PENELOPE DONNELLY

KATHY AND JIM DRUMMY

MICHAEL DUNN

MARY AND WILLIAM DUXLER

CONSTANCE EATON AND WILLIAM HART

LISA FIELD

RUTH GILLILAND AND ARTHUR RIEMAN

LENNIE AND BERNIE GREENBERG

LINDA JOYCE HODGE

SCOTT JOHNSON

SUZY AND MOE KRABBE

LESLIE LASSITER

RAULEE MARCUS

SHARON MCNALLEY

PAMELA MELONE

CLAIRE AND DAVID OXTOBY

LINDA AND RON PHILLIPS

CATHERINE AND BARRY SCHIFRIN

PETER SCHNEIDER

ABBY SHER

SHELLEY AND GREG SMITH

ANNE-MARIE SPATARU

JANE TAYLOR AND FREDERIC OHRINGER

ESTHER WACHTELL

GARY WASSERMAN

JANE AND RICHARD WEIRICK

SUSANNE AND BLAKE* WILSON

JOAN WYNN

CATHY ZOI AND ROBIN ROY

For more information on how you can have an impact, visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or visit our Future Forward Campaign Booth in Libbey Park.

*Deceased

JERRY EBERHARDT

A Message from the Artistic and Executive Director

Welcome to the 77th Ojai Festival! I am so delighted to be in your company as we take part in a remarkably wide-ranging musical journey created by our Music Director this year, Rhiannon Giddens. Rhiannon has an extraordinary breadth of musical interests, all embraced with a spirit of generosity at every turn. Working with her has been so deeply rewarding. We are all thrilled to be celebrating the recent announcement that Rhiannon and Michael Abels were awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the opera Omar

I have long felt that the house of classical music is part of the larger house of music, which in turn is a vital part of the house of life. Our programming this year lives deeply in that belief. We travel readily across Liquid Borders and Between Worlds, as the title of two key Festival works make clear. We will meet at the intersection of cultures, hear music that is very old and very new, encounter people and stories that make our understanding of our world that much richer and more complete. I am immensely grateful to Rhiannon and all of this Festival’s infinitely imaginative artists for being our guides on this particular voyage of discovery. And I’m equally grateful to each listener — in person at the concerts and those watching online. We are so happy that you are here and that we are on this musical adventure together.

As you might imagine, it takes more than a village to assemble such a Festival, beginning with our devoted Board of Directors and Board of Governors whose generous stewardship of the Festival impacts every aspect of this treasured Festival. Our gratitude to the members of our beloved Ojai community is boundless — from local officials and public services to the Ojai businesses, from our intrepid Women’s Committee to the tireless volunteers and the housing hosts who so warmly welcome our artists into their homes. The Ojai Festival simply would not be possible without these key members of our family! Our larger Festival village includes each of you, our amazingly open and adventurous audience as well as every single donor who contributes to ensure the resources and well-being of this wonderfully improbable Festival — something of a musical miracle in the informal setting and natural beauty of a small-town park.

Thank you for joining us for this remarkable 2023 Festival. We invite you to consider a gift to the Festival’s anniversary campaign, Future Forward, to help the innovative spirit of this Festival continue to flourish for many years to come. It does take a village, and we are all villagers here.

I look forward with much pleasure to our voyage of musical discovery together over the next days. A very warm welcome to each of you.

ARA GUZELIMIAN

The position of Ara Guzelimian as Artistic & Executive Director is made possible by a generous gift in memory of Olin Barrett.

Photo by Square Productions

A Message from the Music Director

Well, it’s all thanks to Lois.

Two years ago, I played the Ojai Music Festival and was lucky enough to stay with one Lois Rice, steadfast Ojai supporter, razor-sharp businesswoman, and all-around wonderful human being. We had just made some biscuits and eggs in her restaurant-worthy kitchen (she made the eggs, I made the biscuits) and were talking about the upcoming, closing show of the Festival, and how there wasn’t an after party planned because…well, you know. COVID. Lois immediately said, “Well, why don’t you just invite a few of the organizers here? I’ll order pizza, we’ll make cocktails, let’s make it happen!” After an exhilarating last concert that Sunday night, I found myself holding a cocktail and having a deep conversation with Ara Guzelimian — and the idea for the program you hold in your hands was born. It’s a reminder of how much creativity takes place in the befores and the afters; in the warm homes of ardent supporters and in the green rooms of venues; in all the liminal spaces of the performing arts world — those spaces that were hit the hardest with the strictures of COVID.

The first program is called Liquid Borders, and that is a pretty good descriptor for this entire weekend. Every border is porous, movable, and ultimately, artificial — like a color spectrum, musical forms blend into each other, and the only definitions are the ones that we collectively decide on. It’s only purple when everybody says it’s purple. What is classical music? What is folk? Does it matter? Who gets to decide?

For this weekend, no decisions are necessary — because it’s all there. From China, to Iran, to Italy, to the United States — and everywhere in between — we have musicians who will channel all the years of practice, study, emotional living, and knowledge into music that will move the soul, satisfy the mind, and warm the heart. We have compositions straddling worlds and challenging expectations. We have collaborations that will make connections that nobody will see coming but will immediately be unable to live without.

In short, there will be the fullest spectrum of handmade music imaginable — purple and all.

RHIANNON GIDDENS

The residency of Rhiannon Giddens as Music Director is made possible by the generous support of Jill and Bill Shanbrom and the Shanbrom Family Foundation.

Photo by EbruYildiz

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

OPENING A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

Here, you will experience supportive instruction that inspires compelling performances. You’ll collaborate with remarkable guest composers and performing artists. And you’ll be supported by resources that make imaginative projects possible.

SILKROAD ENSEMBLE 2023 TOUR

Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

ARTISTS

Rhiannon Giddens

Artistic Director, banjo, fiddle, vocals

Shawn Conley, bass

Pura Fé Crescioni, lap-steel guitar, voice

Haruka Fujii, percussion

Sandeep Das, tablas

Maeve Gilchrist, celtic harp

Karen Ouzounian, cello

Mazz Swift violin, voice

Niwel Tsumbu, guitar

Francesco Turrisi, frame drums, accordion

Kaoru Watanabe, percussion

Wu Man, pipa

Michi Wiancko, violin

Silkroad’s newest initiative, American Railroad, illuminates the impact of African American, Chinese, Indigenous, Irish, and other immigrant communities on the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad and America’s Westward Expansion. Exploring the dissemination of cultures across the United States, the railroad was to North America what the Silk Road was to China, the Far East and Europe. Led by artistic director Rhiannon Giddens, each stop on the American Railroad explores the cultural intersections through music, revealing a thread of commonality and reminding us of the intricately rich American story.

FOUR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DATES!

SO CAL TOUR SCHEDULE

Thu, Nov 9 | Santa Barbara

GRANADA THEATRE

Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu

Sat, Nov 11 | Aliso Viejo

SOKA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

Presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County & Soka Performing Arts Center

PhilharmonicSociety.org | Soka.edu/pac

Fri, Nov 10 | San Diego

THE BALBOA THEATRE

Presented by La Jolla Music Society TheConrad.org

Sun, Nov 12 | Northridge

THE SORAYA

Presented by The Soraya at CSUN TheSoraya.org

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.”

Ojai Music Festival: A Creative Laboratory

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

OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL MUSIC DIRECTORS

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

FALL IN LOVE WITH NEW MUSIC

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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

LEARN MORE AT OVS.ORG

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

PRE-KINDERGARTEN TO 12TH GRADE

TWO CAMPUSES IN OJAI | DAY & BOARDING

Building Bridges at the Crossroads

The fact that Rhiannon Giddens made her Ojai Music Festival debut during the 75th anniversary season in 2021 could hardly be more fitting. When curating that milestone edition of the Festival, Music Director John Adams made a point not to rest on laurels from the past but instead to spotlight artists who are shaping the future of music.

Giddens and her colleagues count among the indispensable faces of that future. In the two years since her first Ojai appearance, she has become an increasingly influential presence. The list of accomplishments that Giddens, a Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, can point to since 2021 alone is as wideranging as it is staggering. It includes, among other things, her breakthrough as an opera composer and librettist (the Pultizer-winning Omar), her second Grammy Award win (Best Folk Album in 2022 for They’re Calling Me Home, in partnership with Francesco Turrisi, which was featured at the 2021 Ojai Music Festival), her collaboration with Silkroad Ensemble since being appointed Artistic Director (including their first post-pandemic tour, Phoenix Rising), a season-long residency at Carnegie Hall that reimagined the platform of the song recital (also with Turrisi), and her debut as a children’s book author (Build a House).

The 2023 Festival program, which encompasses examples related to all of the above and much more, explores Giddens’s vision as this year’s Music Director that “the future

is in celebration of how we come together as humans — despite boxes, boundaries, and borders thrown up with the intent to keep us apart.”

The connection Giddens forged with the audience in 2021 convinced her that Ojai offers an environment especially conducive to sharing that vision: “With Ojai, I am able to sit at the crossroads of all that I am artistically.” Adds Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian: “Rhiannon Giddens defies genre and categorization with incredible ease and creativity. This edition of the Festival is a reflection of that.”

Being at the crossroads has deepened Giddens’s understanding of the myriad ways in which “there is no Other,” to cite the title of her landmark 2019 album with Francesco Turrisi. That phrase might also serve as the motto for the sweeping vision of this summer’s Festival. Together with Guzelimian, Giddens has mapped out an array of programs to convey this philosophy of inclusiveness — of breaking down the barriers that establish and enforce the condition of “othering.” In the process, she uncovers long-suppressed truths about and historical insights into overlooked influences on American culture, such as the indispensable contributions from Black American artists that were absorbed without acknowledgment.

What happens when we acknowledge that the dividing lines we’ve been trained to assume as givens are in reality

“liquid,” as the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz depicts them in her percussion quartet Liquid Borders? For one thing, we become more sensitive to the nuances of human experience: to how it resists being categorized by labels that political forces and ideology rely on to impose their power.

The suite Between Worlds by the young American composer Carlos Simon is emblematic of this perspective. Simon effortlessly traverses the entangled identities of familiar Western string instruments — blues, folk, classical — to reflect on the legacy of Bill Traylor, a self-taught, formerly enslaved artist who moved between Black and white culture, rural and urban lifestyles, traditional and modern contexts.

The wealth of traditions, styles, and even instruments we will encounter throughout the Festival ranges from distant antiquity (including music for the ancient pipa deciphered from Chinese scrolls nearly 1,000 years old) to a newly commissioned work by the Iranian composer Aida Shirazi that integrates the technology of electronic music with the age-old strains of the ancient bowed string instrument known as the kamancheh.

Challenging borders and categories so as to celebrate the mutually enriching collaboration between different cultures is at the heart of the mission of the Silkroad Ensemble, which Giddens recently began guiding into its third decade.

Several Silkroad musicians are participating in the 2023 Ojai Music Festival, including leading figures representing the Chinese and Persian classical traditions — two prominent threads being explored this weekend.

Kayhan Kalhor, a virtuoso of the kamancheh, draws on a repertoire of melodies codified centuries ago as part of Persian court tradition, which he brings to life in countless fresh, unrepeatable manifestations through his subtle art of improvisation. Through this category-defying musical practice, Kalhor invites us to interrogate standard Western concepts of the division of labor required to produce a composition. We will also encounter music by a courageous group of female composers from Iran representing the young generation. Collectively bonded together as the Iranian Female Composers Association, they challenge cultural strictures limiting their creativity as women and uninhibitedly combine their knowledge of Persian classical music with Western experimental trends.

Wu Man, a recipient of the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship given by the National Endowment for the Arts, will blend her virtuosity on the pipa (ancient Chinese lute) with Giddens’s roots banjo and the sonorities of a string quartet. A centerpiece of Wu Man’s involvement is a brandnew production of Ghost Opera, a pivotal work Tan Dun wrote specifically for her and the Kronos Quartet early in his career.

BUILDING BRIDGES AT THE CROSSROADS

Tan Dun was mentored by Chou Wen-Chung, who left his mark on several generations of Chinese American students. They in turn have gone on to expand the vocabulary and perspective of contemporary classical music in the West. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Chou Wen-Chung’s birth this year, Giddens and Guzelimian have included two outstanding examples of the music of this trailblazing composer, teacher, and scholar: one of them, Echoes from the Gorge, ranks among the most significant 20th-century compositions for percussion, according to Steven Schick, Ojai’s Music Director in 2015, who will be on hand to lead this performance.

Chou Wen-Chung’s unique position between the worlds of Chinese classical tradition and Western avant-garde music is suggested by the juxtaposition with music of Edgard Varèse, his mentor and close friend. Space is also given to a younger generation of Chinese American composers with the music of Lei Liang, another of the Festival’s featured composers. Like Chou Wen-Chung, Lei Liang combines the identities of artist and scholarly researcher; bringing things full circle, he directs the advisory board of the Chou WenChung Music Research Center in Xinghai.

The adventurous members of the Attacca Quartet, who will partner with Wu Man in Ghost Opera, continue the collaboration with Giddens that they began so enthusiastically at the 2021 Ojai Music Festival. Now in their 20th-anniversary year, they open this year’s edition with a strikingly original playlist showcasing their strengths and interests (including an excerpt from their latest Grammy Award–winning project with Caroline Shaw).

The Quartet took their name from the musical instruction meaning, literally, “attached,” which calls for musicians to keep on playing without stopping at a musical border. According to cellist and founding member Andrew Yee, trying to posit a logical and linear transition from one time period to the next is far less involving than plotting a “spiritual journey” charting their own identity and evolution. Yee describes the liberating feeling of playing across multiple styles and genres “without the burden of calling it crossover.”

In other words, “you don’t have to be a specialist in just one thing and then call yourself a ‘guest’ in another.” While there was “a lot of fear of steering outside your lane in the past,” Yee observes, the focus nowadays is on “bringing honesty to the art form, because you’re not thinking of it as a tourist.”

Additional insights into the issue of music histories await us in the contributions from Francesco Turrisi and his colleagues. A longtime practitioner of jazz and early music, the multi-instrumentalist Turrisi mirrors and complements the ravenous curiosity and versatility of Giddens, his artistic and life partner. Ara Guzelimian describes him as “a perfect match” to Giddens, “one of the most incredibly genredefying, wide-ranging artists I’ve met, both scholarly and popular.”

To give a platform to Turrisi’s “uncontainability,” Guzelimian suggested a program of “early music,” playing on the double entendre with the Sunday morning slot. In keeping with the goal of breaking down barriers, Turrisi and his musical guests will bring together early music from outside the Western tradition and also interweave folk sources and improvisational practices.

The bridges that Giddens and her fellow artists will build at these various crossroads involve more than celebrating a diversity of traditions and styles. Her work makes space for stories hidden or eclipsed by mainstream narratives that are needed to expand our assumptions about American identity — whether in her children’s book Build a House, which reimagines the memorable ballad she wrote during lockdown, or in this year’s major Ojai Music Festival commission: Omar’s Journey, a new concert suite drawn from the opera Omar, which she co-composed with Michael Abels (see sidebar on p. 52).

“There’s a lot of opportunity for all of these worlds to naturally come together at Ojai,” says Giddens. “We are more similar than we are different. And these different musics, I think, all have more similarities than they have differences.”

photo: Ebru Yildiz

Joan Kemper’s Way

One of my favorite spots in Ojai can be found in a corner of this very park, close to Ojai Avenue — Joan Kemper Way, a path connecting Libbey Park to the Ojai Art Center a block away. It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most remarkable citizens of our community.

Joan was a relatively recent arrival to Ojai when she stepped in to serve as Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival in the early 1990s. I had the huge pleasure of working with her for several years and marveled at her boundless gifts for making things happen. She is one of those remarkable people who has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. The Festival was floundering without leadership at the time she took it over — there was no task too large or small for Joan, who rolled up her sleeves and rallied everything and everyone necessary to accomplish the task at hand. Ask me sometime about how she managed to meet Peter Sellars’ request to get an actual pickup truck onstage at Libbey Bowl as the set for Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat

Good things happen whenever Joan is around, particularly throughout the Ojai community. She has a way of bringing people to a common cause, with music and theater being especially close to her heart. She

gets you to pitch in and then she makes the whole thing such great fun that you end up thanking her. A partial list of Joan’s volunteer activities and leadership reads like everything good about Ojai — beginning with her beloved Ojai Performing Arts Theater and including the Ojai Museum, the Ojai Film Society, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, the Ojai Valley Community Hospital, and the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy among numerous other organizations.

Joan has slyly been saying “you know, I’m basically a hundred years old” for several years but she actually reached that milestone last December. Not surprisingly, the guest of honor was the life of the party! Her wonderful indefatigable spirit seems to me as lively and inspiring as it was on the day I met her.

I am grateful, like so many others, to travel on Joan Kemper Way! Long may you brighten our lives, Joan.

—ARA GUZELIMIAN

Joan Kemper and family at her 100th Celebration in December.

Enhance Your Experience

OJAI CHATS

Learn about concert works from the composers! John Schaefer will host 30-minute chats throughout the weekend at the Libbey Park Gazebo. Look for the daily schedule of featured guests on our free Mobile App or on the program pages

GREEN ROOM IN THE PARK

An important part of the Festival is enjoying the wonderful setting of Libbey Park. Visit our special surroundings in the center of the park, meet up with friends, and enjoy drinks and small bites. Learn more about the Festival, our Future Forward Campaign, Ojai Festival Women’s Committtee, and our BRAVO education program. Plus, visit Bart’s Books booth on the weekend

FESTIVAL POP-UP BOUTIQUE

Take home something to help remember your Festival experience! Visit our pop-up market featuring 2023 Festival T-shirts, as well as essentials including hats, seat cushions, blankets, CDs, and more swag!

SUPPERS IN THE PARK

One of our favorite traditions with Festival friends under the oak trees in Libbey Park! Enjoy a gourmet boxed dinner with wine provided by The Ojai Vineyard. Friday, June 9 with Ojai Rôtie and Saturday, June 10 with Lorraine Lim Catering. Limited seating. Advance reservations only.

OJAI BEYOND

The Festival’s live online community continues to grow through our live stream broadcast. Since its inception in 2012, we have expanded Ojai’s global footprint, building vastly larger audiences and deepening relationships with patrons throughout the year. Please enjoy your favorite Festival concerts from this year and years past at OjaiFestival.org free of charge after the Festival.

STAY CONNECTED

Keep in touch with the latest news and updates both during and after the Festival.

A MULTI-DAY SERIES OF CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY CONCERTS, COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND DYNAMIC SPECIAL EVENTS IN ORANGE COUNTY, CA

2024 FESTIVAL ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | VIOLINIST

Anne Akiko Meyers

CONCERTS @ LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE IN LAGUNA BEACH, CA

FEB 16, 8PM: METAMORPHOSES

Anne Akiko Meyers creates a “beautiful sonic world full of color and movement and breath” in her Opening Night program: “Metamorphoses,” featuring new premieres of arrangements for violin and harp as well as violin and electronics.

FEB 17, 8PM: DOUBLES

Joined by string orchestra, Anne Akiko Meyers shares a program titled “Doubles,” which features the fiery interplay of two violins in works such as Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, Philip Glass’ Echorus for Two Violins and Strings, Steve Reich’s Duet for Two Solo Violins and Strings, and more.

FEB 18, 3PM CARNAVAL!

Anne Akiko Meyers brings the 2024 Laguna Beach Music Festival to a delightful close with “Carnaval!” pairing new arrangements of two beloved works: Camille Saint-Saëns’ whimsical Carnival of the Animals and Arturo Márquez’s evocative and dance-inspired Danzón No. 2.

PRESENTED BY THE PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY OF ORANGE COUNTY & LAGUNA BEACH LIVE!

Classically-trained musicians, from new talents to legendary icons, converge at the Music Academy to bring you a summer filled with strings, horns, and operatic arias. Over 120 performances, including symphonies led by world famous conductors, a 1979-set CABARET, and a very modern take on LA BOHÈME.

ANTHONY MCGILL Mosher Guest Artist, Clarinet

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Festival Information

BOX OFFICE HOURS

The Festival Box Office is located in the center of Libbey Park. Our friendly staff and interns will be glad to help you with ticket purchases and questions, as well as ordering your 2024 Festival series passes. Assisted listening devices are available for checkout at the Box Office. Please bring a valid photo ID. If you are unable to use your tickets, you can make a taxdeductible contribution by returning them to the Box Office at least 48 hours in advance of the concert. Stop by the Box Office or call our Ticket Donation Hotline at 805.646.2192.

HOURS OF OPERATION:

Thurs., June 8 12pm-9pm

Fri., June 9 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sat., June 10 9am-1pm / 2:30pm-9pm Sun., June 11 9am-1pm / 4pm-7:30pm

LATE SEATING

Performances start at the time designated on your ticket. In deference to the comfort and listening pleasure of the audience, late-arriving patrons will not be seated while music is being performed. Latecomers are asked to wait quietly in the designated areas until the first break in the program when ushers will assist them to their seats. Late-seating breaks and arrangements vary by concert and are at the discretion of the Front of House Manager in consultation with the conductor and performing artists. Please note that performances without breaks may not have late seating.

Chimes will ring 10 minutes before the start of each concert and 10 minutes before the end of intermission.

Please note: Artists and programs are subject to change without notice. In the event of a weather emergency, concerts may be canceled without ticket refunds.

PHOTOS AND RECORDINGS

Photography, audio recording, and videography are prohibited during Festival performances. We appreciate your cooperation in helping us create an environment for the artists that is not distracting.

PHONES AND ELECTRONIC DEVICES

As a courtesy to others, before the start of Festival performances please turn off your phone, car alarm, and any other electronic device that makes noise or emits light. Efforts to control paper rustling will be appreciated by both audience members and artists.

ALCOHOL & DRINKS POLICY

Due to City of Ojai’s policy, alcohol that is purchased in the Festival’s Green Room in the Park must be consumed in the designated restricted areas. Alcohol will be permitted only in the lawn area of the Bowl. We appreciate that patrons do not bring beverages in the reserved seating sections of the Libbey Bowl. No food or drinks will be allowed in our off-campus venues.

SMOKING POLICY

Both Libbey Park and Libbey Bowl are designated no-smoking zones (including vape pens and e-cigarettes) by the City of Ojai. The Festival’s office, donor lounge, off-campus events, and backstage are also nonsmoking areas.

LAWN SEATING

As a courtesy to other lawn patrons, blankets and low-rise chairs are preferred. Please bring low-rise, beach-style chairs with legs of 10 inches or less. Patrons with higher-rise chairs, such as camping or deck chairs, will be asked to move to the house right side of the lawn. Please do not leave valuable items in the lawn area. The Festival is not responsible for lost or damaged items.

LOST AND FOUND

If you lose or find an item, please check in with the Festival Box Office, just outside the entrance to Libbey Bowl.

RESTROOMS

The Festival provides and maintains portable restrooms which are located 50 yards east of the Box Office in Libbey Park.

PATRONS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Seating for patrons with wheelchairs is available in a reserved section of Libbey Bowl. Please contact the Box Office as early as possible for special seating requests. A handicapped parking lot is located on Signal Street for vehicles displaying a DMV handicapped parking hang tag or license plate. Early arrival is encouraged, as these spaces fill up. For patrons requiring a short walk into Libbey Bowl, a handicapped drop-off point is located near the backstage on Signal Street. Please notify the barricade attendant and they will direct you. There is also nearby parking for the drivers of those needing assistance. For listening devices, please visit the Box Office. Public restrooms at the east end of Libbey Park are wheelchair accessible. Please contact an usher if you need assistance.

IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY

Emergency exits are clearly marked. In the event of an emergency, ushers and Festival staff will provide instructions. Contact an usher or member of the Festival staff if you require medical assistance.

SERVICE ANIMALS

Patrons with disabilities are welcome to bring service animals. Service animals, as defined under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks directly related to a person’s disability. The dog must be able to rest in the seat area of the individual with a disability, excluding aisles or walkways. Please note that any animal whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support does not qualify as a service animal under ADA regulations. We reserve the right to withhold or remove a service dog that fundamentally alters the nature of our programming by behaving in an unacceptable way during a performance, and/ or if the person with the disability does not or cannot control the animal.

AFTER THE PERFORMANCE

We appreciate your cooperation in helping to clear the seating area after concerts. Please be sure to take all personal items and dispose of trash as you leave the Bowl.

GO GREEN

The Festival strives to minimize its ecological footprint. We encourage you to do your share by separating your trash and using our recycle boxes provided by E.J. Harrison & Sons, and by using our complimentary water refill stations located throughout the Park and inside the Bowl. The same program book can be reused throughout the Festival.

OJAI TROLLEY SERVICE

The Ojai Trolley is a convenient way to get from your Ojai lodging to the Libbey Bowl! The Trolley stops near the Blue Iguana Inn, Capri, Casa Ojai, Chantico, Hummingbird Inn, Ojai Rancho Inn, and Ojai Valley Inn. On the evenings of THU, FRI, and SAT, the Ojai Trolley will have free late service after the evening concerts, courtesy of the Ojai Music Festival. You can board the Trolley after these evening performances on Signal Street.

ATMs

There are a few banks within walking distance of Libbey Bowl: Pacific Western Bank (110 S. Ventura Street), Bank of America (205 W. Ojai Avenue) and Wells Fargo Bank (202 E. Matilija Street).

COVID-SAFETY PROTOCOL

The Ojai Music Festival is committed to protecting and ensuring the health and safety of its staff, artists, volunteers, and the Ojai community. Your support and participation are greatly appreciated.

During the 2023 Festival, our audiences will no longer be required to wear masks or show proof of Covid-19 vaccination. Masks are optional but recommended for individuals who are at increased risk for severe disease. We will have hand sanitation supplies available throughout the Festival campus.

Please stay at home if you have any symptoms of illness or have been in contact with someone who is symptomatic or has tested positive for Covid-19. These guidelines are subject to change based on the advice of public health officials and conditions at the time of the Festival.

Keep informed with any updates on our free Mobile App.

Ojai Talks is made possible by the generous support of Rachel Sater and Tom McNalley

OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Gabriela Ortiz and Aida Shirazi

Pop-Up Performance at Libbey Park, 6:30pm: Moon Viewing Music by Peter Garland featuring Steven Schick

Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 2:30pm

Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

OJAI TALKS

PART I

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels with Ara Guzelimian

BREAK

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS)

723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI

PART II

2023 Featured Composers with John Schaefer of WNYC/New Sounds

Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 6:30pm

Libbey Park

FREE COMMUNITY EVENT

Steven Schick percussion

Peter GARLAND (b. 1953)

Moon Viewing Music (2016)

Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness

Studies #1) is composed for three large, knobbed gongs and one large (flat) tam-tam. For the gongs I want a deep low sound, but at the same time the relationship between them (and the character of the pieces in which multiple gongs are featured) is essentially melodic. I am not fixing pitches or interval relationships, so as not to limit possibilities (and to accommodate what might be available on hand). But the tonal (and harmonic/vibrational) character of the three gongs is very important.

This music is low and slow — an obvious correlation exists between tempo and pitch register. As opposed to high and fast, for instance. I might also suggest a correspondence between the round shapes of the gongs and tam-tam and that of the full moon.

I have long ago ceased indicating specific mallets or beaters for my percussionist friends, who are way ahead of me in that department. Besides, a certain amount of empirical testing is inevitable and desirable.

Each of the six pieces has a corresponding haiku or short poem, and there is meant to be a correlation between text and music. Hence the percussionist is free to

recite these poems (or not) before each movement. Ryokan, Buson, and Saigyo are well-known poets, and the texts are taken from various collections of their work. Hyakuri and Renseki (#5 and #6) are lesser-known haiku poets and their texts are taken from a favorite book of mine, Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffman and published by Charles E. Tuttle Company.

For me moon viewing is a year-round activity, though I’m aware that it is associated with autumn in the Japanese literary tradition (as in the text for #4). This cycle was composed in the winter. There is a unique light and intensity in a winter moon, as it rises in the darkest days (nights) of the year, and shines on a landscape of trees stripped of their leaves and of white snow that amplifies and reflects the moonlight, often creating an eerie sense of daylight — further reinforced by the shadows cast on the snow.

There is also a special silence because of the extreme cold, and the absence of animal, bird, and insect sounds. If autumn is the moonlight of nostalgia, winter is the moonlight of loneliness, an inscrutable stillness.

—PETER GARLAND

This Pop-Up Performance is made possible with the generous support of Stephan Farber, Sound Post Capital

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cathryn and Tom Krause

The concert appearance of Attacca Quartet is made possible by the generous support of Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer

OJAI CHATS

at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Gabriela Ortiz and Aida Shirazi

Pop-Up Performance at Libbey Park, 6:30pm: Moon Viewing Music by Peter Garland featuring Steven Schick

Thursday, June 8, 2023 | 8:00pm

Libbey Bowl

LIQUID BORDERS

Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Steven Schick percussion/director | red fish blue fish percussion

Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello

Gabriela ORTIZ

Liquid Borders

Liquid City

Liquid Desert

Liquid Jungle

red fish blue fish, Steven Schick percussion

INTERMISSION

Attacca Quartet Playlist

Joseph HAYDN

Andante from String Quartet in F major, Op. 77 No. 2 Hob. III:82

Zakir HUSSAIN

Pallavi

(arranged by Reena Esmail)

Philip GLASS First Movement from String Quartet No. 3 (“Mishima”)

Colin JACOBSEN

Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged

Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Francesco Turrisi percussion

Geeshie WILEY

Last Kind Words

Rhiannon GIDDENS Lullaby

Rhiannon Giddens vocals

David CROSBY/Nathan SCHRAM Where We Are Not

(arranged by Nathan Schram)

Caroline SHAW Stem and Root from The Evergreen

John ADAMS

Judah to Ocean and Rag the Bone from John’s Book of Alleged Dances

SQUAREPUSHER

Xetaka 1

Gabriela ORTIZ (b. 1964)

Liquid Borders (2013)

Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809)

Andante from String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, No. 2 Hob. III:82 (1799)

Zakir HUSSAIN (b. 1951)

Pallavi (2017)

Philip GLASS (b. 1937)

First Movement from String Quartet No. 3 (“Mishima”) (1985)

No Boundaries

Liquid Borders: Both the title and the premise of the percussion quartet by Gabriela Ortiz that opens this edition of the Ojai Music Festival could not be better suited to Rhiannon Giddens’s curatorial vision. The Mexico City–based Ortiz has created a body of boundlessly imaginative work animated by adventurous border crossings between strikingly different realms: folk and avant-garde, Latin American and European, acoustic and electronic.

Ortiz comes from an influential musical family. Her parents were among the earliest members of the still-active group Los Folkloristas, founded in 1966, which transformed the understanding of Latin American folk music. A composer who asserts that “sounds have souls,” she has developed a special connection to California ensembles, producing works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet.

Explorations of folklore and folk music, pre- and post-colonial, play a prominent role in Ortiz’s music. She combines these sources with contemporary techniques to generate unprecedented yet somehow inevitable sounding and extraordinarily evocative musical spaces.

Colin JACOBSEN (b. 1978)

Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged (2008)

Geeshie WILEY (1908-1950)

Last Kind Words

Rhiannon GIDDENS (b. 1977)

Lullaby

David CROSBY (1941-2023)/

Nathan SCHRAM (b. 1987) Where We Are Not (2020)

Caroline SHAW (b. 1977)

Stem and Root from The Evergreen (2022)

John ADAMS (b. 1947)

Judah to Ocean and Rag the Bone from John’s Book of Alleged Dances (1994)

SQUAREPUSHER (Tom Jenkinson, b. 1975) Xetaka 1 (2021)

Liquid Borders originated as a commission from Steven Schick for his University of California at San Diego–based percussion ensemble red fish blue fish and was premiered at the Banff Centre in Canada in August 2014. The title refers not only to dissolving aesthetic barriers but to Ortiz’s utopian reflection on what it might be like to overcome the artificial divisions she believes are put in place for political and economic reasons.

But because those divisions are in place, they exacerbate injustices caused by changes in the economy, society, and climate, which Ortiz illustrates in the varied soundscapes corresponding to each of the work’s three movements. The metallic and glass percussion of “Liquid City” conjures an urban landscape that, according to the composer, refers to the problem of impoverished immigrants from Mexico’s countryside facing desperate conditions when they seek economic improvement in the cities. In “Liquid Desert,” the soundscape changes dramatically to ghostly, dry, dark, rattling sounds. The social context here involves the problem in the north of Mexico caused by cheap maquila factories that exploit impoverished women. The players are

instructed to whisper the word maquila to represent “these lost voices of women who have disappeared or been killed.” “Liquid Jungle” uses the timbres of marimbas, bongos, and woodblocks to evoke the scene at Mexico’s southern border, with driving rhythms derived from Caribbean and African music. The life force itself pulses with irresistible energy and cannot be contained.

Liquefying the borders between genres and disciplines is a signature of the Attacca Quartet. The playlist they’ve put together to launch their Ojai residency presents a self-portrait of the ensemble and their voracious appetite for trying new things. But rather than a straightforward, realist style, it’s a portrait painted in wildly abstract colors, “where our past and our future are simultaneously reflected in some form,” as cellist Andrew Yee puts it. “Asking what our artistic vision adds to this already rich art form has freed us up to experiment with the framework of our programming.”

The “Haydn 68” project — a cycle of all of the composer’s quartets, which Attacca performed from 2010 to 2016 — left a lasting mark on the quartet’s sound.

GABRIELA ORTIZ

Latin Grammy–nominated Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today.

She has composed three operas, in all of which interdisciplinary collaboration has been a vital experience. Notably, these operas are framed by political contexts of great complexity, such as the drug war in Only the Truth, illegal migration between Mexico and the United States in Ana and her Shadow, and the violation of university autonomy during the student movement of 1968 in Firefly

Ortiz’s music has been commissioned and performed all over the world by prestigious ensembles, soloists, and orchestras. Recent premieres include Yanga and Téenek, both pieces commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel; Luciérnaga (Firefly, her third opera), commissioned and produced by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; and Únicamente la Verdad (Only the Truth, her first opera), with Long Beach Opera and Opera de Bellas Artes in Mexico.

She has been honored with the National Prize for Arts and Literature and has been inducted into the Mexican Academy of the Arts. Born in Mexico City, her parents were musicians in the renowned folk music ensemble Los Folkloristas. She trained with the eminent composer Mario Lavista at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and with Federico Ibarra at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She teaches composition at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and as a visiting professor at Indiana University. Her music is published by Schott, Ediciones Mexicanas de Música, Saxiana Presto, and Tre Fontane.

They play the Andante from Haydn’s last completed work in the medium, composed in 1799 and deemed by the composer himself as his “most beautiful string quartet.” Beginning with an almost folklike duet for just violin and cello, Haydn varies the main idea in profoundly surprising ways.

Zakir Hussain composed Pallavi in 2017 as part of Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future project to create repertory for a new generation of music lovers; Reena Esmail prepared this arrangement. The composer has provided this commentary: “Pallavi is the ancient Carnatic word for ‘composition.’ Each raga would have at least 100 traditional compositions of this type. The piece as written follows the prescribed format of the ancient Pallavi in which there is first Pallavi, then Anu Pallavi followed by Charnam.... Unlike the traditional Pallavi based in one raga, I have used four different ragas and tried to find a way to give each instrument its own personality with a raga assigned just for it. By doing so I hoped to address the Western system, which employs

counterpoint and harmony, through the multi-tonal play of the four ragas working in tandem in certain passages. There is also interplay between different rhythm cycles (Tala) using 4, 6, 9, and 16 beats, each assigned to an instrument in the quartet.”

As with the Haydn piece, economy of means is at the fore in Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3. It derives from his score for Paul Schrader’s biographical film about the Japanese writer Mishima (1985). The Attaccas recorded the work on their 2021 album Of All Joys, which juxtaposes music of the Renaissance with the Minimalist aesthetic.

Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged began as a collaboration between Kayhan Kalhor and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. Working on a production with the Silkroad Ensemble, the violinist Colin Jacobsen had become fascinated by Layla and Majnun, the story of star-crossed lovers immensely popular in the Middle East (whose Western counterpart is often said to be Romeo and Juliet). Knowledge

of the rich tradition of Persian music is no prerequisite to being swept away by Kalhor’s depiction of the state of lovemadness central to the telling of the story, with its anticipation of medieval European troubadours.

To embark on their collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival, the musicians have chosen two especially characteristic songs: Last Kind Words, which Giddens covers on her debut solo album from 2015 (Tomorrow Is My Turn), was written and recorded by Geeshie Wiley in 1930 and condenses an evocative drama into the country blues idiom. Giddens’s Lullaby, from her 2017 album Folk Songs with the Kronos Quartet, only hints at the underlying situation, endured by countless enslaved women, that makes it so heartbreaking: “such a shame now, little baby, that you are not my own.”

In memory of the late David Crosby, who died at his ranch in nearby Santa Ynez in January, the Attacca Quartet performs a

piece that violist Nathan Schram wrote with the legendary songwriter called Where We Are Not. Schram transformed the song I’d

Swear There Was Somebody

Here from Crosby’s debut solo album of 1970 (If I Could Only Remember My Name) into a haunting new composition on his solo record Nearsided, which he arranged for Attacca. “It’s about people we had both lost in the past but now has taken on a new meaning,” says Schram.

The Attaccas also pay tribute to their close collaboration with composer Caroline Shaw, offering selections from their most recent recording, which won a Grammy Award this year. Shaw’s quartet writing is often inspired by gardens and trees — as is the case with The Evergreen, a fourmovement work she has described as “an offering” to a tree in a coniferous forest on one of the islands in the Salish Sea separating Canada and the U.S. Shaw’s vivid, gestural writing for the strings reclaims the Romantic aspiration toward “organically” inspired art for our climateanxious time.

A decade ago, on their Fellow Traveler album devoted to the string quartet music John Adams had written up to that point, Attacca Quartet put their own stamp on his 1994 collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, John’s Book of Alleged Dances They play two of the 10 dances — whose “general tone is dry, droll, sardonic,” according to the composer — that call for a pre-recorded percussion track played by prepared piano.

One of the Attacca Quartet’s most experimental projects to date in crossing borders is their 2021 album Real Life, which gave them a platform to repaint the musical canvases of leading artists and producers in electronica and avant hip-hop, including Squarepusher. Their blending of the string quartet — historically, a benchmark of acoustic intimacy — with the contemporary dance floor’s amplified reverberations can sound by turns thrillingly chaotic and serenely surreal.

This concert is approximately 115 minutes.

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Don Pattison

The Ojai residency of the Iranian Female Composers Association is made possible, in part, by the gracious support of the Farhang Foundation

There is no intermission during the concert

Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00am

Zalk Theater, Besant Hill School

OJAI DAWNS

Emi Ferguson flute | Ross Karre percussion | Tara Khozein soprano | Niloufar Shiri kamancheh

Aida Shirazi electronics | Steven Schick percussion | red fish blue fish percussion

Golfam KHAYAM Lost Wind

Emi Ferguson flute | Ross Karre percussion

ZALK THEATER, BESANT HILL SCHOOL

8585 OJAI SANTA PAULA ROAD

Aida SHIRAZI

Yearning, Every Dawn World Premiere

Commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival

Niloufar Shiri kamancheh | Aida Shirazi electronics

Tara Khozein soprano (recorded)

Edgard VARÈSE

Density 21.5

Emi Ferguson flute

CHOU Wen-Chung

Echoes from the Gorge

prelude (exploring the modes)

raindrops on bamboo leaves

echoes from the gorge

autumn pond

clear moon

shadows in the ravine

old tree by the cold spring

droplets down the rocks

drifting clouds

rolling pearls

peaks and cascades

falling rocks and flying spray

red fish blue fish, Steven Schick percussion

Golfam

KHAYAM (b. 1983)

Lost Wind (2018)

Aida SHIRAZI (b. 1987) Yearning, Every Dawn (2023)

Edgard VARÈSE (1883-1965)

Density 21.5 (1936)

CHOU Wen-Chung (1923-2019)

Echoes from the Gorge (1989)

Calligraphies of Sound

For all its antiquity, the flute has taken a lead, liberating role in the transition to modernism. Pierre Boulez cited Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as the “origin” point of modern music. Georges Barrère, who played the epochal flute solo that begins Debussy’s trailblazing score at its premiere in 1894, asked Edgard Varèse to write Density 21.5 for him 42 years later. In Lost Wind, Golfam Khayam similarly uses the flute to imagine a new sound world. But the reference point in her case is the rich and diverse Persian classical music tradition.

Like many composers of her generation, Khayam ventured outside her native Iran to continue her studies. After immersing herself in contemporary experimental music in Cincinnati and Geneva, she returned to Iran and now teaches in Tehran. Lost Wind is a written score but breathes the spirit of improvisation that is central to Persian music and offers the flute soloist ample opportunity to make individual choices about phrasing and rhythmic articulation. Extended techniques calling for breathing in and out of the instrument, bending pitch, “aeolian sound,” and the like suggest a wordless poetry being communicated. Khayam’s accompaniment with the deeperrimmed heng gong (a favorite of sound healers) seems to extend the flute’s own

voice, often playing in its low range but ascending to the heights at the climax.

Aida Shirazi also refracts Persian traditions through a contemporary and experimental perspective, combining layers of live and processed electronics with onstage improvisation by the kamancheh virtuoso Niloufar Shiri in her new work Yearning, Every Dawn. While growing up in Iran, Shirazi was trained classically in both Persian and Western music and went on to study in Turkey and at the University of California at Davis, where she recently completed her doctorate. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48), Shirazi was able to realize her desire to collaborate with two admired colleagues for her Ojai Music Festival commission (one in live performance and the other through a pre-recorded tape).

In addition to performing and improvising live, Shiri provided Shirazi with recordings of her work to be incorporated into the processed and pre-recorded electronics. The Iranian American soprano Tara Khozein contributed another layer by recording a short improvisatory song based on a text (see p. 48) by the 19th-century poet Táhirih Qurrat al-’Ayn, which was also processed. Shirazi, who spent a period training at IRCAM in Paris,

has woven these recorded materials into Yearning, Every Dawn, thus combining sources that are acoustic and electronic, live and recorded, played and sung, improvised and fixed. Rather than merely juxtapose traditions and sound worlds, she aims to create “a hybrid that will sound as natural and organic as possible — so that it’s all of them, and at the same time none of them, but with my voice.”

Edgard Varèse is often cited as a tutelary spirit to colorful figures of the Western avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen, Frank Zappa), but his influence extended to non-Western composers. He left an indelible mark on Chou Wen-Chung (see sidebar on p. 64), who became his student and copyist when they met in 1949 and, following the death of Varèse, his literary executor. Density 21.5 dates from the previous decade (1936) and was composed for the above-mentioned Georges Barrère, who planned to inaugurate a newly engineered platinum flute at the upcoming New York World’s Fair. The title refers to the density or specific mass of this rare metal, which is 21.5. (Cocktail party conversation point: The new flute was in fact a platinumiridium alloy with an estimated specific mass of 21.6.) Varèse crafts a novel language from alterations in timbre, use

IRANIAN FEMALE COMPOSERS ASSOCIATION (IFCA)

Aida Shirazi co-founded the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA) in 2017 to serve as a platform supporting the creative work of female-identifying composers from Iran. IFCA mentors an aesthetically diverse array of young artists across the Iranian diaspora and advocates for their increased presence through programming and commissions. Music by other composers from IFCA can be heard on the vis-à-vis concert on Friday at 10:00am as well as on The Willows Are New concert on Saturday at 10:00am.

AIDA SHIRAZI

composer/electronics

Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Aida Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. In her works for solo instruments, voice, ensemble, orchestra, and electronics, Shirazi mainly focuses on timbre for organizing structures inspired by language and literature. Shirazi’s music

has been featured at festivals and concert series, including Manifeste, Wien Modern, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, OutHear New Music Week, MATA, Marlboro Music Festival, Direct Current, Taproot, and Tehran Contemporary Music Festival. Her works are performed by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Oerknal, Quince Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, among others.

Shirazi holds a PhD in composition and music theory from the University of California, Davis. She has studied with Mika Pelo, Pablo Ortiz, Kurt Rohde, Yiğit Aydın, Tolga Yayalar, Onur Türkmen, and Hooshyar Khayam and participated in workshops and masterclasses by Kaija Saariaho, Mark Andre, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Riccardo Piacentini, and Füsun Köksal.

Shirazi is a 2022 graduate of IRCAM’s “Cursus Program in Composition and Computer Music.” She holds a BM in music composition and theory from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) and a BA in classical piano from Tehran University of Art (Iran.) She has studied santoor (traditional Iranian hammered dulcimer) with Parissa Khosravi Samani.

Text by Tara Khozein based on a poem by Táhirih (Fátimih Baraghání), translated by Dr. Amin Banani

Just let the wind untie my perfumed hair my net will capture every wild thing there.

“Oh Heaven, Heaven, Heaven you yearn to see me every dawn, so go on. Pick up your looking glass, look down.

Just let me paint my flashing eyes with black and I will make this hellbent world turn back.

Oh Heaven, Heaven, Heaven

If I should pass a temple by chance one day, One thousand angels would rush to my aid.

Just let me open up my blood red mouth And I will sing away these fatal vows

Oh Heaven, Heaven, Heaven

You see me reaching up through the light,

So go on.

Take your golden scissors, Join your brothers, join your sisters

And join the fight.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47

CALLIGRAPHIES OF SOUND

of the extreme high and low ends of the register, and percussive effects.

Varèse mentored the young Chou WenChung, who in turn had a profound influence on the generation of composers emigrating from China after the Cultural Revolution (including Ge Gan-Ru, Lei Liang, and Tan Dun). Chou Wen-Chung anticipated their quest to synthesize Asian and Western idioms in his own integration of classical Chinese aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Also a prominent scholar, Chou Wen-Chung described Varèse’s concept of sound as “living matter” as “a modern Western parallel of a pervasive Chinese concept: that each single tone is a musical entity in itself, that musical meaning lies intrinsically in the tones themselves, and that one must

investigate sound to know tones and investigate tones to know music.”

This overarching idea pervades the subtly fluctuating soundscape of Echoes from the Gorge, completed in 1989 after a lengthy break from composition during which Chou Wen-Chung had worked on his edition of Varèse’s scores. Among Chou Wen-Chung’s most substantial works, Echoes is regarded as on one level a tribute to his former mentor as well.

Chou Wen-Chung organizes his quartet of percussionists to preside over a vast panoply of instruments. These are divided into various family groups based on timbre (wood, metal, skin, and various other kinds of drums), articulation, and even where and how the instruments are struck.

Chou Wen-Chung’s devotion to Chinese calligraphy and its philosophy also informs the shaping of sounds in a delicate balance between predetermination and seeming spontaneity.

In the view of Steven Schick, Echoes from the Gorge ranks with the most significant yet overlooked works for percussion written in the 20th century. Comprising an introduction and 12 sections labeled with nature imagery (“echoes from the gorge,” “falling rocks and flying spray,” etc.), the piece reflects what Chou Wen-Chung described as “the preeminent musical form in East Asia, wherein all sections of a composition are elaborations or reductions of one and the same nuclear idea.”

This concert is approximately 45 minutes.

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation

The concert appearance of Emi Ferguson is made possible by the generous support of Carolyn and Jamie Bennett

The Ojai residency of the Iranian Female Composers Association is made possible, in part, by the gracious support of the Farhang Foundation

OJAI CHATS

at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Nina Barzegar and Nasim Khorassani

There is no intermission during the concert

Friday, June 9, 2023 | 10:00am

Libbey Bowl

VIS-À-VIS

Gloria Cheng piano | Emi Ferguson flute | Mario Gotoh viola | Leonard Hayes piano | Karen Ouzounian cello

Joshua Rubin clarinet | Steven Schick percussion | Michi Wiancko violin | Wu Man pipa

Shawn OKPEBHOLO mi sueño: afro-flamenco

Tyson Gholston DAVIS American Tableau (Tableau XI)

Margaret BONDS

Michael ABELS

Troubled Water (Wade in the Water from Spirituals Suite)

Iconoclasm

Leonard Hayes piano

Jessie MONTGOMERY Rhapsody No. 2

Michi Wiancko violin

Nasim KHORASSANI Growth

Michi Wiancko violin | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello

Nina BARZEGAR

Inexorable Passage

Emi Ferguson flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Michi Wiancko violin

Karen Ouzounian cello | Gloria Cheng piano

Lei LIANG vis-à-vis

Wu Man pipa | Steven Schick percussion

Shawn OKPEBHOLO (b. 1981)

mi sueño: afro-flamenco (2021)

Tyson Gholston DAVIS (b. 2000)

American Tableau (Tableau XI) (2021)

Margaret BONDS (1913-72)

Troubled Water (Wade in the Water) (c. 1930s-40s)

Face to Face

The face of American concert music has been changing dramatically in our time, immeasurably enriched by the acknowledgment and celebration of voices that, not long ago, were largely excluded. Contributions by woefully undervalued Black American composers of the past are finding eager new audiences, and young artists of color are galvanizing the scene by bringing their own perspectives to classical traditions. This morning’s program spans three generations of composers active today, with a nod to a rediscovered elder from the last century.

Commissioned as part of a project inspired by Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, Shawn Okpebholo’s mi sueño: afro-flamenco responds to the Spanish-flavored fourth movement, “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”), from Ravel’s original piano suite. The title (“my dream: afro-flamenco”) combines his “prepandemic nostalgia” with “post-pandemic dreams” to travel again and revisit Spain and Africa. References to flamenco as well as rhythms and idioms inspired by his Nigerian musical heritage and African American music convey the composer’s longing to reconnect to these sources.

American Tableau (Tableau XI) is one of a larger cycle of a dozen pieces,

Michael ABELS (b. 1962) Iconoclasm (2017)

Jessie MONTGOMERY (b. 1981) Rhapsody No. 2

Nasim KHORASSANI (b. 1987) Growth (2017)

Nina BARZEGAR (b. 1984) Inexorable Passage (2020)

Lei LIANG (b. 1972) vis-à-vis (2018)

each for a different solo instrument, by Tyson Gholston Davis, the youngest composer on Leonard Hayes’s opening set for solo piano. Davis interrogates the straightforward assurance of the melody known as “America the Beautiful” — and the betrayal of the values it signifies — by weaving it into a chromatically ambivalent context.

A student of Florence Price who later collaborated with her and with the poet Langston Hughes, the composer and pianist Margaret Bonds in 1933 became the first Black musician to perform with the Chicago Symphony. Troubled Water originated as the finale of a threemovement suite Bonds composed to bring her solo recitals to a rousing close. Rather than a mere “arrangement” of a famous spiritual, Bonds offers a multifaceted pianistic fantasy infused with idioms from jazz and European Romanticism. The words to “Wade in the Water,” her source, originally encoded lifesaving information for fugitives following the Underground Railroad to freedom.

For her album marking the Leonard Bernstein centennial in 2018, the pianist Lara Downes asked an array of composers to write short pieces honoring his legacy. Michael Abels explains that he sought to convey his impressions of “the personality

and not the sage” in his witty Iconoclasm Bouncy rhythms and restlessly shifting meters echoing Bernstein’s own style evoke how he embodied “the puckish life of the party.”

Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2023, Jessie Montgomery grew up amid the rebelliously creative experimental scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s. Both her parents led active careers in the performing arts, and their home became a meeting place for boundary-crossing musicians from free jazz; their prodigy daughter meanwhile pursued training in classical violin and began composing as a child. Rhapsody No. 2 is part of set of in-progress solo violin works, each dedicated to a particular contemporary violinist. Citing Béla Bartók as one of her inspirations, Montgomery wrote No. 2 for Michi Wiancko, who included it on her Planetary Candidate album (released in 2020).

Both Nasim Khorassani and Nina Barzegar are members of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see sidebar on p. 48). Khorassani began composing at the age of 8 and spent time in Germany and the U.K. before coming to San Diego, where she is a doctoral composition student at the University of California. In her single-movement string trio Growth,

she restricts herself to just four pitches that are closely adjacent (B, C, D, and E-flat). But changes in texture, dynamics, and rhythmic articulation produce a sense of restless pressure to metamorphose.

Both a composer and an actor, Nina Barzegar studied in Tehran before enrolling in the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and combines interests in film music, improvisation, and the Iranian classical tradition. The New York Times singled out the world premiere of her quintet Inexorable Passage at a concert last October, noting that the work was “thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.” Barzegar introduces the piece as a depiction of “the stages of life”: “We enter this world with hope, we learn, we strive, fall in love, we fight, we fail and triumph. Despite all our wishes, we eventually surrender, accept, and get off the train of life. This is the miracle of being in this world.”

Our morning program concludes with an innovative reconsideration of the principle of musical dialogue and virtuosity. Lei Liang composed vis-à-vis for Wu Man and Steven Schick — fellow San Diego–based colleagues who, he notes, share a “magnetic stage presence and unparalleled virtuosity on their instruments.”

This substantial duo for pipa and percussion goes far beyond simple confrontations of East with West or the traditional with the experimental. Lei Liang uses the paradoxical formula “new music that is old” to depict his aesthetic, adding that he prefers writing “music that has layers of memories underneath.”

Although he grew up in Beijing, Lei Liang has observed that he didn’t discover China until he was living in America. The process of using instrumentation outside one’s own culture, he says, resembles constructing a “mirror that makes us look at ourselves with a kind of X-ray vision. It allows us to penetrate the surface.” The part that Schick plays alone in vis-à-vis accomplishes this by inhabiting three states of mind or three very different spaces simultaneously: “looking inward, looking outward, and resting in a state of motionlessness.”

Juxtaposing the ancient pipa, an instrument with thousands of years of history, versus modern percussion, which began to come into its own in Western classical music only over the last century, is intentionally extreme. Lei Liang points out the jarring humor inherent as well in pitting the pipa’s image as a silk-string instrument of refined delicacy against the brute strength of the sonorities percussionists can produce. “I imagine the piece to be at times serious, challenging, probing, and even contentious; and at other times, relaxed, playful, and humorous,” writes the composer. “This is what a contentious friendship between kindred spirits would be like!”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 70 minutes.

MICHAEL ABELS

Emmy- and Grammynominated composer Michael Abels, winner with Rhiannon Giddens

of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for their opera Omar, is best known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out, Us, and Nope. The score for Us won a World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, multiple critics awards, and was named “Score of the Decade” by The Wrap. Both Us and Nope were shortlisted for the Oscar for Best Original Score. In 2022, Abels’s film music was honored by the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Other recent media projects include the films Bad Education, Nightbooks, and the docu-series Allen V. Farrow. Current releases include Chevalier (Toronto Intl Film Festival) and Landscape With Invisible Hand (Sundance), his second collaboration with director Cory Finley. Upcoming projects include The Burial (Amazon) and a series for Disney Plus.

Abels’s creative output also includes many concert works, including the choral song cycle At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet and the Grammy-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn. Abels’s other concert works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and many others. Some of these pieces are available on the Cedille label, including Delights & Dances and Winged Creatures. Recent commissions include Emerge for the National Symphony and Detroit Symphony and a guitar concerto (Borders) for Grammy-nominated artist Mak Grgić.

Abels is co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming, and streaming media.

NINA BARZEGAR

Nina Barzegar is an Iranian composer, pianist, and actress. She writes music in diverse styles and for various mediums, including concert music and music for film and theater. As an actress and film scorer, she has collaborated on many film projects screened at various film festivals worldwide. She has worked as a piano pedagogue for years and authored a twovolume piano training book. Since coming to the United States in 2020, Barzegar has collaborated with great performers and ensembles such as Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Del Sol Quartet. Barzegar holds a bachelor’s degree in piano and a master’s in composition from the University of Tehran and is currently a DMA student at the University of California Santa Cruz.

NASIM KHORASSANI

Nasim Khorassani is an Iranian composer, visual artist, music educator, and founder of MMCiran. She is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition working with Katharina Rosenberger, Marcos Balter, and Rand Steiger at the University of California San Diego. She studied her second master’s degree with Andrew Rindfleisch and Greg D’Alessio at Cleveland State University. The University of Tehran was where she gained her first master’s degree and studied composition with Mohammad Reza Tafazzoli, Kiawasch Sahebnassagh, and Sara Abazari. Mainly as a self-taught composer, Khorassani started composing at eight. However, her works did not receive any performance in Iran until 2016, when she moved to the United States. Since then, Khorassani’s works have been performed by No Exit New Music Ensemble, Del Sol String Quartet, Patchwork Duo, Zeitgeist, OCAZEnigma, Loadbang, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Silkroad.

During her life in Iran, she managed to create and organize a group of music students that became the first Iranian group to receive a DAAD Study Visit scholarship in 2009. In 2012, she met with Peter Ablinger and Klaus Lang in Tehran and performed their music. In 2013, Khorassani became among five selected sound artists from Iran for IranUK Sonics residency in London, where she joined various workshops by Keith Rowe and Chris Watson and had her first experimental improvisation with Veryan Weston at Queen Elizabeth Hall. The trip to Germany as her introduction to modern dance expanded throughout her life, influencing the style of music composition she follows today. Khorassani has founded a free online music academy, MMCiran, to support Persian students, which is now called and cofounded as MOAASER.

LEI LIANG

Born in 1972 to parents who were both pioneering musicologists, Lei Liang came of age in Beijing after the Cultural Revolution and began playing piano and composing at an early age. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests, in which he took part, Lei Liang’s parents sent him to the U.S. to study at the New England Conservatory. He earned his doctorate at Harvard and is currently on the faculty at the University of California San Diego. Lei Liang’s prolific catalogue of more than 100 compositions includes works that engage with such issues as human trafficking, undocumented immigrants, gun-related violence, and environmental destruction. Describing his orchestral piece A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, which was inspired by a Chinese ink-brush landscape painting and won the 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, Lei Liang remarks: “I always wanted to create music as if painting with a sonic brush.” In 2021, Lei Liang received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson and with the special support from the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics, Ventura County Community Foundation

The concert appearance of Wu Man is made possible by the generous support of Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney

There is no intermission during the concert

Friday, June 9, 2023 | 3:30pm

Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

GHOST OPERA

Wu Man pipa | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins

Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | PeiJu Chien-Pott dancer/choreographer

Jon Reimer director | Nicholas Houfek lighting designer

TAN Dun Ghost Opera

Act I

Bach, Monks, and Shakespeare Meet in Water

Act II

Earth Dance

Act III

Dialogue with “Little Cabbage”

Act IV

Metal and Stone

Act V

Song of Paper

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS)

723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI

Ghost Opera (1994)

We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on

During his youth in Hunan Province, Tan Dun became fascinated by local lore associated with shamans and sorcerers, listening eagerly to the ghost stories his grandmother told him as a boy. But he had to rediscover the folk traditions of his own culture following the upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which banned not only Western composition but Chinese music as well — unless it had the “revolutionary” seal of approval.

Since he came from a family of “intellectuals” — his mother was a doctor and his father a researcher — Tan Dun was forcibly separated from them as a teenager and sent to an agricultural commune to be “re-educated” by toiling in the rice fields. Mao’s death in 1976 put an end to these policies, and Tan Dun was allowed to gain experience playing violin with a Beijing Opera troupe and to hear Western classical music on the radio. He was accepted to the newly reopened Central Conservatory in Beijing to study composition and eventually found his way in the mid-1980s to Columbia University — where Chou Wen-Chung numbered among his mentors. New York City has since remained home base for Tan Dun’s tirelessly peripatetic career, which keeps him internationally in demand as both a composer and a conductor.

Even when Chinese folk traditions were still forbidden during his period on the collective farm, Tan Dun found a way to experience these sources by offering to set texts of Maoist propaganda to the folk tunes he persuaded the farmers to share with him. The impulse to reconnect with aspects of Chinese culture was later intensified by his encounters with John Cage and similar figures in New York’s experimental downtown scene, which provided an enlightening counterpart to what he was learning more formally uptown. As with so many émigré composers, the stimulation of distance encouraged a fresh perspective on his native culture.

Ghost Opera is an early breakthrough work in which Tan Dun comes to terms with these formative influences by forging them into a strikingly original musical language. The result, as in this composer’s oeuvre overall, transcends reductive (and bland) formulas such as “East meets West” or “ancient juxtaposed with avant-garde.”

Indeed, Tan Dun relishes the creative tension generated by combining perspectives often assumed to stand in contradiction — whether Buddhist and Christian traditions (in his Water Passion and Buddha Passion, both modeled

on J.S. Bach) or the spontaneous music of nature and “composed” music (a fusion integral to his vocabulary, which plays a key role in the soundscape of Ghost Opera).

Originally created for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, Ghost Opera is also characteristic of Tan Dun’s artistic practice in its engrossing theatrical sensibility. The scenario alludes to a tradition of shamanistic performance that is believed to reach back thousands of years, which later became integrated with Buddhist philosophy. In its traditional format, according to Tan Dun, the performer “has a dialogue with his past and future life — a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature.”

For his version of this long tradition, Tan Dun created a sequence of five acts or movements. Among the departed who are invoked by the performers are the spirits of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach, who join the proceedings through references to their work — via quotations from The Tempest and the C-sharp minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II. In addition to their usual instruments, all five musicians are called on to play percussion and “natural” instruments (water, metal, stone, and paper) that allude

WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

to the classical Chinese philosophy of the elements. In the Ojai Music Festival’s new production, a dancer mediates between the spheres of the living and those who have passed on.

Although Tan Dun’s treatment of the pipa itself, according to Wu Man, involves no avant-garde extended techniques, the idea of a dialogue between pipa and string quartet is unprecedented — and a novel kind of music theater. Tan Dun never merely evokes the past. His “ghosts” join together in a dialogue whose surprising twists are spellbinding. The “exhalations of a ghostly monk” in the first movement, for example, underline the porousness of the borders between sound and silence, the motions of breathing that mark the passage of time against eternity.

Ghost Opera is also, for Wu Man, “a very personal piece” because of her close involvement in the process while Tan Dun was composing it. When Tan Dun was searching for a folk tune, she suggested “Little Cabbage,” which is played on the

pipa in the third act and which she sings in the fifth. During this final movement, the song’s significance is revealed as the lament of “a little girl who has lost her parents,” explains Tan Dun. “Such an odd, sad song. It’s the essence of ghostliness. You can talk to the past, the stone can talk to the violin, and the cabbage can sing of her sorrowful life.”

Tan Dun’s use of the visual aspects of the performers interacting with their instruments — and, in the final scene, with the paper installation — is further enhanced in this production, specially designed for the Ojai Music Festival, with new choreography, lighting, and stage direction.

Through the strands that he weaves together in Ghost Opera’s unique counterpoint of cultures, eras, and instruments, Tan Dun himself becomes a contemporary shaman able to communicate between realms thought to be inseparably divided.

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 60 minutes.

This production was developed in part during a residency at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York and will be presented there in partnership with the Ojai Music Festival in October 2023.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Nancy and Barry Sanders

OJAI CHATS

at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Lei Liang and Wu Man

There is no intermission during the concert

Friday, June 9, 2023 | 8:00pm

Libbey Bowl

AN EVENING WITH RHIANNON GIDDENS AND FRANCESCO TURRISI

Rhiannon Giddens vocals and banjo | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist

The program will be announced from the stage.

Hybrid Spaces

Songs are the most versatile of musical artifacts. As a medium of communication, song isn’t even confined to the human species. The impulse to sing accompanies the relationships that define our lives, from the intimate and familial to the spiritual to the political: whether it’s a soothing lullaby to calm a child, a heartfelt moment of prayer, or a defiant chant of protest.

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi make this versatility itself into an art in their song programs. The notion of songs as “repertory” items to be temporarily retrieved from the shelf, dusted off, and ritually performed — as if the singer were merely ventriloquizing the past — couldn’t be more antithetical to the experience Giddens and Turrisi seek to convey in their performances.

Part of what makes this approach possible is their shared conviction that the categories we’ve been trained to assign to songs are artificial — above all, the categories that reinforce hierarchies of “high” and “low,” “classical” and “popular.” “Art songs” written by privileged composers in the Western classical tradition or folk songs that originated with enslaved African Americans and have been passed down over the generations: the distinctions cued by labels reinforce preconceived ideas about what to expect and even how we should respond to a musical experience.

Giddens refers to the “hybrid spaces” that emerge when we break down these boundaries — spaces where new contexts can be created through boldly original juxtapositions that freshly illuminate the familiar with a haunting, at times surprising, relevance.

One of Giddens’s models for this approach is Nina Simone — whose birthday she happens to share and to whom she paid tribute by making Tomorrow Is My Turn the title song of her debut solo album (2015), adding her own layer to Simone’s unforgettable version of the Charles Aznavour hit.

“The idea is that a recital for piano and voice doesn’t have to be attached to any concept of a ‘classical’ recital — even when we’re also doing some classical pieces,” says Turrisi. “We’re exploring the fluidity between the classical and popular sound.” For example, surprising crosscurrents can emerge between a madrigal by Monteverdi and an Italian pop song from the 1960s. Even within the realm of what we generally consider “vernacular” music, hidden and suppressed histories are brought to light — such as the unacknowledged origins of country music from African American sources. (To explore more of this topic, Giddens’s contributions to the 2019 Ken Burns Country Music series are highly recommended.)

Giddens and Turrisi show how timeless folk tunes can take on a burning relevance for today, as with the songs about final things that they interpret on their recent Grammy Award–winning They’re Calling Me Home album, produced in isolation during the pandemic.

On the other hand, Giddens’s original song Build a House, which she premiered online with Yo-Yo Ma on Juneteenth 2020 — and recently transformed into a children’s book (see p. 83) — works back from frustration over contemporary racial injustice to condense a history of the African American experience into a song that seems to have always been part of the folk tradition.

“It’s the song that matters, not what category it is, not where it originally appeared,” says Giddens. “If the song is compelling, what’s to keep it from being done as an art song?”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 100 minutes.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Mechas and Greg Grinnell

There is no intermission during the concert

Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 8:00am

Chaparral Auditorium

MORNING MEDITATION

Niloufar Shiri kamancheh | Mario Gotoh violin

You will experience improvisation and sonic exploration through deep listening. Together with Mario Gotoh on violin, we will immerse the space in the sound of bowed string instruments to forge newfound connections through the intervallic structure and melodies of the Iranian musical tradition, the Radif.

CHAPARRAL AUDITORIUM

414 EAST OJAI AVENUE, OJAI

—NILOUFAR SHIRI

Zubin Mehta Isata Kanneh-Mason Sphinx Virtuosi Avi Avital Sir Stephen Hough

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Carol and Luther Luedtke

The Ojai residency of the Iranian Female Composers Association is made possible, in part, by the gracious support of the Farhang Foundation

The concert appearance of Kayhan Kalhor is made possible by the generous support of The Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics, Ventura County Community Foundation

The concert appearance of Gloria Cheng is made possible by the generous support of Drs. Bridget

Tsao and Bruce Brockman

OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Carlos Simon

There is no intermission during the concert

Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 10:00am

Libbey Bowl THE WILLOWS ARE NEW

Gloria Cheng piano | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Nathan Schram viola | Wu Man pipa

Niloufar NOURBAKHSH Veiled for cello and electronics

Karen Ouzounian cello

Lei LIANG

Mother’s Songs

Wu Man pipa | Nathan Schram viola

GE Gan-Ru Gong (from Gu Yue) CHOU Wen-Chung The Willows Are New Gloria Cheng piano

Kayhan KALHOR Solo improvisation

Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh

Niloufar NOURBAKHSH (b. 1992)

Veiled for cello and electronics (2019)

Lei LIANG (b. 1972)

Mother’s Songs (2020)

GE Gan-Ru (b. 1954) Gong (1985)

CHOU Wen-Chung (1923-2019) The Willows Are New (1957)

Old Wine in New Bottles

Next month marks the official centennial of the birth of Chou Wen-Chung, who left us only four years ago. Along with his remarkable but woefully underrecognized oeuvre, his legacy extends to his influence on several generations of Chinese composers and performers he mentored over a long, productive career. Many of them, like Chou Wen-Chung, settled in the U.S., where they have explored innovative ways of synthesizing various aspects of Chinese culture with currents in contemporary Western music.

Framing this morning’s focus on that legacy is music representing two generations of Iranian artists. We begin with Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a young composer and pianist born in Karaj and now based in the U.S. A co-founder of the Iranian Female Composers Association (see p. 48), she wrote Veiled in response to the Iranian protests in 2017. Nourbakhsh points to the anger she carries within as a result of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.” The cello’s eloquence, pitched high in the register, mixes with an electronically processed track of a woman singing, transforming her anger “into a collective force that is both beautiful and resilient.” She describes Veiled as a “tribute to the Iranian women who made such transformations possible.”

Lei Liang (see p. 53), a featured composer at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival who is based at the University of California San Diego, was appointed artistic director of the Chou Wen-Chung Research Center at the Xinghai Conservatory in 2018. Mother’s Songs, which he wrote for Wu Man, gives voice to a tension that accompanies the experience of being “between worlds” — the power of musical memory sharpened by distance.

Lei Liang recalls the deep impression left on him by the Mongolian scholar Wulalji, his teacher since childhood. A friend of his musicologist parents, Wulalji taught Lei Liang traditional folk music against the backdrop of 1970s Beijing, when the music officially approved by the authorities centered around “happy propaganda songs.” Wulalji instead shared his traditional “long songs” from Mongolia, which deal with themes of solitude and homesickness — a sadness that acquired a deeper resonance after Lei Liang came to America. Both Mother’s Songs and the more recent Mongolian Suite for solo cello (which was premiered this past February) tap into this source.

When Lei Liang visited China in 2019, he again met up with Wulalji, who sang for him songs that he had learned from his mother. “These songs are of a traveler’s longing for home and a daughter’s desire

Kayhan KALHOR (b. 1963)

Solo improvisation

to be reunited with her mother,” Lei Liang explains. “At age 83, my teacher is the only one in Inner Mongolia who still remembers these ancient melodies, and he sang them with deep emotion. I, too, am away from home. My teacher’s singing evoked a strong sense of longing even as it offered profound solace.” The result is a moving meditation on memory and on music’s role in creating a sense of home.

Ge Gan-Ru studied at the conservatory of his native Shanghai following the Cultural Revolution. Even after the reopening of exchange with the West, Ge Gan-Ru’s avant-garde inclinations made him an outsider in China. His controversial landmark Lost Style for solo cello (1983) has staked a claim as “the first avantgarde work in China.” Ge Gan-Ru left his homeland to pursue doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1983 with Chou Wen-Chung.

He also captured the attention of avantgarde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. She commissioned him to compose a work simultaneously inspired by the songs of the qin (ancient Chinese zither) and the Western piano.

Ge Gan-Ru, who refrains from using actual Chinese instruments, responded with Gu Yue (“Ancient Music”). Each movement of this four-movement suite for prepared

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CHOU WEN-CHUNG

Chou Wen-Chung

(1923-2019) was born to a cultured family devoted to a wenren (literati) sensibility and raised in post-imperial China in Shandong on the northeastern coast. He spent the vast majority of his long life in the U.S., where he settled in 1946 and befriended the pioneering French American composer Edgard Varèse early on. Yet his appreciation of traditional Chinese philosophy and aesthetics — I Ching and calligraphy, for example — informed a syncretic vision that Chou Wen-Chung passed on to an international array of students who have established themselves as leading figures in the contemporarymusic scene (Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, and many others). “Composer, Teacher, and Cultural Ambassador,” as the website honoring his legacy introduces Chou Wen-Chung, is as good a summation as any for this unsung hero in the advancement of cross-cultural, border-defying musical thought in our time.

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OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

piano conjures the sonority and spirit of a different traditional Chinese instrument. We hear the first movement, devoted to the gong (the other movements imitate the qin, pipa, and drum, respectively).

Ge Gan-Ru also has the performer actively manipulate the prepared piano’s innards, evoking not only timbres but traditions, such as the “morning ringing of bells.”

Writing about Ge Gan-Ru’s music, the scholar Yiming Zhang notes that Gu Yue “has many similarities with ancient Chinese visual arts … particularly painting and calligraphy” through the balance of shape, emotion, and abstraction. Chou Wen-Chung similarly draws a connection to ancient Chinese calligraphy with The Willows Are New, comparing his process to how, in calligraphy, “the controlled flow of the ink — through the interaction of rhythm and density, the modulation of line and texture — creates a continuum of motion and tension in spatial equilibrium.”

Chou Wen-Chung evokes ancient music and poetry from Chinese tradition, taking as his source a composition for qin attributed to the Tang Dynasty musician, poet, painter, and politician Wang Wei (689-759). His title occurs as a line in Wang’s poem associated with this ancient music, which Chou Wen-Chung translates:

In this town by the river, morning rain has cleared the light dust. Green, green around the tavern, the willows are new. Let us empty another cup of wine — For, once west of Yang Kuai There will be no more friends. (Sprigs of willow, he notes, were “used in farewell ceremonies and regarded as a symbol of parting.”)

“Mutations of the original material are woven over the entire range of the piano and embroidered with sonorities that are

the magnified reflexes of brushstroke-like movements,” Chou Wen-Chung writes. Through his calligraphy-inspired musical treatment, he amplifies “the restrained emotion of the poem and the subtle nuances of the qin technique.”

Working with sources from ancient tradition to create something new, unrepeatable, belonging to the present moment: this is an art that Kayhan Kalhor has perfected over decades. The great tradition of Persian classical music, which flourished in the court, draws on a repertoire of melodic figures and songs that have been passed on orally over many generations, from teacher to student. These were eventually gathered into a collection known as the Radif.

Kalhor describes how these melodies, long since memorized, are metamorphosed into unexpected larger constructions through the process of improvisation — a process that lies at the heart of all classical traditions, though it became separated from composition in the Western tradition with the development of written music and increasing specialization.

The kamancheh, the main bowed instrument in Persian music, traveled both east and west, Kalhor explains, and became responsible for many different bowed instruments in Europe. When playing a solo improvisation, Kalhor says that the focus is mostly on melody. “Before we had a way to write music, this was the only way people had to memorize a melody and interpret it according to their own ideas and playing skills.”

The challenge for an improviser is “to expand the melody beyond recognition,” so that it becomes something completely different from what he began with, illuminated by nuances and angles — much like the transformative process of working with themes and variations.

Is Kalhor able to replicate an improvisation that he has found particularly beautiful?

“I should be able to start from the same place if I want to, but it will probably go elsewhere in terms of direction and development,” he responds. “It depends on the audience, yourself, what kind of day you are having. You’re human and have emotions, and those emotions are heavily reflected in what you produce.”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 70 minutes.

NILOUFAR NOURBAKHSH

A winner of 2022

Beth Morrison Projects Next Generation competition, an awardee of National Sawdust’s Second International Hildegard Commission, and a 2019 recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant, Niloufar Nourbakhsh is a composer whose music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, and Direct Current Festival at the Kennedy Center.

A founding member and co-artistic director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education and equal opportunities. She is currently co-artistic director of Peabody Conservatory Laptop Orchestra and teaches composition at Longy School of Music of Bard College. Nourbakhsh holds a doctorate degree from Stony Brook University and regularly performs with her Ensemble Decipher.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson with the special support from the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics, Ventura County Community Foundation

The concert appearance of Wu Man is made possible by the generous support of Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney

There is no intermission during the concert

See program notes on page 55

Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 3:30pm (Repeat Performance)

Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

GHOST OPERA

Wu Man pipa | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins

Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | PeiJu Chien-Pott dancer/choreographer

Jon Reimer director | Nicholas Houfek lighting designer

TAN Dun

Ghost Opera

Act I

Bach, Monks, and Shakespeare Meet in Water

Act II

Earth Dance

Act III

Dialogue with “Little Cabbage”

Act IV

Metal and Stone

Act V

Song of Paper

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS)

723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund

The concert appearance of Limmie Pulliam is made possible by the generous support of Linda Joyce Hodge

OJAI CHATS at Libbey Park Gazebo, 6:00pm: Michael Abels

There will be an intermission in tonight’s program

Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 8:00pm

Libbey Bowl

OMAR’S JOURNEY

Limmie Pulliam tenor (Omar) | Rhiannon Giddens soprano (Julie) | Cheryse McLeod Lewis mezzo-soprano (Fatima)

Michael Preacely bass-baritone (Abdul/Abe) | Andy Papas bass-baritone (Owen/Johnson)

Emi Ferguson flute | Joshua Rubin clarinet | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola

Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Leonard Hayes piano | Ross Karre, Francesco Turrisi percussion

Justin Robinson fiddle | Seckou Keita kora

Music from Senegal and the Carolinas

Music by Rhiannon GIDDENS Omar’s Journey World Premiere and Michael ABELS Commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival

Libretto by Rhiannon GIDDENS

Rhiannon GIDDENS (b. 1979)

Michael ABELS (b. 1962)

Omar’s Journey (2023)

Necessary Stories

In 2019, Spoleto Festival USA asked Rhiannon Giddens whether she would consider writing an opera based on Omar Ibn Said (see sidebar p. 70). Giddens was shocked that she had not previously known of this remarkable figure. The fact that his story had been eclipsed by the standard historical narrative of enslavement in America made Giddens all the more determined to use the resources of her art to bring Omar Ibn Said to the attention of contemporary audiences.

To transform all this material into an opera, Giddens adopted an unconventional collaborative strategy that would remain true to her own identity as a singer: She reached out to Michael Abels as her composing partner, impressed by his score for the Academy Award–winning Jordan Peele film Get Out. According to Abels, he and Giddens share a clear sense “of what a good and effective opera sounds like” as well as a passion for folk music — an ideal match to undertake what was for both the formidable task of writing their first opera.

The result, Omar, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music (see sidebar on p. 71). Originally to have premiered in 2020, Omar finally reached the stage, to rapturous reviews, at the opening of the 2022 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina — less than a mile from the dock

where some 40% of enslaved Africans brought into the U.S. passed through, including Omar in a pivotal scene in the opera. Omar has since been presented by Los Angeles Opera and Boston Lyric Opera and will return to California in November as part of San Francisco Opera’s season.

While the scope and implications of Omar’s story called for the large-scale, multidimensional treatment for which opera is so well-suited, Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian shared Giddens’s conviction that this story needs to be as widely told as possible. He therefore commissioned Omar’s Journey as a concert piece to capture the arc of the full-length opera — without the demands of a full-scale stage production.

When she was deciding whether to accept the original opera commission, Giddens found herself deeply moved by what she discovered in her research and realized that she could not turn away from the challenge. Omar recovers multiple historical perspectives that have been unjustly overlooked: the perspective of enslaved persons coerced to immigrate to the “New World” as well as the perspective of Muslims in the African diaspora (about 30% of Africans captured to be enslaved in the U.S. are estimated to have been Muslim).

The libretto, also by Giddens, interweaves what she learned of Omar’s real-life story with fictional threads to give fuller context to his experience as an enslaved person during a certain period of American history. She invented the character of Julie, for example: an enslaved woman whom Omar reminds of the father she was separated from long ago. (Giddens sings this role for the first time in tonight’s performance.) In an interview she gave shortly before the Spoleto premiere, Giddens explained that she aimed to allow Omar’s own words to speak as much as possible — including the Qur’anic quotations that were so central to his identity: The themes of Arabic versus English and the sacred texts corresponding to the faiths of the enslaved and their enslavers are a defining thread in the original production design.

Giddens composed whole scenes by singing her way through them, accompanying herself with banjo, piano, or guitar. She then sent recordings of the work-in-progress to the Los Angeles–based Abels via WhatsApp. Giddens found her way into the story from her perspective as an expert in American roots music and the deep history of American vernaculars. She complemented this with research into the music Omar Ibn Said would have known from his West African

A Muslim scholar from West Africa (in modern-day Senegal) born around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was forcibly taken to the U.S. at the age of 37 and enslaved for the rest of his long life, dying in Giddens’s native state of North Carolina at the height of the Civil War in 1864. The Life of Omar Ibn Said, which he wrote in 1831, is the only known autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the U.S.; all told, more than a dozen manuscripts were authored by Ibn Said, many of them related to Qur’anic topics. (You can see a digitized version of Ibn Said’s handwritten autobiography and other related documents on the Library of Congress’s extensive website: search for “Omar Ibn Said Collection.”)

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE NECESSARY STORIES

upbringing as well as the modal music that accompanied the Muslim African diaspora — idioms that come to the fore, for example, when Omar is conversing internally with the spirit of his mother. Instrumental selections from Senegal and the folk music of the Carolinas provide a general context for the sources that influenced Giddens.

Abels went beyond merely transcribing and orchestrating this material. He describes serving as a “sounding board” for Giddens, allowing her to focus on her melody-centered process and then “bringing that into a world that is operatic.” This involved enhancing the music with transitions and harmonic context, as well as ensuring that the musical narrative would be effectively paced as an unfolding drama — a skill that Abels has fine-tuned through his career in film music.

Abels emphasizes that he and Giddens both intend Omar “to be written in one artistic voice” that preserves the identities of each. By eschewing a clear-cut division of labor with compartmentalized tasks assigned to each party, their collaborative process might be said to embody another sense of “liquid borders.”

A new stage has been added to their collaboration with the creation of Omar’s Journey. According to Abels, the biggest challenge has not been scaling down the orchestration but rather selecting what needs to be retained in order to preserve a sense of the journey at the opera’s core. It’s a journey in two senses, he adds: both

Omar’s physical journey — during his prime, from his life as a flourishing scholar to a foreign land where he was subjected to unimaginable dehumanization — and his inner emotional and spiritual journey. The second of the opera’s two acts focuses on the spirituality that sustains Omar and gives him a sense of purpose, despite the attempts of the enslavers to suppress and replace it with their own worldview.

While the chorus has a significant presence in the opera, the concert version relies on five singers to tell the story; they sometimes join forces to form an intimate chorus. Replacing an orchestra hidden in the pit with an onstage ensemble contributes to the music making “in a way that you might not be as conscious of in an operatic format,” as Abels puts it, with the instrumentalists becoming “equally as important as the singers.” (This involves not so much a reduction as a return to the small ensemble he and Giddens used while workshopping the opera.)

Omar and Omar’s Journey convey the pain and trauma carried by the African people — by people “descended from these stories,” as Giddens puts it. But essential to her retelling is Omar’s triumph in overcoming these impossible circumstances and finding the strength to remain true to his identity. That triumph resounds in the music that has in turn nourished America’s cultural identity.

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 110 minutes.

Photograph circa 1850

SYNOPSIS OF THE OPERA OMAR

The opening scene is set in 1806 in the Futa Toro region of West Africa, where Omar Ibn Said and his family live peacefully until they are attacked by raiders. His mother, Fatima, a spiritual matriarch for the village, is killed and Omar is taken by enslavers. He endures the atrocities of the Middle Passage and arrives at the Charleston slave market, where he is auctioned after meeting Julie, an enslaved woman planning her escape. She tries to help Omar, who is unable to understand her English, and she safeguards his cap when the auctioneer throws it into the crowd — it reminds her of her long-lost father. Omar works in the fields of an abusive enslaver named Johnson but is eventually urged to escape by the spirit of his mother.

Omar has been captured as a runaway slave and is jailed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He writes Qur’anic verses on the walls of his cell and is eventually bought by plantation owner Owen (real-life brother of the governor of North Carolina), who wants to convert Omar to Christianity to prove the superiority of his own faith. Omar begins laboring on Owen’s plantation and is welcomed by the other enslaved workers, including Julie, who returns his cap to him. In Owen’s study, Omar pretends to write a verse from the Bible while actually writing “I want to go home.” He later reads his new Bible and reinterprets Psalm 23 from the point of view of an enslaved Muslim. Julie encourages Omar to write a book about what he has experienced. He reminds those who have been taken to America, where they are forming new communities, not to forget their faith. Omar is joined by the company to praise Allah’s omnipresence.

Omar’s Journey is a concert work adapted from the full-evening opera Omar with libretto by Rhiannon Giddens and music by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels. Omar was originally co-produced by Spoleto Festival USA and Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and co-commissioned by Los Angeles Opera, Spoleto Festival USA, Carolina Performing Arts, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Detroit Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera. The true story of Omar Ibn Said is based upon an English translation of the Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said as published in From a Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said translated with an introduction by Ala Alryyes. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. Omar’s Journey is presented with the kind cooperation of Subito Music Corp., publisher.

Omar Wins the 2023 Pulitzer Prize

In May 2023, it was announced that Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels were awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for Omar. The selection committee described Omar as “an innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries” and “a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.”

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Mechas and Greg Grinnell

The concert appearance of Seckou Keita is made possible by the generous support of Claire and David Oxtoby

There is no intermission during the concert

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 8:00am

Chaparral Auditorium

MORNING MEDITATION

Seckou Keita kora

Centuries ago, when the djinns (the spirits of the African bush) gave the first-ever kora to the griot Jali Mady “Wuleng” (Jali Mady “The Red”), it had 22 strings. Then, when Jali Mady died, his fellow griots took one string away in his memory. But back in its birthplace in southern Senegal and Guinea Bissau, the 22-stringed kora survives, with the extra string giving the instrument special advantages in terms of tonal reach and groove. Each string on the kora has its own unique name in spoken Mandinka.

The kora is an instrument with three souls. The first soul is that of the tree and the fruit which makes up the neck and the calabash. The second soul is that of the animal — the skin of the antelope or cow that covers the calabash. And the third soul is the living soul — the person who plays it. It’s impossible for someone listening not to be touched.

Seckou learnt his art at the feet of his grandfather, Jali Kemo Cissokho, in the family compound back home in Casamance, Senegal. Here he was taught about discipline, hard work, faith, and self-respect. During this morning meditation, Seckou invites you to contemplate these values and the griot tradition of music, poetry, tradition and heritage being passed on, orally, to future traditions. What does the future look like for those whose learning comes from this tradition?

—SECKOU KEITA

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Ida and Glenn Mercer

The concert appearance of Francesco Turrisi is made possible by the generous support of Michele Brustin

OJAI CHATS

at Libbey Park Gazebo, 11:30am: Francesco Turrisi

There is no intermission during the concert

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 10:00am

Libbey Bowl

EARLY MUSIC

Francesco Turrisi curator and keyboards

Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello

Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Karen Ouzounian cello | Wu Man pipa

Joshua Stauffer theorbo

On this program, you might hear Monteverdi on the Persian kamancheh, Luca Marenzio’s madrigals performed by a modern string quartet, Dowland sung as a jazz ballad, or a Baroque theorbo playing folk-inspired original music.

This concert challenges the idea of late Renaissance and early Baroque music and reinterprets it as a universal language that can connect the 17th century to today through an imagined historical and geographical journey.

—FRANCESCO TURRISI

Early, Not Old

This summer’s Festival seeks to cross borders not only in the geographical sense but across time as well. The area generally known as “early music” has in fact turned out to have remarkably liquid borders. The antiquarian preoccupations that once underscored the alienness of early music are increasingly giving way to engagement by contemporary composers and performers who sense an affinity of values.

“Early music didn’t sound ‘old’ to me,” says Francesco Turrisi, recalling his discovery of parallels between early music and jazz in their attitude toward improvisation. His dual grounding in folk and early music further deepened this sense of the ongoing relevance of music from centuries ago.

Turrisi points to the connections between Renaissance and early Baroque music, especially from Italy, and folk sources: “There was much less of a distinction between classical and folk music, especially in the dance rhythms, the melodic quality of that music, and a

certain type of improvisation. But things changed very dramatically after those times, and early music speaks to me in a different way,” he adds. This was roughly around the time that the concept of a “standard repertoire” started taking shape in Western music — a powerful tool for reinforcing musical borders.

Turrisi is interested in exploring the idea of early music from several angles on this program — during the “very magical time” of Sunday morning on the final day of the Festival, as Ojai Music Festival Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian puts it. There will also be new music Turrisi has written, which is inspired by early music. The use of period instruments became a signature of the early music revival in the last century. We will hear various mixes of old and modern instruments as well as instruments that are not part of the tradition of Western music.

Wu Man, for example, presents the oldest music on the program, sharing her research into the music scrolls from the caves in Dunhuang — an important

crossroads on the ancient Silk Road, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China — which date back some 900 years. “This will give the audience a sense of what early Chinese music sounded like,” she says. “These are very simple melodies in the low register, not pentatonic and very different from the Chinese music we think of today.”

“We both have a very similar way of looking at these things,” says Rhiannon Giddens of her collaboration with Turrisi. “Both of us want to tear down false notions that you can only do a certain kind of music in a concert.”

The versatility of weaving in early music from different eras and cultures is the point — and that includes sharing the musical material itself among instruments from different contexts, whether cello, pipa, or kamancheh. The path from ancient Persia to modern jazz is shorter than we imagined…

This concert is approximately 90 minutes.

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 1:00pm

Libbey Park

FREE COMMUNITY EVENT

Steven Schick percussion

Stones and Stars: Listening to (and beyond) the World

Lei LIANG Trans

Conversation: How does what we hear help us tell our stories?

John CAGE 4’33”

Conversation: How does what we hear help us know where we are?

Frederic RZEWSKI To the Earth

Conversation: How does what we hear help us imagine our future?

Group Performance Stones and Stars

Wendell’s History for Steve Gustavo Aguilar (voice and playback)

We know that Ojai looks beautiful: the nearby mountains, the pretty streets of the town, the pink moment. But what does it sound like? Let’s discover that together through a series of musical works inspired by the environment, conversations designed to bring us closer to the sounds of this beautiful place, and ultimately a group composition/ performance, which will turn the audience into a large percussion ensemble. Join us for an event designed to open our ears and our hearts.

—STEVEN SCHICK

This concert is made possible by the generous support of Kathleen and James Drummy

The concert appearance of Steven Schick is made possible by the generous support of an Anonymous donor

Save the Date!

November 11 & 12 2023

Hosted by the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee with proceeds benefiting the Ojai Festival and its BRAVO music education and community program.

TOUR distinctive homes adorned with festive holiday inspirations

SHOP at the Holiday Marketplace featuring more than 45 vendors

Tickets on sale in Fall 2023. Get more information at OjaiFestival.org

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman

There is no intermission during the concert

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 2:30pm

Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

BETWEEN WORLDS

Mazz Swift violin | Mario Gotoh viola | Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass Ross Karre projection designer

Carlos SIMON Between Worlds

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS)

723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI

(2019)

Deceptive Simplicity

An increasingly prominent presence in the new music world, Carlos Simon is a versatile composer who writes solo and chamber pieces, orchestral works, and music theater works with equal fluency. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of a family who encouraged his love of music as a way to participate in church services at the African American Pentecostal church founded by his father, who comes from a line of preachers stretching back several generations.

Much of Simon’s work conveys his conviction that art can serve as a powerful platform to bring attention to suppressed and marginalized voices. Elegy: A Cry from the Grave for string quartet (2015), one of his most-performed pieces, uses music to reflect on “those who have been murdered wrongfully by an oppressive power; namely Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.” Requiem for the Enslaved is a rap opera featuring spoken word and hip-hop artist Marco Pavé and appears on Simon’s debut album for the Decca label (released last summer); it was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in the 2023 Grammy Awards.

Now based in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at Georgetown University as a member of the performing arts faculty,

Simon was deeply moved when he attended a landmark exhibition devoted to the self-taught artist Bill Traylor (see sidebar on p. 80), which was presented from September 2018 to April 2019 by the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art. Titled Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, this comprehensive retrospective — the fruit of seven years of intense curation by Leslie Umberger — marked the first major exhibition devoted to an artist who had been born into slavery.

In 1939, at the age of 84, Traylor suddenly began to express himself in an outpouring of paintings and drawings. By the time of his death in 1949, he had produced a remarkable series of untitled works. Many were lost, but around 1,200 survived. They range from drawings of single human or animal figures to more complex compositions. Silhouette shapes or abstractions are characteristic of Traylor’s vocabulary and are painted using a palette often limited to brown and black, with an occasional eruption of red or deep blue.

The deceptively simple style cultivated by the entirely self-taught Traylor “has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paintings, and something spanking new,” wrote the late Peter Schjeldahl in a review of the Smithsonian exhibition. “Songlike rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz

and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images.”

Recognition by the white-dominated art establishment was belated, despite the efforts of fellow artist Charles Shannon, who befriended Traylor and attempted to champion his work. The reception history of Traylor is a textbook case of how curation in the visual arts, just as in music, can also be used to reinforce reductive, tone-policing labels and boundaries — or to dismantle them. Once the word about Traylor began to spread in the 1980s, when his work appeared as part of a larger show at the Corcoran Gallery, it tended to get categorized as “primitive” or “folk art.”

But we are now more attuned to the multifaceted implications of what Traylor created. His art truly exists between worlds. As the critic Alana Shilling-Janoff puts it, his images portray “nothing less than the predicament of a man caught between past enslavement he cannot forget and present liberty he struggles to accept.” In addition to his achievement as an artist, Traylor is “an eloquent annalist of a nation’s history: its brutality.”

Simon recalls that, before attending the exhibition, he had not been aware of

Carlos SIMON (b. 1986) Between Worlds

BILL TRAYLOR

Traylor’s long life spanned close to a century, from the last decade of legalized slavery in the United States through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the Second World War. Born on a cotton plantation in central Alabama in 1853, he lived his early childhood as an enslaved person and continued working on the land until his mid-70s. No longer physically able to continue farming, Traylor moved to Montgomery, the state capital. He subsisted through a series of jobs but eventually became homeless. Most of his many children headed north in the Great Migration, and he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. (Only recently was a headstone placed in the cemetery in tribute.)

Carlos Simon is a multi-faceted and highly sought-after composer whose music ranges from concert music for large and small ensembles to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-Romanticism.

Currently Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center, Simon has been commissioned by leading ensembles, orchestras, and opera companies, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Washington National Opera. Next February, the Oakland Symphony will premiere Here I Stand: Paul Robeson, Simon’s opera on the legendary singer, actor, and civil rights activist to a libretto by Dan Harder.

Simon earned his doctorate degree at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. He has also received degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College. He is an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Music Sinfonia Fraternity and a member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, Society of Composers International, and Pi Kappa Lambda Music Honor Society. He has served as a member of the music faculty at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Simon was also a winner of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization to recognize extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians and was named a Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellow for his work for film and moving image.

CONTINUED

DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY

Traylor’s life or work. But the encounter caused him to feel an immediate sense of connection to Traylor. An eyewitness to the social and political turbulence of this crucial period in American history, Traylor fascinated Simon as a creative figure who moved between the worlds of slavery and freedom, wealth and poverty, rural and urban life, white and Black culture, the traditional and the modern.

Between Worlds originated as a series commissioned for the young artists of the Irving M. Klein International String Competition. Simon created a series of solo pieces — one each for violin, viola, cello, and double bass — that can be played separately or as a kind of suite. Each lasts about four minutes and is marked “sorrowful” at the beginning.

Simon moves between worlds stylistically to evoke the kind of music he imagines Traylor would have heard. He spans such vernacular idioms as the blues with phrasings reminiscent of Bach to cast new light on the “themes of mystical folklore, race, and religion [that] pervade Traylor’s work” — he doesn’t limit himself to interacting with a particular drawing or painting. “In many ways, the simplified forms in Traylor’s artwork tell of the complexity of his world, creativity, and inspiring bid for self-definition in a dehumanizing segregated culture,” explains Simon. “I imagine these solo pieces as a musical study, hopefully showing Traylor’s life between disparate worlds.”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 50 minutes.

CARLOS SIMON

The Ojai Festival Women’s Committee (OFWC) is the largest donor to the internationally acclaimed Ojai Music Festival and its BRAVO Music Education and Community Program. Through their philanthropic and volunteer activities, the OFWC has raised more than one million dollars over the past 70 years!

An active 100+ member volunteer committee, the OFWC presents unique events throughout the year, including the annual Holiday Home Tour & Marketplace, Art & Music Trips, Concerts, Lectures, and fun Socials, all fostering lasting friendships and the continued gift of music to the community.

Join us!

For more info about the OFWC visit OjaiFestival.org/Support or call Anna Wagner at the festival office 805 646 2094.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Hope Tschopik Schneider and with special support by the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee

There is no intermission during the concert

Visit Bart’s Books table to purchase your own copy of Build a House by Rhiannon Giddens

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 4:00pm

Libbey Park Gazebo

FREE COMMUNITY EVENT: BUILD A HOUSE

Rhiannon Giddens vocals and banjo | Francesco Turrisi percussion

A Song and Story for Today

Build a House began as a song — and as a response to the troubled times we’re living through. In the summer of 2020, while on lockdown at her current home base in Ireland, Rhiannon Giddens observed the protests over racial injustice that erupted across the United States and needed to channel the anger and outrage — and sense of helplessness — that they unleashed for her.

“This song came knocking … and I had to open the door and let it in,” Giddens says. She wrote the words first, matching them with a melody whose haunting directness makes it sound like a folk song that has been around for a long time. It perfectly suits the story her lyrics tell of the ongoing struggle of African Americans — from the moment they were enslaved and forcibly brought to the Americas.

To introduce the song, Giddens collaborated virtually with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, whose mantle as artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble she inherited soon after. To the accompaniment of Ma’s cello, Build a House was first streamed on Juneteenth of 2020.

“There are so many stories made invisible: too-often-violent histories hidden beneath

the surfaces of our cities, our institutions, our music. It’s our job to make them visible,” Ma tweeted to announce the song’s birth.

As it happened, Giddens chanced upon a Twitter comment suggesting that she make Build a House into a children’s book. She recalls that the suggestion reawakened a long-dormant desire to venture into this art form. The circumstances of pandemic lockdown suddenly provided an opportunity.

Giddens chose as her collaborator the Atlanta-based author and illustrator Monica Mikai, whose bright, personalitysaturated images have graced numerous children’s books, including a biography of Georgia politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams (Sarah Warren’s Stacey Abrams: Lift Every Voice).

Mikai’s vivid images match the uncompromising honesty of Giddens’s poetry. Using a ballad form whose repetitions make it readily adaptable to a children’s book, the song recounts experiences of oppression and violence faced by Black people that are an undeniable part of American history — as well as the determination to keep pushing forward for a better life.

The book shows a Black family surviving all of these tribulations, starting with the long centuries of enslavement. A scene set during the Reconstruction era, for example, shows a white man on a horse torching the house the family has finally been able to build for themselves.

The family finds a way to lift their spirits with music — the father playing fiddle, the mother and daughter banjos — but “then you came and took my song and claimed it for your own,” sings the narrator. Yet the family continues to rebuild and, in a particularly memorable image near the end of the book, to draw from the well that replenishes them. And they persist in playing their instruments.

“Monica Mikai’s illustrations are incredible and exciting to engage with on their own terms,” says Giddens. “I love reading Build a House to kids because they get it immediately. And it’s exactly these kinds of stories that we need to tell.”

MAY This concert is approximately 45 minutes.

—THOMAS

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Kathleen Kane and Jerry Eberhardt

There will be an intermission during the concert

Sunday, June 11, 2023 | 5:30pm

Libbey Bowl

STRINGS ATTACHED

Amy Schroeder violin | Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Seckou Keita kora | Rhiannon Giddens vocals/multi-instrumentalist

Wu Man pipa | Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist | Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko violins | Mario Gotoh viola

Karen Ouzounian cello | Shawn Conley bass | Joshua Stauffer theorbo

Michael ABELS

Isolation Variation

Amy Schroeder violin

Duo Improvisation

Kayhan Kalhor kamancheh | Seckou Keita kora

INTERMISSION

Nassim KHORASSANI Lullaby

Rhiannon Giddens vocals | Karen Ouzounian cello

Francesco Turrisi piano

Selections to be announced from the stage

The Company

Connection Variations

Throughout this edition of the Ojai Music Festival, Rhiannon Giddens and her colleagues have been celebrating the extraordinary creative boost that happens when artists — and audiences — venture into the hybrid spaces between worlds. Music is by its nature uncontainable and resists the boundaries and borders into which we are pressured to compartmentalize our experiences.

One of the side effects of the recent years of pandemic closure was to underscore how diminished we become when compelled to adapt to artificial constraints — and how essential it is to break free from whatever isolates us. The impossibility of live performance fueled a desire to reestablish connections through our technological Silk Road, the internet, and thus share musical discoveries with a global audience.

Michael Abels, whose collaboration with Giddens on the concert piece Omar’s Journey has been a centerpiece of the Festival, captures this phenomenon in the Isolation Variation he wrote in 2020 for violinist Hilary Hahn. Conceived as a solo encore piece, it “commemorates and validates the experience of being a musician in a time of constant change and uncertainty,” Hahn observes, “the hypnotic, repetitive, yet unpredictable nature of working indefinitely on something you love, a metamorphosis in progress.”

Defying racism, classism, political rivalries, and similarly divisive influences, music around the world has always thrived on exchange between cultures or between people across the hierarchies of a particular society.

Instruments cross borders, too. We have the actual Silk Road to thank for the diffusion of instruments across borders that helped shape Europe’s string culture, for example, which in turn became a hallmark of Western classical music.

“It may well have been along the Silk Road that some of the first ‘world music’ jam sessions took place,” says the ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin. “Innovative musicians and luthiers adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques.”

Our closing musical celebration replicates that process by staging encounters among the diverse kinds of string instruments from the cultures represented throughout the Festival: whether it’s Kayhan Kalhor and Seckou Keita improvising as a kamancheh-kora duo or Rhiannon Giddens and Wu Man bringing the banjo and pipa into dialogue. The stories of each of these instruments, as Giddens has so eloquently shown in her work, embody complex histories of social and political as well as artistic interaction.

“Humans came out of Africa and spread all over the world and changed along the way. That’s what instruments do as well,” observes Giddens. “The massive migration of instruments is connected to the migration of people. The banjo and the pipa have a common ancestor, just like we do.” Her hope is that the 2023 Ojai Music Festival encourages us to ignore artificial boundaries and see that “we’re really not that far apart.”

The spontaneity of the program is also grounded in Giddens’s philosophy. “Everybody brings something from what has been created over the course of the weekend, as we’ve been interacting through the concerts. These opportunities that we have to get to be together and play together are blessings. We need more collaboration in these worlds of music and more open-endedness, not less.”

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 90 minutes.

Ensemble Profiles

ATTACCA QUARTET

Two-time Grammy Award-winning Attacca Quartet are acclaimed as one of the most versatile and outstanding ensembles of the moment — a true quartet for modern times. Gliding through traditional classical repertoire through to electronic, video game music, and contemporary collaborations, they are one of the world’s most innovative and respected ensembles.

In 2021, the quartet announced their exclusive signing to Sony Classical, releasing two albums, Real Life and Of All Joys, that embody their redefinition of what a string quartet can be. Passionate advocates of contemporary repertoire, the quartet are dedicated to presenting and recording new works, with their two releases Orange and Evergreen, in collaboration with Caroline Shaw, winning the 2020 and 2023 Grammy Awards for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

The quartet continue to perform in the world’s top venues and festivals, with highlights including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Sala São Paolo, San Francisco Performances, Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville, Palau de la Musica, Concertgebow Brugges, De Doelen, Kings Place, and Amsterdam’s String Quartet Biennale. They last appeared at the 75th Ojai Music Festival in 2021 with Music Director John Adams.

Having originally met whilst studying at the Juilliard School in the early 2000s, Attacca Quartet have received numerous accolades, and engage in extensive educational and community outreach projects.

ATTACCA QUARTET

AMY SCHROEDER violin

DOMENIC SALERNI violin

NATHAN SCHRAM viola

ANDREW YEE cello

Amy Schroeder has been hailed by the Washington Post as “an impressive artist whose playing combines imagination and virtuosity.” She has soloed with orchestras including the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Amherst Symphony, the Clarence Symphony, the Hilton Head Symphony, and the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra. Schroeder has soloed with the Spanish National Orchestra with John Adams and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra with Marin Alsop. Schroeder serves as music faculty member at Vassar College. She also recently formed the Schroeder Umansky Duo with her husband, Felix Umansky, internationally celebrated cellist and member of the Harlem Quartet. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Henrietta and Albert J. Ziegle Jr. Scholarship, which provided the tuition for her studies at Juilliard. There she was a student of Sally Thomas and the Juilliard String Quartet. She currently plays on two different violins: a Fernando Gagliano made in 1771, on loan to her from the Five Partners Foundation; and a violin made by Nathan Slobodkin in 2012. Schroeder teaches violin and piano to students of all ages, and in her spare time

she enjoys composing, traveling with her husband, and scuba diving.

Domenic Salerni is a frequent guest of the Chiarina Chamber Players and is active as a chamber musician, clinician, composer, and arranger. As a member of the Chiarina Chamber Players, Salerni was a recipient of a 2020 Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant and performed a new work by Carlos Simon with Peabody Conservatory bass faculty Carl DuPont in April 2022. In 2021 his one-movement string quartet, Trilobites, after a short story by Breece D’J Pancake, was premiered at the first inaugural Appalachian Chamber Music Festival in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Salerni looks forward to the premiere this season of a suite of protest songs from the first Civil Rights Era by the Palaver Strings and tenor Nicholas Phan. In 2020, as part of his response to the Covid-19 outbreak, he helped set up the Philadelphia Musicians Relief Fund as part of AFM Local 77’s efforts to provide for its community of musicians in times of need. In 2019, he performed his original film accompaniment to Giuseppe

Photo by David Goddard

Ensemble Profiles

de Liguoro’s Dante’s Inferno as part of a consortium between the film studies, French, and Italian departments and the Center for Creativity and the Arts at Emory University. Salerni was the recipient of the Atlanta Symphony Talent Development Program’s Aspire Award in 2019. He holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Yale University School of Music.

Nathan Schram is a Grammy Award–winning composer. He has collaborated, in the studio and on stage, with many of the great artists of today including Björk, James Blake, Sting, David Crosby, Becca Stevens, David Byrne, Just Blaze, Itzhak Perlman, and others. Schram is a PhD student in composition at Princeton University and an Honorary Ambassador to the city of Chuncheon, South Korea. He has released two solo records of his own compositions, Nearsided and Oak & the Ghost, on Better Company Records and New Amsterdam Records, respectively. His arrangement of Radiohead’s 2 + 2 = 5 written for Becca Stevens and Attacca Quartet was also nominated at the 2023 Grammy Awards. Apart from performing, he is the founder and executive director of Musicambia. Founded in 2013, Musicambia develops music education programs and performances inside prisons and jails throughout the United States.

Andrew Yee (she/they), cellist and composer, was trained at The Juilliard School. The Attacca Quartet, which has released several albums to critical acclaim, included Yee’s arrangement of Haydn’s Seven Last Words, which thewholenote.com praised as “. . . easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” She co-composed a score to Wu Tsang’s film adaptation of Moby Dick; or, The Whale with Caroline Shaw that premiered with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and then in New York at the Shed by the New York Philharmonic.

She is writing works for Leilehua Lanzilotti, the Thalea Quartet and the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra this season. Her solo project Halfie draws on her experience as a bi-racial and trans person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned, and on the concerts, will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello. She has been touring a duo show with Caroline Shaw since 2021. In 2019 she won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for her pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. She likes to draw apples, cook like an Italian grandma, and has developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City. Her son Otis is the love of her life. She plays on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.

RED FISH BLUE FISH, PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE

The New York Times has called red fish blue fish a “dynamic percussion ensemble from the University of California.” Founded more than 25 years ago by Steven Schick, the San Diego–based ensemble performs, records, and premieres works from the last 85 years of western percussion’s rich history. The group works regularly with living composers from every continent. Recent projects include the world premiere of Roger Reynolds’s Sanctuary and the American premiere of James Dillon’s epic Nine Rivers cycle with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In the summer of 2011, red fish blue fish collaborated with George Crumb, Dawn Upshaw, and Peter Sellars at the Ojai Music Festival to premiere the staged version of The Winds of Destiny. Eighth Blackbird invited red fish blue fish to join

them in performances of works by American icons John Cage and Steve Reich at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The New York Times called their “riveting” John Cage performance the “highlight” of the program. In 2012 red fish blue fish presented four concerts of percussion music alongside Percussion Group Cincinnati at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington, DC, where they performed highlights from Cage’s collection of percussion works.

Recordings of the percussion chamber music of Iannis Xenakis and Roger Reynolds on Mode Records have been praised by critics around the world. Their recording of the early percussion works of Karlheinz Stockhausen received Germany’s award for the best recording of contemporary music in 2015.

red fish blue fish has had impact on new music percussion both by virtue of their many performances and acclaimed recordings, and also through their commitment to research and pedagogy as a resident ensemble at UCSD. The group’s numerous alumni hold major teaching and artistic positions throughout the world.

RED FISH BLUE FISH, PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE

MITCHELL CARLSTROM

MICHAEL JONES

KOSUKE MATSUDA

CAMILO ZAMUDIO

STEVEN SCHICK director

Artist Profiles

Gloria Cheng piano

“An invaluable newmusic advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and EsaPekka Salonen” (New York Times), Grammyand Emmy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng has long been devoted to creative collaborations with composers of our time. She has been a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen. She has been a recitalist at the Ojai Music Festival (where she began her association with Boulez in 1984), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Mendocino, and Chautauqua Music Festivals, and annually on Los Angeles’s Piano Spheres series. She has premiered and been the dedicatee of countless works that include John Williams’s Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Dichotomie, and John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos. In duo-recitals with the composers, she premiered Thomas Adès’s two-piano Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley’s Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. Winner of the Best Instrumental Solo Performance (without orchestra) Grammy for her 2008 recording Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film project, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, featuring Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams, aired multiple times on PBS SoCal and won the 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy.

Garlands for Steven Stucky was her 2018 star-studded CD tribute to the late composer by 32 of his friends and former students. Her education includes a BA in economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. She teaches graduate seminars and chamber music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

young influencer in performing arts by The Generation T List of Asia Tatler in 2018 and 2019; and one of 10 Outstanding Young Persons of Taiwan by Junior Chamber International. She was named one of the Best Dancers of 2021 in Richard Move’s Herstory of the Universe by the New York Times

PeiJu Chien-Pott is an internationally acclaimed award-winning contemporary dance artist and choreographer from Taiwan, celebrated particularly for her work as a principal dancer for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Described as “one of the greatest living modern dancers” and “the most dramatically daring and physically chameleon-esque Graham dancer of her generation,” ChienPott has interpreted the iconic lead roles of Martha Graham’s repertoire. She holds a BFA in Dance from Taipei National University of the Arts, where she has been honored with “Outstanding Alumni Award.” Chien-Pott has received many prestigious international recognitions, including a Bessie from the NY Dance and Performance Awards; Positano Premia La Danza Leonide Massine for Best Female Contemporary Dancer; an honoree of the Women’s History Month by Hudson County; named by Dance Magazine one of its Best Performers in 2014 and 2017; and received the Capri International Dance Award 2018. Chien-Pott was selected as a

Her recent choreography includes Rebirth in collaboration with sculptor Kang MuXiang for Taipei 101; Island, created during the pandemic on commission from the Iron Rose Festival of Taiwan; Unity, completed for the late choreographer Nai-Ni Chen and premiered at the New York Live Arts; Split, commissioned by Periapsis Music and Dance; and she was one of the collaborating choreographers for the evening-length work The Threads Project #1 Universal Dialogues of Buglisi Dance Theater, premiered at the Chelsea Factory. She has recently premiered her work Lion in the City, a hip-hop Chinese Lion Dance for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company’s Lunar New Year program celebrating the Year of the Water Rabbit. Chien-Pott’s appearance in a short film Nala, directed by British filmmaker and choreographer Darshan Singh Bhuller, has received 10 international film awards.  Chien-Pott was awarded a 2023 choreography fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is a faculty member at The Ailey School and Martha Graham School.

Shawn Conley bass

Hawaiian-born bassist and composer Shawn Conley grew up loving all types of music. This love developed into a career that straddles many genres. He has been playing with

the Silkroad Ensemble for six years and is a

PeiJu Chien-Pott choreographer and dancer

Artist Profiles

member of the Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra The Knights. Recent projects include Silkroad’s Grammy-winning album Sing Me Home, an upcoming release of the Brahms and Beethoven violin concertos with Gil Shaham and The Knights, the world premiere tour of Osvaldo Golijov’s Falling Out of Time (commissioned by Silkroad), as well as an international tour of the new performance-art piece The Head & the Load created by South African visual artist William Kentridge.

Conley can also be heard on The Knights’s album Azul, featuring Silkroad founder Yo-Yo Ma. As a studio musician, he has performed on multiple soundtracks including True Grit, Moonrise Kingdom, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Conley studied at Rice University with Paul Ellison and in Paris, France, with Francois Rabbath.

Emi Ferguson flute

Emi Ferguson is excited to be back at the 2023 Ojai Music Festival. A 2023 recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ferguson can be heard live in concerts and festivals with groups including 2022 Ojai Festival Music Director AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), the Handel and Haydn Society, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Manhattan Chamber Players. Her recordings celebrate her fascination with reinvigorating music and instruments of the past for the present. Her debut album, Amour Cruel, an indie-pop song cycle inspired by the music of the 17thcentury French court, was released by Arezzo

Music in September 2017, spending four weeks on the classical, classical crossover, and world music Billboard charts. Her 2019 album Fly the Coop: Bach Sonatas and Preludes, a collaboration with continuo band Ruckus, debuted at #1 on the iTunes classical charts and #2 on the Billboard classical charts, and was called “blindingly impressive ... a fizzing, daring display of personality and imagination” by the New York Times A passionate chamber musician of works new and old, Ferguson has been a featured performer at the Marlboro, Lucerne, Ojai, Lake Champlain, Bach Virtuosi, and June in Buffalo festivals, often premiering new works by composers of our time. Ferguson has spoken and performed at several TEDx events and has been featured on media outlets including the Discovery Channel, Amazon Prime, WQXR, and Vox talking about how music relates to our world today. As part of WQXR’s Artist Propulsion Lab, she created the series “This Composer is SICK!” with Max Fine that explored the impact of syphilis on composers Franz Schubert, Bedrich Smetana, and Scott Joplin, in addition to guest hosting WQXR’s Young Artists Showcase. This summer, her book co-written with David and Nicholas Csicsko, Iconic Composers, will be released by Trope Publishing, introducing kids and adults to 50 incredible composers. Born in Japan and raised in London and Boston, she now resides in New York City.

Born in Japan, Mario Gotoh is recognized as a Grammy Award winner, sought for distinguished roles as an innovative and creative violinist, violist, passionate educator,

and composer with a remarkably unique style of expression in all genres, performing worldwide. An avid interdisciplinary collaborator, Dr. Gotoh performs worldwide as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble (founded by Yo-Yo Ma), and is also a member of The Knights, a collective based in NYC. Dr. Gotoh has performed at the Park Avenue Armory, Holland Festival, Tate Modern, and Ruhr Festival as an original featured actor in William Kentridge’s large-scale production, The Head & The Load, about Africans in the First World War. Dr. Gotoh frequently performs as soloist, concertmaster, and principal of numerous ensembles. She regularly premieres and records new works; and also records and performs with numerous renowned artists and on soundtracks, including: Succession, Moonlight, Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, Roger Waters, Sting, Doja Cat, Ed Sheeran - performing live on The Grammys, SNL, MTV VMAs, Colbert, Letterman, The White House, Madison Square Garden, Barclays Center, Elbphilharmonie, Musikverein Vienna, Newport Folk Festival, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Aspen, Banff, to name a few. She was the original violinist-violist in Hamilton: An American Musical on Broadway, Original Cast Recording, and Movie. Dr. Gotoh holds dual-degree Doctorates in both Violin and Viola Performance. She is currently on faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College, teaches workshops through Silkroad Connect and Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts, and has taught workshops and classes in Taiwan, China, Canada and colleges and institutions across the US. Dr. Gotoh is inspired by her community activism, language, literature, cooking, writing, visual arts, film, swimming, and exploring cultures everywhere.

Mario Gotoh violin and viola

Artist Profiles

Leonard Hayes piano

Leonard Hayes is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where he studies under the tutelage of concert pianist Bernadene Blaha. He serves as the graduate teaching assistant in the Keyboard Studies department. Previously, Hayes served as head of piano studies and assistant director in the Music Conservatory at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Texas.

Hayes is a winner of numerous piano competitions including the 2021 Los Angeles Korean American Music Competition and the 2015 National Piano Competition sponsored by the National Association of Negro Musicians. As a concerto soloist, he has performed with the Santa Monica Symphony, New England Repertory Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Korean American Orchestra. As recitalist and chamber musician, Hayes has performed across the U.S. and abroad, including such notable venues as Sweelinkzaal at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; Hammond Hall at the Winspear Opera House; Steinway Hall, Hatch Hall, and Kilbourn Hall (Eastman School of Music); Memorial Chapel (Lawrence University); Ayers Recital Hall (Texas Lutheran University); and Thrasher Opera House (Green Lake, WI). As a scholar, Hayes was awarded the prestigious 2015 Links Scholarship. The award, a cooperative effort between the Rochester (NY) Chapter of The Links, Inc., and the Eastman School of Music, recognizes and celebrates the extraordinary talent of an African American scholar musician.

Hayes received a high school diploma from the Interlochen Arts Academy. He holds a bachelor of music degree from the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University with additional studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam; and a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music. Leonard’s teachermentors have included Douglas Humpherys, Catherine Kautsky, and T.J. Lymenstull.

Nicholas Houfek lighting designer

Nicholas Houfek is a NYC-based lighting designer working in music, dance, and theater. Selected projects include Claire Chase’s Density Project (The Kitchen), International Contemporary Ensemble; Oyá by Marcos Balter (NY Philharmonic, soloist for light); Natalie Merchant; Maya Beiser; Ojai Music Festival; Silkroad Ensemble; Tyshawn Sorey’s Perle Noire directed by Peter Sellars (Ojai Music Festival, Oberon-ART); Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler; Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen; Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, directed by Doug Fitch; George Lewis’s Soundlines featuring Steven Schick and directed by Jim Findlay (Skirball); Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air; Ash Fure’s The Force of Things (Mostly Mozart); The 39 Steps (Olney Theatre Center). In addition to traditional lighting for live performance, Houfek has been developing a light-organ software interface called the ColorSynth that acts as a link between performer and lighting. Houfek has also designed for the Martha Graham Dance Company, Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance, and Ian Spencer Bell Dance; is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.

Kayhan Kalhor

kamancheh

Three-time Grammy nominee

Kayhan Kalhor is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh, who through his many musical collaborations has been instrumental in popularizing Persian music in the West and is a creative force in today’s music scene. His performances of traditional Persian music and multiple collaborations have attracted audiences around the globe. He has studied the music of Iran’s many regions, in particular those of Khorason and Kordestan, and has toured the world as a soloist with various ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is co-founder of the renowned ensembles Dastan, Ghazal: Persian & Indian Improvisations and Masters of Persian Music. Kayhan Kalhor has composed works for Iran’s most renowned vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri and has also performed and recorded with Iran’s greatest instrumentalists. He has composed music for television and film and was most recently featured on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth in a score that he collaborated on with Osvaldo Golijov. In 2004, he was invited by American composer John Adams to give a solo recital at Carnegie Hall as part of his Perspectives Series and in the same year he appeared on a double bill at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, sharing the program with the Festival Orchestra performing the Mozart Requiem. Kalhor was a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma and his compositions appear on several of the ensemble’s albums.

Artist Profiles

Ross Karre percussion, projection designer

Ross Karre is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, OH, and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his doctorate in music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Karre formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts degree. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble, where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/ Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival (Netherlands), Ojai Music Festival (CA), LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears (TN), MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Diskotek (Greenland), and Music Today Biennial (Brazil). Karre’s solo album 10.67 Cycles, featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre

at Columbia University, and the National Gallery of Art. Karre’s archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICE, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group.

Seckou Keita kora

Since arriving in the U.K. from Senegal in 1999, Seckou Keita has been on an epic creative journey that has seen him broaden the idiomatic scope of his instrument as well as spread his wings, literally and figuratively. Nicknamed “the Hendrix of the Kora,” he has been celebrated for his ingenious tunings and virtuosity and praised as “one of the finest exponents of the kora.” Performing all over the globe as a solo artist and with his groundbreaking quintet, he has captivated audiences at WOMAD, Hay, Glastonbury, Tokyo Jazz, Chicago World Music Festival, Sydney International, Montreal Jazz Festivals, and other places.

Acclaimed collaborations with numerous jazz, pop, Latin, folk, and classical artists, notably include Damon Albarn & the Africa

Express; Welsh harpist Catrin Finch; Cuban pianist Omar Sosa; AKA trio with Italian guitarist Antonio Forcione and Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale; Paul Weller and the Folk Collective; The Lost Words: Spell Songs (2019) joined by the words of Robert Macfarlane and artwork of Jackie Morris. Since 2007, he has had several opportunities to perform with classical ensembles including Orchestre National de Bretagne, which has spurred him towards his dream of leading an orchestral work specifically for the kora.

Seckou Keita has released 11 albums as a leader and co-leader. Through this work, he has earned numerous accolades including three Songlines Music Awards, and several BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including 2019 Musician of the Year. “I don’t know if I’m a folk musician, a jazz, or a world one,” he said at the time. “Forget about categories. My music is just music for the soul.”

Seckou Keita released African Rhapsodies (Claves Records), a work for kora and orchestra arranged by Italian composer and bass player Davide Mantovani and recorded with BBC Concert Orchestra. Directed by Royal Northern College of Music’s Head of Conducting Mark Heron, Keita also invited Mantovani on double bass and his brother, Gambian percussionist (and kora player) Suntou Susso; pride of place was given to the outstanding South African cellist and vocalist Abel Selaocoe.

Artist Profiles

Cheryse McLeod

Lewis mezzo-soprano

Greensboro, North Carolina, native mezzo-soprano

Cheryse McLeod

Lewis enjoys a diverse career in opera, musical theater, concert, commercial, print, and voiceover. Lewis made her Spoleto Festival USA debut as The Mother (Fatima) in the world premiere production of Omar in 2022. She also recently reprised her world premiere role at Carolina Performing Arts in February 2023. Other recent role highlights include Bess Understudy/Ensemble Swing in the first National Broadway Tour of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Girlfriend 3/Congregant 3 in Blue (Seattle Opera); Carmen in Carmen (Asheville Lyric Opera, Capital Opera Raleigh); Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia (Asheville Lyric Opera, Mansfield Symphony, Central Georgia Opera Guild); Hansel in Hansel and Gretel (Connecticut Opera, Greensboro Opera); The Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors (Opera Carolina, Connecticut Opera); Cinderella’s Stepmother in Into the Woods (Village Theatre); and Annie in Porgy and Bess (Seattle Opera).

Lewis has been a concert soloist with Orchestra Seattle, Kirkland Choral Society, Eugene Concert Choir, Eastern Music Festival, Greensboro Symphony, Master Chorus Eastside and Greensboro Oratorio Society. Recent commercial, print, and voiceover credits include national ads for Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, T-Mobile, and Zillow. In addition to performing, she runs her own company, Premier Vocal Entertainment, that provides top-tier, professional vocal entertainment for year-round events in the greater Seattle area, where she is based. Follow @CheryseMezzo and @ PremierVocalEntertainment to learn more.

Described as “radiant” and “expressive” (New York Times) and “nothing less than gorgeous” (Memphis Commercial Appeal), cellist Karen Ouzounian leads a multifaceted career as a chamber musician, soloist, collaborator, and composer. Winner of the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award, she is drawn to unusual collaborations and the development of adventurous new works, and is soughtafter for her open-hearted, passionate, and vibrantly detailed approach to music-making. Recent projects include the creation of an experimental theater work with director Joanna Settle; the world premiere of Lembit

Beecher’s cello concerto Tell Me Again with the Orlando Philharmonic; the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Shorthand for solo cello and strings with The Knights, which she subsequently toured as soloist with The Knights throughout Europe and the U.S. and released on Avie Records; the release of Kayhan Kalhor’s Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur for solo cello, kamancheh, and tabla; the development, touring, and recording of Osvaldo Golijov’s Falling Out of Time; and the digital world premiere of Beecher’s A Year to the Day, filmed for The Violin Channel with Augustin Hadelich and Nicholas Phan. She is a founding member of the Grammy-nominated Aizuri Quartet, and appears regularly as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble and The Knights. Her eveninglength video work In Motion, an exploration of heritage, family history, and migration through interviews, her own compositions, and collaborations with visual artists Kevork Mourad and Nomi Sasaki and composerpercussionist Haruka Fujii, was presented by BroadBand in 2021.

Karen Ouzounian cello

Artist Profiles

Andy Papas bass-baritone

Praised for his “vocal power and finesse” and “irresistible hijinks,” baritone Andy Papas is sought after for his impeccable musicianship and mastery of comic repertoire. In the 2022-2023 season, Papas is pleased to make his debut with Ojai Music Festival as Owen/Johnson in Omar’s Journey, roles which he recently covered in the Boston Lyric Opera production of Omar This season, he reprises the title role in Don Pasquale with Opera Saratoga and Union Avenue Opera. Last season, he returned to Anchorage Opera in one of his signature roles, Major General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, which he has also performed with Opera Naples. He also rejoined Opera Company of Middlebury as John Styx in Orphée aux Enfers, brought his celebrated Doctor Bartolo (Il barbiere di Siviglia) to Pacific Northwest Opera, and reprised his acclaimed Don Magnifico (La Cenerentola) at Fargo-Moorhead Opera. Papas has sung Bartolo with Union Avenue Opera, Opera Theater of Connecticut, Anchorage Opera, Painted Sky Opera, and covered the role at Boston Lyric Opera. His committed, musically sophisticated performances have consistently earned him praise for “creating a character both sinister and silly,” and for his “rich voiced portrayals... of considerable aplomb.”

Other noteworthy recent engagements for Papas include the Music Master in Ariadne auf Naxos with Vashon Opera, Benoit in La bohème with The Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, Baron Zeta in The Merry Widow with Opera Saratoga, Pandolfe in Cendrillon with Opera Company of Middlebury; and the title role in Falstaff and Tonio in Pagliacci with Raylynmor Opera.

Papas can be heard on Bridge Records as Bugs/Gent, which he also performed with Opera Saratoga, on New World Records as part of White Snake Projects recording of The Ouroboros Trilogy: Naga, and on Albany Records as Stephano in the world premiere of composer Joseph Summer’s The Tempest

Michael Preacely bass-baritone

Michael Preacely, an American baritone based in Lexington, Kentucky, has proven himself a rising star on the operatic stage. Over the course of his burgeoning career, he has worked with numerous major and regional opera houses and orchestras in the United States and abroad and has consistently garnered critical acclaim. Preacely’s international career has spanned the globe, having featured performances in Europe, Asia, Russia, and Canada. Domestically, he has been featured with the Cincinnati Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Opera Memphis, Kentucky Opera, and Cleveland Opera, rank among the multitude of distinguished companies with whom he has performed. He has appeared with many of the nation’s leading orchestras — including the Cincinnati Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Hilton Head Symphony, Asheville Symphony, Oakland East Bay Symphony, Memphis Symphony, Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Pops, Cincinnati Pops, American Spiritual Ensemble, and most recently the American Pops Orchestra.

In addition to his noteworthy stage credits and history of critical acclaim, Preacely has also received a great many accolades, including his reception of awards in the Fritz and Jensen Vocal Competition and the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Preacely is on faculty at the University of Kentucky as a lecturer in voice. Upcoming engagements include his debut singing the title role of oratorio Elijah with the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra.

Artist Profiles

Limmie Pulliam tenor

Rising tenor Limmie

Pulliam thrills audiences with his captivating stage presence and his “stentorian, yet beautiful,” sound.

Pulliam was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for his “fullthroated vocal power, and intimate lyricism” in his debut at Livermore Valley Opera in Verdi’s Otello

On December 17, 2022, Pulliam made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Radamès in Verdi’s Aida, which also served as his role debut. He recently reprised the role of Radamès with Tulsa Opera for their 75thanniversary gala concert. Elsewhere during the season, he returns to The Cleveland Orchestra for his first performances as Dick Johnson in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. In concert, he debuts with the San Diego Symphony singing Verdi’s Requiem and makes his Carnegie Hall debut performing The Ordering of Moses in collaboration with his alma mater, The Oberlin Conservatory. He also joins pianist Mark Markham for a series of recitals entitled “Make Them Hear You: A Spiritual Journey” and will also be featured on “operatic greatest hits” concerts with the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra and Delta Symphony.

The 2021–22 season was highlighted by his highly anticipated Los Angeles Opera debut as Manrico in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, where he was lauded by the Los Angeles Times for his “healthy, focused, ringing tenor.” He followed that with a successful role debut as Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Vashon Opera. Upcoming performances include his company debut with Livermore Valley Opera in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, his company debut in Fort Worth Opera’s A Night of Black Excellence concert, and his rescheduled appearance with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra as the tenor soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He is set to take the stage again as Verdi’s Otello in his highly anticipated debut with The Cleveland Orchestra.

Future engagements include a mainstage debut as Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca with Madison Opera, and international debuts with the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, Germany, in Verdi’s Requiem, and The Vienna Volksoper in Vienna, Austria, in John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary

Jon Reimer director

Jon Reimer is a freelance theatre artist and educator. He holds a doctorate from the Joint PhD program in Theatre and Drama at the University of California

San Diego and UC Irvine, and an MFA in Directing from UC San Diego.

Born, raised, and educated in eastern Pennsylvania, Reimer also earned a BA in Theatre Arts (Directing and Design) with a minor in Religion (Asian Studies) from

Muhlenberg College. He is now based in Tokyo, Japan, where he lives with his husband and works as a drama teacher at the International School of the Sacred Heart.  Reimer’s doctoral dissertation, “Proximal and Reminiscent Nostalgias: Queer Potentiality in Postwar Japan and the Post-Method American Theatre,” explores how an expanded understanding of nostalgia on postwar Japan can influence acting pedagogy and play analysis. Its chapters center around concepts of nostalgia, traditional and modern Japanese performance (particularly that of Yukio Mishima), active-listening-based acting techniques, and cross-cultural theatre. His current research is focused on inter- and intra-cultural Japanese performance and their relevance amongst international perspectives of performance.

Reimer has served as a Visiting Professor in Theatre for the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego, an Adjunct Lecturer in the Japanese Program of the Department of Linguistics and Asian/ Middle Eastern Languages at San Diego State University where he taught Japanese Popular Culture, and a Guest Lecturer in Theatre at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he taught Japanese Theatre, Pan-Asian Theatre, Dramaturgy/Play Analysis, and Theatre & Society

Accomplishments he is most proud of in his life so far: completing his dissertation during a global pandemic, converting to Judaism at the age of 16, moving to and living in Japan multiple times, marrying his wonderful husband Andy, and traveling the globe to better understand others’ cultures and customs.

Artist Profiles

Justin Robinson fiddle

Justin Robinson is a Grammy-winning musician and vocalist, cultural preservationist, and historic foodways expert. Robinson has used his wide range of interests and talents to preserve North Carolina’s African American history and culture, connecting people to the past and to the world around them.

Robinson grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina. Influenced by the musical tastes of his grandparents, he grew to love a diversity of musical styles. He played with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, thereby working to preserve traditional forms of music, to introduce new generations to musical legends like Joe Thompson, and to remind audiences that the fiddle was, historically, an African American instrument. He wrote the song Kissin’ and Cussin’ for the group’s Grammy-winning album, Genuine Negro Jig, and continued to write music after leaving the group in 2011, releasing the album Bones for Tinder as Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes in 2012.

In addition to preserving African American musical traditions, Robinson is known for his work as a culinary historian. He explores the ways that foods of the African diaspora shaped and influenced Southern foodways, and reveals how foods like rice, blackeyed peas, and okra can be traced directly to the African continent. Robinson is also committed to helping African Americans rekindle their ties to the land. He is a founding member of the Earthseed Land Cooperative, a collective in northern Durham “made up of farmers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and teachers who are currently engaged in creating alternative models for sustainability, equity, and cooperation within communities of color.”

Justin Robinson holds a BA in Linguistics from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MS in Forestry and Environmental Science from NC State University. He is a member of the Conservation Trust for North Carolina Board of Directors.

Joshua Rubin clarinet

Joshua Rubin is a clarinetist and former artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. As a clarinetist, he was praised by the New York Times as “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.” His interest in electronic music has led him to work to make these technologies easier to use for both composers and performers, and to build platforms for collective management of ensembles.

He has collaborated with the foremost composers and performers of our time, and this season is featured in performances on modern and on historical clarinets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Houston, Geneva, Bergen, and Berlin. He is on the faculty of the New School, Ensemble Evolution, and soundSCAPE Festival in Switzerland, teaching clarinet and electronic music. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.

Artist Profiles

Steven Schick conductor and percussion

Percussionist, conductor, and author

Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for nearly 50 years, and in 2014 was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

Steven Schick is music director emeritus of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, serving as its music director from 2006–22, and the artistic director of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He has guest conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/ Schönberg Ensemble. He was artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2010–18) and directed programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from 2009–19, the last three as co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Classical Music program. He was the music director of the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.

In 2020, Schick won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University for commitment to the performance of American music. Schick’s publications include a book,

The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams; and numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis and its companion The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). The latter received Germany’s award for the best new music release of 2015.

Steven Schick is distinguished professor of music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California San Diego.

Niloufar Shiri kamancheh

Niloufar Shiri is a kamancheh player, composer, and improviser from Tehran, Iran. Her music weaves Iranian musical structure from the Radif with timbres, textures, noise, techniques, and perspectives of contemporary music. She focuses particularly on the investigation of timbral and textural components, as well as the sonic capabilities of the kamancheh, a bowed string instrument. Her distinctive language and approach explore the radical self-transformation that comes with displacement and the striving to reconnect to her sense of self as a woman. She is a graduate of Tehran Music Conservatory, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine. She is artist in residence at Pomona College at Claremont.

Joshua Stauffer theorbo

Joshua Stauffer is a restless creative who performs music from over four centuries on a variety of plucked instruments. He began his career as an electric guitarist performing jazz and improvised music before transitioning to the classical guitar via contemporary works and chamber music. His diverse musical interests converged when he encountered the theorbo, a large lute that performs primarily basso continuo, or improvised accompaniment, in chamber and orchestral works from the 17th and early 18th centuries.

A keen interest in musical collaboration has taken Stauffer across the U.S. and around the globe, including concerts in Thailand, New Zealand, England, France, Switzerland, and Canada. He is a founding member and the executive director of Time Canvas, an ensemble dedicated to performing early music and new compositions on period instruments. Recent orchestral appearances include Portland Baroque Orchestra, Atlanta Baroque, and Ruckus, and performances as a guest artist at the Juilliard School, The Orchestra Now at Bard College, and the Festival de Música de Santa Catarina, Brazil. He received his Master of Music in historical plucked instruments at The Juilliard School in New York City. Previous studies include a Master of Music in classical guitar in the studio of Jason Vieaux at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and a Bachelor of Music in jazz guitar at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Artist Profiles

Mazz Swift violin

Mazz Swift is a violinist, singer, composer, and conductor, weaving improvisation, classic African American musics, electronica, and mindfulness into their work. They have composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Blaffer Foundation. Aside from enjoying a robust career as a performer, Swift is an educator. They have performed and taught free-improvisation workshops on six continents, most notably having traveled to Suriname, Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Albania, and Siberia as “cultural diplomat” for the U.S. Department of State.

Mazz Swift is also a performing member and teaching artist with the acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble. As part of that group, they spearheaded and developed Project MUSIC (Music, Uniting Strangers Into Community), through which they seek to develop abolitionist-minded and antiracist programming alongside incarcerated people, designing our own liberation through presence and creativity.

Swift is a 2021 United States Artist, and 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, continually creating orchestral compositions that involve “Conduction” (conducted improvisation — a system for group improvisation pioneered and trademarked by the late, great Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris), small ensemble works, and solo works that are centered around protest and freedom songs, spirituals, and the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa: looking back to learn how to move forward.

Francesco Turrisi multi-instrumentalist

Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist

Francesco Turrisi has been described as a “musical alchemist” and a “musical polyglot” by the press. He left his native Italy to study jazz piano and early music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where he obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

He moved to Ireland in 2004, where he’s currently based and where he is active as a freelance musician. He is equally at home playing with jazz veterans Dave Liebman and Bill Frisell as he is with Irish traditional sean-nós singer Roisin El Safty and with tarantella specialist Lucilla Galeazzi. Turrisi has toured with Bobby McFerrin, played baroque operas with ensemble L’Arpeggiata, toured with the Silkroad Ensemble, interpreted the music of Steve Reich with Bang on a Can All Stars, accompanied flamenco star Pepe El Habichuela and Greek singer Savina Yannatou.

He has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader and two as co-leader (Tarab, a cross boundary innovative ensemble that blends Irish and Mediterranean traditional music, and Zahr, a project that looks at connections between southern Italian traditional music and Arabic music).

His latest piano solo album Northern Migrations was described as “delicate, wistful, and wholly engrossing” by the Irish Times Since 2018 he has been collaborating with American Grammy-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, on a duo project that seamlessly combines music from the Mediterranean with music from the African diaspora in the Americas. In 2019 Giddens and Turrisi released their critically acclaimed duo album There Is No Other. The album single “I’m On My Way” was nominated for a 2020 Grammy. Their 2021 second duo album They’re Calling Me Home was nominated for two Grammy awards and won as best folk album at the 2022 Grammy Awards.

His long list of collaborators includes Bobby McFerrin, Dave Liebman, Gianluigi Trovesi, Bill Frisell, Rhiannon Giddens, the Silkoad Ensemble, Nils Landgren, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Gavin Bryars, Gabriele Mirabassi, Rolando Villazon, Lisa Hannigan, Savina Yannatou, Maria Pia de Vito, Theodosii Spassov, The King’s Singers, Veronique Gens, Philippe Jaroussky, Pepe el Habichuela, and Lucilla Galeazzi.

Artist Profiles

Michi Wiancko violin

Michi Wiancko is a versatile and highly imaginative composer, violinist, and collaborator, whose multifaceted creative projects and organizational work prioritize artistic discovery, as well as community resilience and social change. Recent chamber music commissions include works for Boston Chamber Music Society, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, Schubert Club, Accordo, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Anne Akiko Meyers, Ecstatic Music Festival, Aizuri Quartet, Parker Quartet, Friction Quartet, and the Jupiter Quartet, to name a few. She has composed three operas: Murasaki’s Moon (2019), commissioned by Met Live Arts, Onsite opera, and American Lyric Theater; Arkana Aquarium (2021), commissioned by Experiments in Opera; and The Stream (2022) commissioned by Baldwin Wallace and the Cleveland Lyric Theater. Wiancko has also composed music for short and feature-length films, commercials, and for her own band, Kono Michi.

A passionate collaborator, she has been fortunate to work and tour with renowned artists from across a vast musical spectrum: Gabriela Lena Frank, Missy Mazzoli, PaviElle French, Vijay Iyer, Steve Reich, Emily Wells, Laurie Anderson, William Brittelle, Kaoru Watanabe, Qasim Naqvi, Mark Dancigers, Satoshi Takeishi, Mazz Swift, Sandeep Das, Jessie Montgomery, Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, Matt Berninger, Dolio the Sleuth, and Rench. A member of Silkroad Ensemble and the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, she

has also performed with The Knights, A Far Cry, Mark Morris Dance Group, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and International Contemporary Ensemble. Described by Gramophone Magazine as an “alluring soloist with heightened expressive and violinistic gifts,” Wiancko made her violin solo debuts with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performed her recital debut in Weill Hall, and released a solo album of new works on New Amsterdam called Planetary Candidate, as well as an album of the complete violin solo works of Émile Sauret on Naxos.

A native of California, she holds degrees from CIM and Juilliard, where she studied with Donald Weilerstein and the late Robert Mann, respectively. In addition to her composition and performing career, Michi Wiancko is director and curator of Antenna Cloud Farm, a music festival, arts retreat, and community organization based in western Massachusetts.

Wu Man pipa

Wu Man belongs to a rare group of musicians who have redefined the role of their instruments, in her case, the pipa — a pear-shaped, fourstringed Chinese lute with a rich history spanning centuries. She is celebrated as one of the most prominent instrumentalists of traditional Chinese music, as well as a composer and educator. She has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa and has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such

as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. She has appeared on more than 40 recordings, including the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her composition “Green (Vincent’s Tune).” She is also a featured artist in the 2015 Emmy Award–winning documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. In the 2023–24 season, Wu Man premieres a new Pipa Concerto by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Du Yun with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and later with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She returns to Carnegie Hall for performances with the Kronos Quartet and The Knights.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. At age 13, she was recognized as a child prodigy and a national role model for young pipa players. Wu is a recipient of the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), one of the United States’ most prestigious honors in folk and traditional arts. In 2023 she was additionally honored with the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award, an annual award presented in New York City honoring artists and arts professionals for their significant contributions to contemporary art. She is a visiting professor at her alma mater, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing; and a distinguished professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi’an Conservatories. In 2021 she received an honorary doctorate of music from the New England Conservatory of Music. She has also served as artistic director of the Xi’an Silk Road Music Festival at the Xi’an Conservatory.

ARA GUZELIMIAN

Artistic and Executive Director

Ara Guzelimian is Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival, beginning in that position in July 2020. The appointment culminates many years of association with the Festival including tenures as director of the Ojai Talks at the Festival and as Artistic Director 1992–97. Guzelimian stepped down as provost and dean of The Juilliard School in New York City in June 2020, having served in that position since 2007. At Juilliard, he worked closely with the president in overseeing the faculty, curriculum, and artistic planning of the distinguished performing arts conservatory in all three of its divisions: dance, drama, and music. He continues at Juilliard as special advisor to the office of the president.

Prior to the Juilliard appointment, he was senior director and artistic advisor of Carnegie Hall from 1998 to 2006. Guzelimian currently serves as artistic consultant for the Marlboro Music Festival and School in Vermont. He is a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Music Awards, the artistic committee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in London, and a board member of the Amphion and Pacific Harmony foundations. He is also a member of the Music Visiting Committee of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

THOMAS MAY Program Book Annotator

Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in an array of international publications, including the New York Times, Gramophone, and the program books of Pierre-Boulez Saal in Berlin. The English-language editor for Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, he also writes for such institutions as the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Davos Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and The Juilliard School. He has translated collections of essays on Toshio Hosokawa, Olga Neuwirth, Thomas Pintscher, and Rebecca Saunders for the Roche Commissions series as well as Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance, published by the Zurich University of the Arts. His books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader: Writings on an American Composer (both published by Amadeus Press). He blogs at memeteria.com.

JOHN SCHAEFER Ojai Talks Host

John Schaefer is the host and producer of WNYC’s long-running new music show New Sounds (“The #1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard), founded in 1982, and its innovative Soundcheck podcast, which has featured live performances and interviews with a variety of guests since 2002. He created the New Sounds Live concert series in 1986, which features new works, commissioned pieces, and a special series devoted to live music for silent films. Produced largely at Brookfield Place and Merkin Concert Hall in NY, the series continues to this day.

Schaefer has written extensively about music, including the book New Sounds: A Listener’s Guide to New Music (Harper & Row, NY, 1987; Virgin Books, London, 1990); the Cambridge Companion to Singing: World Music (Cambridge University Press, U.K., 2000); and the TV program Bravo Profile: Bobby McFerrin (Bravo Television, 2003). He has also written about horse racing (Bloodlines: A Horse Racing Anthology, Vintage, NY 2006), hosted panels for the World Science Festival, and been a regular panelist on the BBC’s soccer-based program Sports World

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Pacific Harmony Foundation

Donald Pattison

Rachel Sater and Thomas McNalley

Hope Tschopik Schneider

Abby Sher

Jackie Sherman and Fred Rothenberg

Shelley and Greg Smith

Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation

Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer

Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman

Ventura County Community Foundation

“One of the world’s most lovably idiosyncratic festivals…”

—New York Times

With your support you help bring some of the most influential artistic work to be found anywhere, to this iconic setting. We are truly grateful for every member of the Festival family.

2022-2023 Annual Giving Contributors

$5,000-$9,999

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music

Amphion Foundation

Sasha and William Anawalt

Barbara Barry

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

Sue Bienkowksi and Wang Lee

Judy and Merrill Blau

Lily and Thomas Brod

Barbara Delaune Warren

Michael Dunn

Mary and Bill Duxler

Lisa Field

Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman

Chris Hacker and Will Thomas

Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot

Raulee Marcus

Geneva Martin and Patrick Garvey

Sharon McNalley

Pamela Melone

Jane and Thomas W. Morris

Steve Novick, in honor of Ara Guzelimian

Ojai Valley School

Linda and Ron Phillips

Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher

Anne-Marie Spataru

John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation

Christine Upton

Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner, Wasserman Projects Fund

Susanne and Blake* Wilson

Christine Yano and Scott Wilson, BRAVO Program in memory of Ginger Wilson

Cathy Zoi and Robin Roy

$2,500-$4,999

Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi

Barney and Kate Barnhart

Jean and John Berghoff

Kyle and Rodney Boone

Burnand-Partridge Foundation

City of Ojai Arts Commission

Jill Cohen and Norman Siderow, Viniberia Selections

Barbara and John Cummings

Carol Ann Dyer

Elizabeth A. Greenberg

E.J. Harrison and Sons

Janet Levin and Frank Gruber

Dorothy Loebl

Ann and Harry Oppenheimer

Richard Shafer

Emmanuel Sharef

$1,000-$2,499

Susan and Michael Addison

Mary Baiamonte

June and Shed Behar

Nancy Bennett

Marsha Berman

Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly

M Susan Bjerre

Burnand-Partridge Foundation

Janet Clough and Ara Guzelimian, in memory of Lawrence Morton

Barbara Cohn

Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen

Hung Fan and Michael Feldman

Rachel Fine and Christopher Hawthorne

Fariba Ghaffari

David Gilbert and David Farneth

Gina Gutierrez and Gary Richardson

Susan H. and David L. Hirsch III

Mary and Jon Hogen

Gary Hollander

Naomi and Michael Inaba

Russ Irwin

Diane and Louis Jackson

Kevin Keating

Joan Kemper

Matt Kilman

Carol Krause*

Thomas Kren and E. Bruce Robinson

The Lenny Bruce Lee Memorial Weird Groove Fund

Cheryl Lew

Richard McCurdy

Margaret and Fredrick Menninger

Lena Muñiz

Victoria Nightingale

Joan Oliver

Christian Perry

Kathy and Peter Reynolds

PK Righthand Fund at the East Bay Community Foundation

Sandy Robertson and Marshall Donovan

Joyce Avery Robinson

Regina and Rick Roney

Anita Rae Shapiro and Mark Howard Shapiro

Marisa Silver and Ken Kwapis

Ruth Simon

Christine Steiner

Mark Summa

Ann and Steven Sunshine

Rachel Ticotin and Peter Strauss

Jane and Richard Weirick

Joan Wynn

$500-$999

Scott Brinkerhoff

Walker Crewson

Fiona Digney and Michael Lee Parker

Karen and Don Evarts

Diana Feinberg

Doris and Caleb Finch

Gloria and Tom Forgea

James Freeman

Nancy Gallagher

Lori Gay

Kathan and Anthony Glassman

Janet Greenberg and Mark Kempson

Martha Groszewski

Susan and Steven Hodges

Carole and Charles Magnuson

Carolyn McKnight and Rajeev Talwani

Susan and Joseph Miller

Judith Hale Norris and Bill Norris

Jane Salonen

Beverly and Pierre Schuberth

Sandy and Richard Schulhof

John Schunhoff and Kenneth Titley

Lucinda and Tim Setnicka

Steve Starkey

The Steele Family

Elizabeth Strutzel

Anne and Tony Thacher

William Ulrich

Sandra Wagner

Jill and John Walsh

Ralph E. Wiggen

Bonnie Wright

$250-$499

Lisa and John Adair

Margaret and Danilo Bach

Elizabeth Bachman and Bob Tallyn

Priscilla Lambert Brennan

Erica and William Clark

Nancy and Herb Conley

Ross Conner and Emmett Carlson

Esther da Costa Meyer and Christopher Hailey

Robert Eisler

Susan Feder and Todd Gordon

Karen Fiske

Peter Flint, Jr

Barry Gold

Susan and Kim Grossman

Barbara and Anthony Hirsch

Terry Hoffman

Judith Holly

Jeff Ingram

William Ireland

Eric and Cathy Kadison

Mark Kalow

Jenny Kallick and Robert Bezucha

Hannah and Marshall Kramer

David Lea

Peggy and Gerald Matchin, Stiix Billiards

Lisa McKinnon

Carla Melson

Ann and David Millican

Trisha and Todd Mills

George Mood

Marilyn Nissenson

Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye

Patricia O’Connor

Diana and Bijan Rezvani

Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano

Eric Sather

Irna Sayn-Wittgenstein

Nancy and Rob* Stewart

Anna Thomas

Susan and John Trauger

Libby and Sandy Treadwell

Cynthia Ulman and Lyle Novis

Betsy Watson

2022-2023 Annual Giving Contributors

Karen Wilson

$150-$249

Lisa Anderson

Susan Anderson

Patricia and Martin Angerman

Karen Bailey

Mary Bergen

Suzan Boatman

Soo Borson

Francisco Bracho

Cathy Colloff

Peter Corrigan

Laurel Crary

Cynthia and David Dunlop

Anne and James Edwards

Caroline and Ralph Grierson

Judy Fish

Lauren Hobratsch

Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk

Lavon Kellner

Clare Kiklowicz

Richard Lewis

Mary Ann Makee

Theodore McCombs

Mary McConnel

Angela and Jeffrey McGregor

Heidrun Mumper-Drumm

Karen and Christopher Noren

Joan Petty

Dan Savell

Danner Schefler

Leah and Norm Schwetizer

Susan Suriyapa and Luca Ferrero

Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers

Arthur and Judith Vander

Robin and James Walther

Carolyn Yancey

$75-$149

Betsy Atwater

Kay Austen and Craig Houx

Louisa Bonnie

Thomas Boo

Barbaran Britton and Ursula Britton

Ramona Jean Burns

Cynthia Butler

Joseph Carroll

Lisa Cervantes

Donald Crockett

Dee Dee Dorskind and Bradley Tabach-Bank

Pamela Drexel

Susan and David Egloff

Ann Erickson and Stephen Jacobsen

Lore and Ted Exner

Ronald Lee Fleming

Richard Foye

Fred Frumberg

Kenneth Fry

Etsu Garfias

Ronald Garrity

Sharon and William Griswold

Susie Edberg and Allen Grogan

Carole and Roger Hale

Jeff Hall

Karen A. Hesli

Holly Hickman

Camille and Kingsley Hines

Essie and David Horwitz

Jacaranda Music

Lynn Julian

Birgit Jung-Schmitt

Elaine Klasson and David Wong

Margaret and John Kaufman

Robin Kissell and George Kushner

Kathleen Kottler

Diane Kravif

Helen Little

Sophie Loire

C Lucero

Barbara Masters

Siobhan McDevitt

Tom and Nancy Michali

Helen Milner

Deborah Mintz

Rusti and Steven Moffic

Gail Osherenko

Sharon Palmer

Sue Perry

Daniel Petry

Scott Pollard

Stephen Pope

Caitlin Praetorius

Andrew Radford

Faith Raiguel

Emilie Robertson

Marueen Robinson

Stephen Rochford

Frank Salazar

Sandra and Charles Sledd

Jeff and Rebecca Smith

Scott Sorrentino

Benjamin Sperber

Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince

Teri Strickland

Carolyn and Robert Wagner

Glen Wallick

Geoffrey Winterowd

Neal Wrightson

Charles Zeltzer

Up to $75

Myron Aguilar

Ginny Atherton

Joy Atrops-Kimura and Greg Kimura

Linda and Robert Attiyeh

Aviva Bergman and Garett Carlson

Janet Black

Caryn and Charles Bosson

Ruth and Steve Bramson

Shelley Burgon

Seline Burns

Pradeep and Ranjit Dhillon

Maggie Bradley

Sharon and Robert Eaton

Michele Edelman

William Edwards

Jessica Ehrhardt

Gerald Faris

Cynthia Fitzpatrick

Barry Forman

Pablo Frasconi

Kevin Gilbert

Patricia Glasow

Karen Lawson Harris

Leslie Hawker

Ann Hester

Susan K. Hogan

Eric Hughes

Monica Irauzqui

Larry Isberg

Stanislaw Jarecki

Jason LaPadura

Louisa Laroche

David Leland

Jack Leland

Carolyn Lingl

Mary K McCool

Sue McDonald

Consuela Metzger

P. Lyn Middleton and Geoffrey Wardle

Jane Milner

Eileen Monahan

Sara Munshin

Carol Munter

Dolores Murphy

Michael Newlson

Polly Nelson

Camille Patrao

Mimi Platt

Susan Reardon

Don Roberts

Uma and Lilit Sanasaryan

Karen Schneider

Lisa Shirley

Madeleine Sifantus

Dennis Thompson

Kathleen Waltrip-Gardella

Danielle Waters

Joann Yabrof

Kendra Yoes

Patti and Stephen Yoshida

Anne Zimmerman

Many thanks to all our generous donors!

Every effort has been made to accurately list donors to the Festival (5/16/22 – 5/16/2023).

If you have any questions or a correction, please contact Anna Wagner at 805 646 2094.

Ojai Festivals, Ltd. Is a 501 c3 non-profit tax exemption organization.

*Deceased

Innovation is Our LegacyJoin Us in Celebrating Our Story and Inventing the Future

The Ojai Music Festival is a creative laboratory for musical innovation — launching artists’ careers, creating new works, starting musical conversations, and weaving together music, artists, and engaged audiences in the enchanting Ojai Valley. The alchemy of Ojai is recognized and respected nationally and internationally — at a level far beyond its size and resources.

You are a part of our story, and this is a moment to celebrate our shared story, your legacy, and most importantly, the vibrant future to come.

Campaign Visionary Supporters

Join us in thanking these visionary supporters who have participated in the Future Forward campaign. We welcome all Festival Family members to join in supporting future of the Ojai Music Festival.

$1,000,000+

Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey*

$500,000 – 999,999

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

Cathryn and Tom Krause

Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation

$250,000 – 499,999

Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson

Jamie and Carolyn Bennett

Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt

Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk

Terri and Jerry Kohl

Hope Tschopik Schneider

$100,000 - 249,000

Ann and Olin* Barrett

Judy and Merrill Blau

NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke

The Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund

Carol and Luther Luedtke

Ida and Glenn Mercer

Charles Millard*

David L. Nygren

Donald Pattison

Esther and Tom* Wachtell

$50,000 – 99,999

Michele Brustin

Cynthia Chapman and Neil Selman

James and Kathy Drummy

Nancy and Barry Sanders

For the first time in our history, we’ve launched a $14 million campaign to ensure that the Ojai experience you love can be sustained for future generations of musicians and audiences.

Your investment in the Festival’s Future Forward Campaign will:

• Nurture Artistic Excellence

• Cultivate a Creative Laboratory

• Expand BRAVO Education and Community Programs

Join us in our next chapter and help bring the Future Forward!

For more information about the campaign, please scan this QR code:

Or contact Anna Wagner, Director of Philanthropy at (805) 646-3178, or awagner@ojaifestival.org.

$25,000 – 49,999

Anonymous

Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer

Ruth Eliel and William Cooney

Lisa Field

Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman

Mechas and Greg Grinnell

Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher

Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting

Peter Schneider

Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman

Wilson Family Fund, Ventura County Community Foundation

$10,000 – 24,999

Evelyn and Stephen Block

Susan Bowey

Stephan Farber

Raulee Marcus

Ojai Civic Association

$5,000-$9,999

Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz

Linda Joyce Hodge

Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot

Catherine and Barry Schifrin

Mark Summa

Jane Taylor and Frederic Ohringer

Merrill Williams

*Deceased

2022-23 Annual Giving Contributors

INSTITUTIONAL FUNDERS

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music

Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust

Amphion Foundation

City of Ojai Arts Commission

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics

Brooks Dry Cider

Farhang Foundation

John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation

Lorraine Lim Catering

National Endowment for the Arts

Ojai Festival Women’s Committee

Ojai Valley School

The Ojai Vineyard

CORPORATE PARTNERS

California Arts Council

California Venues Grant Program

California Nonprofit Performing Arts Program

E.J. Harrison & Sons

MEDIA PARTNERS

Ojai Women’s Fund

Pacific Harmony Foundation

Smith-Hobson Foundation Fund

Ventura County Community Foundation

Vinberia Selections

BUSINESS COMMUNITY & MEDIA PARTNERS

Lifetime Giving

$1,000,000+

Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey*

Ojai Festival Women’s Committee

Esther and Tom* Wachtell

$500,000-$999,999

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

James Irvine Foundation

The Walter Lantz Foundation

Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation

Smith-Hobson Foundation

Cathryn and Thomas Krause

$250,000-$499,999

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Ann and Olin* Barrett

Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson

Jamie and Carolyn Bennett

California Arts Council

NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke

The Colburn Foundation

Kathleen and James Drummy

Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt

Michael Gorfaine, Gorfaine-Schwartz Agency

Lennie and Bernie Greenberg

Carolyn Huntsinger*

Terri and Jerry Kohl

Daniel Lewis

E. Louise Gooding*

Stuart Meiklejohn

Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris

National Endowment for the Arts

David L. Nygren

Donald Pattison

Hope Tschopik Schneider

Ventura County Community Foundation

$100,000-$249,999

Anonymous (2)

Sue Bienkowksi and Wang Lee

Judy and Merrill Blau

Michele Brustin

California Venues Grant Program

Lainie* and Peter Cannon

Hyon Chough and Maurice Singer

Dunard Fund USA Ltd.

Constance Eaton and William Hart

Ruth Eliel and William Cooney

Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation

Richard S. Gould

E.J. Harrison and Sons

Linda Joyce Hodge

Russ Irwin

Jordan and Sandra* Laby

Robert M. Light*

Sharon McNalley

Ida and Glenn Mercer

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Charles Millard III*

Thomas W. and Jane Morris

Nesbitt Foundation

Ojai Valley Inn & Spa

Ann and Harry Oppenheimer

Ralph M. Parsons Foundation

Linda and Ron Phillips

Fred Rothenberg

Nancy and Barry Sanders

Catherine and Barry Schifrin

Abby Sher

Shelley and Gregory Smith

John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation

Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman

Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust

Wallis Foundation

Gary Wasserman and Charles Kashner

Jane and Richard Weirick

Nita Whaley and Don Anderson

$50,000-$99,999

Amphion Foundation

Anonymous

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music

Barney and Kate Barnhart

William H. Brady, III*

Lynn Bremer

William Burr

Castagnola Family Fund, Santa Fe Community Foundation

California Nonprofit Performing Arts Program

Richard Colburn*

Joanne Ernst and James Collins

Zoe and Donald Cosgrove*

Robert C. Davis

Barbara Delaune Warren

Carlos Diniz*

Christine and Sanford Drucker*

Mary and Bill Duxler

Stephan M. Farber

Fred Fisher and Jennie Prebor

Betty Freeman*

Eve Steele and Peter Gelles

Bernard Gondos*

Mechas and Gregory Grinnell

Ara Guzelimian and Janet Clough

Mary and Jon Hogen

Joan Kemper

Dorothy Loebl

Carol and Luther Luedtke

Ginny Mancini

Raulee Marcus

Pamela Melone

Margaret and Fritz Menninger

Metabolic Studio, Annenberg Foundation

Nancy and William Myers*

Neubauer Family Foundation

Shelby Notkin*

Ojai Women’s Fund

Claire and David Oxtoby

Pacific Harmony Foundation

Jan and Alan* Rains

Judith and Ronald* Rosen

Rotary Club of Ojai

Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting

The Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics

Wade Family Trust

Marilyn Wallace

Jeanne C. Wanlass

Wells Fargo Bank

Ginger and John Wilson*

Susanne and Blake* Wilson

Wood-Claeyssens Foundation

*Deceased

Our steadfast supporters make adventurous and transcendent music possible - year after year.

Longtime Festival Attendees

Merrill L. Williams

SINCE 1980s

Marsia Alexander-Clarke

Kate and Barney Barnhart

Maureen Bauman and Isaac Malitz

Elisabeth Clark

NancyBell Coe

Michael Dunn

Mary and William Duxler

Gwen Erickson

James Farber

Jan and Mark Fisher

Gloria and Tom Forgea

Moey and Bruce Gilman

Peggy Grossman and Josef Woodard

Linda Joyce Hodge

Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson

Joan Kemper

Lorraine Lim and Glenn Fout

Margaret and Fredrick Menninger

Annat Provo

Stephen Rochford

Jonathan Said

Helen and Justus Schlichting

Jill and William Shanbrom

Jude Sharp and Jack Jackson

Noreen Stimac and Thomas Powers

Anna Thomas

Bridget Tsao Brockman and Bruce Brockman

Roberta Weiser Blau

Ralph E. Wiggen

Susanne and Blake* Wilson

SINCE 1990s

Lisa and John Adair

Marianne and Abdelmonem Afifi

Lisa and Leslie Anderson

Patricia and Martin Angerman

Ginny Atherton

Richard Dolen

Barbara and Alan Ducker

Sharon and Robert Eaton

Diane Eisenman

Ruth Eliel and William Cooney

Gerald Faris

Diana Feinberg

Kathryn Fellows

Frank Finck

Susan Foster

Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman

Linda Granat

Lennie and Bernie Greenberg

Camille and Kingsley Hines

Barbara and Anthony Hirsch

Gary Hollander

Essie and David Horwitz

Marion and Hector Inchaustegui

Cynthia Kaplan

Terry Knowles and Marshall Rutter

Joan Huang-Kraft

Cathryn and Tom Krause

Susan and David Kuehn

Karen Lewis

Richard Linnett

Barbara and David Littenberg

Amanda McBroom and George Ball

Amanda and Linda McIntyre

Gerald McIntyre

Lisa McKinnon

Tom McNalley

Joyce McWilliams

Karen Merriam

Raffi and Myrna Mesrobian

Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris

Wyant Morton

Mary and Weston Naef

Victoria Nightingale

Cynthia Nunes and Barbara Nye

Ann and Harry Oppenheimer

Nancy Pepper

Nancy Perloff and Robert Lempert

SINCE 1940s

Joyce Epstein

Diane and Louis Jackson

The Steele Family

SINCE 1950s

Elisa Callow

Sally Stevens

Tony Thacher

Lavonne Theriault

SINCE 1960s

Sue-Ellen Case

Betty and Robert Emirhanian

Caroline and Ralph Grierson

John May

Rita Moran

Laura Peck

Mark Swed

SINCE 1970s

Dan Barham

Beverlee Bickmore and Jim Kelly

Barbara and John Cummings

Robert C. Davis, Jr.

Richard Ginell/American Record Guide

Anthony Glassman

Richard S. Gould

Judith Holly

Paul Homchick

Patrick Scott, Mark Hilt (Jacaranda Music)

Cathy Kadison

Susan and Joseph Miller

James Spitser

Mark Summa

Stephen and Christy Sylvester

Denise VanZago and C. M. Bowen

Esther Wachtell

Linda and Bob Attiyeh

Kay Austen and Craig Houx

Margaret and Danilo Bach

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

June and Shed Behar

Jeanette and Joel Berkovitz

Caryn and Charles Bosson

Marie and Bruce Botnick

Diana Burman

Pamela Burton and Richard Hertz

Eric Callow

Renee Castagnola

Deanna and Robert Chauls

Lora and Philip Clarke

Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl

Francine T. Cooper

Peter Corrigan

Kathleen Crandall

Donald Crockett

Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen

Joan Peters and Peter Passell

Linda and Ron Phillips

Paris Poirier

Stephen Pope

Ruth and Rodney Punt

Sylvia and Shlomo Raz

Stephen C. Reilly

Penny Righthand

Emilie Robertson

Linda Rudell-Betts and John Betts

Nancy and Barry Sanders

Heather and Bob Sanders

Catherine and Barry Schifrin

Barbara Schwartz and Thomas Moore

Anita Rae Shapiro

Marisa Silver and Ken Kwapis

Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke

Elizabeth Spring and Michael Hince

Christine Steiner

Kit Stolz

THANK YOU to our longtime Festival patrons attending 10 or more years. You are why we exist. We are grateful for your longstanding appreciation of adventurous music.

“The Ojai faithful – an audience prized for its open minds and congeniality – proved ever faithful.”

—Los Angeles Times

Longtime Festival Attendees

Ann and Steven Sunshine

Kenneth Titley and John Schunhoff

Christine Upton

Glen Wallick

Barbara and Deric Washburn

Neil Watt

Susan and Michael Weaver

Jane and Dick Weirick

Arnold Weiss

Beth Wickstrum

Ed Yim

Mary and Jerry Zinser

SINCE 2000s

Caroline Allen

Joyce and Ronald Allin

Sasha and William Anawalt

Susan Anderson

Gregory Angsten

Barbara Aran and Lawrence Hawley

Alice Asquith

John Aufderheide

Elizabeth Bachman and Bob Tallyn

Karen Bailey

Philip Baily

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

Mary Bergen

Karen and Michael Berk

Susan Bienkowski and Wang C. Lee

Rosalyn Bloch

Susan Bloom and Dirk Farner

Kyle and Rodney Boone

Francisco Bracho

Bret Bradigan

Thomas and Lily Brod

Joseph Bulock

Betye Burton

Cindy Pitou Burton

Margaret Carey

Lisa Cervantes

Nancy and Martin Chalifour

Tina Chappel and Thomas Lane

Ruth Charloff

Maurice Singer and Hyon Chough

Marsia Alexander-Clarke

Brooks Cochran

Debra Cohen and Thomas Stahl

Sheila and Sidney Cohn

Annete Colfax and Tom Wilson

Ross Conner and Emmett Carlson

Kyle and Stuart Crowner

Nava and Gabriel Danovitch

Juanita J. Davis and Dan Saucedo

Kenneth Delbo

Carin Dewhirst and William Knutson

Penny Donnelly

Kathy and Jim Drummy

Constance Eaton and Bill Hart

Jerrold L. Eberhardt

Karen and Don Evarts

Karen and William Evenden

David Falconer

Judy Fish

Dana and Fred Fleet

Barry Forman

Kimberly Fox and Robert Fink

Pablo Frasconi

Jan and Arnold Friedman

Kenneth Fry

Carol Garramone

Margaret Gascoigne

Berta and Frank Gehry

Andreas Georgi

John Grant

Martha Groszewski

Carole and Roger Hale

Sasha Heslip

Mary Ann Hill and Laszlo Engelman

Susan and Steven Hodges

Terry Hoffman

Farzaneh and Brian Hulan

Naomi and Michael Inaba

Jeff Ingram

Russ Irwin

Linda Kachel and David Katz

Cathy Karol-Crowther

Cecilia Kazol

Diana Kelly

Ruth Lasell and Robert Bonewitz

Lydia and Scott Lawson

Lynda and Stan Levy

Cheryl Lew

Daniel Lewis

Mary and Robert Lynch

Raulee Marcus

Geneva Martin and Patrick Garvey

Mitchell Matsey and James Schultz

Morency Maxwell

Elizabeth and Paul McConnaughey

Christina and Todd McGinley

Carolyn McKnight and Rajeev Talwani

Gillian McManus and Chris Newell

Sharon McNalley

Pamela Melone

Carla Melson

Elizabeth Memel

George Mood

Thomas and Jane Morris

Nomi Morris

Sally Mosher

Lena Muniz

Sara Munshin

Stacey Nakasone

Jennifer and Richard Niles

David L. Nygren

Victoria and Thomas Ostwald

Claire and David Oxtoby

Donald Pattison

Christian Perry

Lisa Roetzel and Alan Terricciano

Mary Rupp

Peggy and John Russell

Desy Safán-Gerard

Louise Sandhaus and Michael Shapiro

Ruth Sayre

Leah and Norm Schweitzer

Susan Scott

Lucinda Setnicka

Sandra and Harold Shapiro

Abby Sher

Fred Rothenberg

Thomas Moore and Barbara Schwartz

Jane and Lee Silver

Shelley and Gregory Smith

Edda Spielmann and Andrew Nichelson

Gretel Stephens

Nancy Stewart

John Strysik

Susan Suriyapa and Luca Ferrero

Aryna Swope and Phil Caruthers

Brett Tarnet

Alan Terakawa

Alice Terrell and Alex Matich

Gail Topping and George Berg

Susan Tova and Lawrence Clevenson

Hope Tschopik Schneider

Judy and Art Vander

Jill and John Walsh

Robin and James Walther

Jeanne C. Wanlass

Leslie Westbrook

Andrea and Bernard White

Geoffrey Winterowd

Soni Wright

Kathy and Larry Yee

Charles Zeltzer

Anne Zimmerman

SINCE 2010s

Susan and Michael Addison

Elizabeth Alvarez

Lani Asher

Catherine Sharkey

Mary Baiamonte

Ann Barrett

Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson

Carolyn and Jamie Bennett

Richard Bentley

John Berezney

Judy and Merrill Blau

Scott Brinkerhoff

Sandra Buechley

Nova Clite

Stephen and Sheila Cox

Jared Dawson

Jane Deknatel and John Seddon

Barbara Delaune Warren

Stuart and Beverly Denenberg

Charles Donelan

Cynthia and David Dunlop

Carol Ann Dyer

Doris and Caleb Finch

John Finch

Bonnie Freeman

Jocelyn Gibbs

Robina and Rene Goiffon

Susan and David Hirsch

Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk

Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson

Anne Johnstone

Clare Kiklowicz

Hannah and Marshall Kramer

Kathryn Lawhun and Mark Shinbrot

Mary McConnel

Sheila McCue

Sue McDonald

Christina McPhee

Rusti and Steven Moffic

Rex Moser

Charles Mosmann

Anthony Parr

Joan Petty

Krisanto Pranata

Jennie Prebor and Fred Fisher

Joyce A. Robinson

Nikki Scandalios

Ruth Simon

Kathy Solomon and Bob Burchman

Eva Soltes

Elizabeth St. Clair

Libby and Sandy Treadwell

Douglas Whitney

Joann Yabrof

We have made every effort to accurately list longtime attendees and regret any errors or omissions.

We invite you to visit our Future Forward Campaign Booth to make your own Longtime Attendee Button or to add or make changes to this list!

Matilija Society

Our heartfelt thanks to the following supporters of the Ojai Music Festival Endowment:

Kate and Barney Barnhart

Meg Bates and Scott Johnson

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

June and Shed Behar

Jamie and Carolyn Bennett

Lerie Bjornstedt*

Judy and Merrill Blau

Barbara Bowman and Sol de la Torre Bueno

Witold Brabec

William H. Brady, III*

Marion and William Burke*

Lainie* and Peter Cannon

Ara Guzelimian and Janet Clough

Don and Sheila* Cluff

NancyBell Coe and Bill Burke

The Colburn Foundation

Jennifer Coleman

THANK YOU! Matilija Society Members are generous donors to the Festival Endowment or have included the Festival in their estate plans.

Matilija Society Members help the Festival to be bold and pioneering in its artistic programs, while deeply influencing the Festival’s capacity to carry out its mission.

We gratefully acknowledge the following Matilija Society members who have included the Ojai Music Festival in their estate plans:

Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson

Marjorie Beale and William Meyerhoff

Carolyn and Jamie Bennett

Judy and Merrill Blau

NancyBell Coe

Sheila* and Don Cluff

Lynne Doherty

Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt

Theresa and Jeff Ferguson

Ruth Gilliland and Arthur Rieman

Richard S. Gould

Frank* and Linda Granat

Cathryn and Tom Krause

Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk

Russ Irwin

Raulee Marcus

Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris

David Nygren

Don Pattison

Laura and William* Peck

Hope Tschopik Schneider

Leslie Westbrook

Nita Whaley and Don Anderson

Should your name appear here? If so, please tell us about it! We can tell the world or keep it quiet if you want to stay anonymous. Either way, knowing about your plans will help us to better prepare for the future. Visit the Future Forward Campaign Booth to learn more and sign up!

Making a planned gift is a wonderful way to show your support for the Ojai Music Festival, while achieving your own philanthropic, estate-planning, and financial goals. Planned gifts can benefit you and your loved ones today and, in the future, and allow the Festival to provide innovative musical programming, create groundbreaking new work, engage students and learners of all ages through music education, while securing this creative laboratory for generations to come.

We encourage you to discuss your planned gift confidentially with the Ojai Music Festival. Please contact Anna Wagner, Director of Philanthropy at 805-646-3178 or awagner@ojaifestival.org

Molly Cook

Joan Davidson

Robert C. Davis, Jr

Carlos Diniz*

Lynne Doherty and Helen Allen

Christine and Sanford Drucker*

Constance Eaton and William Hart

Merilee* and Samuel Eaton

Kathleen and Jerry Eberhardt

Mercedes H. Eichholz*

Yvette Ellis*

Betty and Robert Emirhanian

Harriette and Robert Erickson*

Evans Foundation

Theresa and Jeff Ferguson

Lorraine Holve Finch

Frank and Maudette Fink* Fund

Frances Fitting

Ernest Fleischmann*

Kate and Richard Godfrey

E. Louise Gooding*

Helene Gordon and Bill Blackburn

Richard S. Gould

Dennis Gould

Virginia and Richard Gould*

Linda and Frank* Granat

Caroline and Ralph Grierson

Ginger Harmon*

Philip Heckscher

Janette and Richard Hellmann

Louie Hopkins and Douglas Mirk

Natalia and Michael Howe

Carolyn Huntsinger*

Nancy Huntsinger

Russ Irwin

Betty Izant*

Barbara Jackman

Bernice and Wendell Jeffrey*

Edith and Jack Jungmeyer*

Jorjana and Roger Kellaway

Joan Kemper

Pat Kennedy*

Margaret Krauss

Muriel Lavender

Robert M. Light*

Andree Lindow

Dorothy Loebl

Jon Lovelace*

Carol and Luther Luedtke

Raulee Marcus

Elise Marvin*

Martha and Thomas May

Zelda and Dennis McCarthy

Quentin McKenna*

Pamela Melone

Margaret and Fritz Menninger

Lolita and Joe Metscher

Charles Millard III*

Rachael and Philip Moncharsh

Thomas W. and Jane Morris

Anne and Stephen J.M. Morris

William Myers*

Sandi Nicholson

Marianne and Philip Nielsen

Victoria Nightingale

Maj. Gen. Frank Norris

David L. Nygren

Donald Pattison

Laura and William* Peck

Barbara and Martin Pops

Ruth and Rodney Punt

Claire Rantoul

Alice and Robert* Rene

John Rex*

Susan and Mark Robinson

Merle and Hans Schiff

Jill and Bill Shanbrom, Shanbrom Family Foundation

Helen and Edward Shanbrom*

Dorothy and Richard Sheahan*

Harry Sims*

Ellen Sklarz and Peter Thielke

Paula Spellman

Melody and John Taft

Sheila Tepper

Margaret Thomas*

Charlotte and Charles Thompson

Glenda Tippett*

Hope Tschopik Schneider

Ventura County Community Foundation

Joan and William Vogel

Patricia Weinberger*

Jane and Richard Weirick

Harriet Wenig*

Joyce and Allan West

Leslie Westbrook

Nita Whaley and Don Anderson

Julia and Marc Whitman

Margaret and Philip Williams

Susanne and Blake* Wilson

Helen Wolff

Constance Wood

Willard Wyma

*Deceased

BRAVO Music Education Program

Music is an important communal activity. BRAVO gives students a chance to make music together. Whether singing or playing an instrument, we create feelings of peace, unity, and belonging. Our story is part of a larger story. Our brains release oxytocin when we sing with others, a chemical involved in social bonding, which can give rise to feelings of togetherness and friendship.

Whether we are with an 18-year-old who remembers the joy of music class, or a 5-year-old who wonders about the marvel of music, together we create a sense of reciprocity. We experience kindness, acceptance, and integrity.

The Ojai Music Festival BRAVO program brings music and laughter to local students and the Ojai community through educational workshops, interactive demonstrations, and free concerts.

BRAVO EDUCATION COORDINATOR

Laura Walter

EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Bridget Brockman, Co-Chair

Judy Fish, Co-Chair

Licity Collins

Laura Denne

Lynne Doherty

Gina Gutierrez

Martha Highfill

Leigh Ann McDonald

Audrey McPherson

Jane Roberts

Kathleen Robertson

Michelle Sherman

Lillian Tally

Joann Yabrof

INSTITUTIONAL FUNDERS

Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust

California Arts Council

City of Ojai, Arts Commission

John and Beverly Stauffer Foundation

Ojai Festival Women’s Committee

Ojai Valley School -

Barbara Barnard Smith Fund

Ojai Women’s Fund

Ventura County Community Foundation

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Shelley Burgon

David Cipriani

Rosanne Forgette

Ojai Library Ukulele Group

Cameron Schubert

Julie Tumamait

BRAVO VOLUNTEERS

Helen Allen

Babette and Bob

Betsy Bachman

Fern Barishman

Jim Bell

Hitesh Benny

Hadley Christenson

Kerri Climer

Caressa Cowan

Lynne Doherty

Maddy Doss

Michael Estwanik

Jodie Farrell

Diana Feinberg

Judy Fish

Melissa Flores

Jackie Francis

Louis Grace

Bonnie Griffin

Jim Harmon

Gretchen Hays

IMPACT & ENGAGEMENT IN THE COMMUNITY

2023 BRAVO by the numbers:

3,575 Children Served 105 Workshops 65 Classrooms

26,850 Direct experiences

Martha Highfill

Kathie Kottler

Raul Kottler

Bryan Lane

Melanie Link

The Lotus Trio

Madrigali

Lorraine McDonald

Audrey McPherson

Liz Memel

Don Midgett

Mood Swing

Karen Nelson

Ojai Library Ukulele

Group

Ann Oppenheimer

Audrey and Emmy Pearson

Nancy Pepper

Gail Peterson

Cindy Pitou-Burton

Dori Riggs

Joyce Robinson

Jane Roberts

Ronnie Rodriguez

Roy Rodriguez

Anna and Mattie Rowlands

Santa Barbara County

Flute Ensemble

Ruby Skye

Michelle Sherman

Gail Smith

Starlight Quartet

Ray Sullivan

Morgan Swaidan

Tracy Sweetland

Lillian Tally

Lizzy Tepaske

Randee Vasilakos

Anna Wagner

JB White and Friends

Joann Yabrof

Kendra Yoes

—LAURA WALTER, BRAVO education coordinator

BRAVO PROGRAMS INCLUDE

COMMUNITY EVENTS

IMAGINE Concert is part of our school and community outreach. In collaboration with Ojai Valley School and the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund, more than 600 students and adults enjoyed music and dance from around the world this past spring. Audience members were treated to a performance of Tamakan Rhythms African Dance and Drumming. In addition, the Festival invites Ojai students who participate in BRAVO to attend a Festival concert free of charge and presents free community concerts during the Festival in June.

EDUCATIONAL AND COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

We work with the Ojai Unified School District to bring free of charge music education to local students and to provide interactive song and dance for residents of assisted living facilities.

BRIDGE Program enriches our world through interactions of third grade students with our local seniors through music and song games. Children invite the residents to join them in walking or skipping, or even just staying in their place and having a turn in the song! We introduce ourselves and find out about the lives of the residents, all while singing folk songs.

EDUCATION THROUGH MUSIC brings interactive song and play to students in grades TK-3, building empathy, intelligence, and cooperation. Experiences with pitch and rhythm prepare them for further musical experience and increase language and math literacy.

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE conduct workshops including Chumash Song and Dance, Cello, Indian Slide Guitar, Harp, and Drumming, teaching students about history, geography, and world cultures through music.

Our MUSIC VAN visits eight elementary schools to encourage students to choose their favorite instrument to learn in their own school music programs. Students blew, plucked, and bowed, all to great laughter, inspiring our future citizens!

SUMMER MUSIC AND ARTS

CAMP will celebrate its fifth year. Children and adults will sing, play, and explore art and storytelling in an interactive environment. Through music and movement, we encourage imagination, questioning, collaboration, and determination.

Photos by Cindy Pitou Burton, Misty Hall, and Fred Rothenberg

Ojai Music Festival Arts Management Internship Program

“Unique mentorship experiences with the Festival’s staff allowed me to explore different facets of the industry and deepen my commitment to further developing as a well-rounded arts administrator.”

—LANDON WILSON, MANHATTAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC OJAI ALUMNUS 2022

The Festival’s Arts Management Internship program welcomes college students and recent graduates to go behind the scenes working closely with the staff and production team and gain invaluable hands-on experience for their future careers.

Festival interns have gone on to have successful careers in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Those who have gone on to work in the arts have done so at organizations across the country, including AMOC*, Ojai Music Festival, San Diego Symphony, Pacific Symphony, Early Music Guild of Seattle, and Voices of Change, as well as forged new paths as entrepreneurial performing artists and composers.

Colleges and universities represented have included Berklee School of Music, Boston University, CalArts, California Lutheran University, Cal State UniversityLong Beach, Manhattan School of Music, Occidental College, San Diego State University, Stanford University, UCLA, USC, Moorpark College, and Westmont College

Steven Rothenberg Internship Fellow

In 2011, Ojai Valley residents Ila and Fred Rothenberg generously provided the Festival with a fund to support the Festival’s growing internship program, which is dedicated in memory of their son, Steven Rothenberg. The 2023 Rothenberg Fellow is Landon Wilson.

The Festival’s Arts Management Internship Program is made by possible by the generous support of Fred Rothenberg, in memory of Steven Rothenberg.

Special Thanks

The Ojai Music Festival wishes to express our deepest gratitude to the following:

Ashly Piano Crafts/Dennis Ashly & Evan Austin

Besant Hill School/Alex Smith

Barbara Bowman

Brooks Dry Cider

Ed Brooks

City of Ojai

Community Memorial Hospital Syste

Custom Printing

Gold Coast Ambulance Company

Integrity Wealth Advisors

Joan Kemper

Kathie Kottler

LA Percussion Rentals/Dan & Abby Savell

LS Promotions/Linda Schimmel

Lorraine Lim Catering

Music Academy of the West

Nordhoff High School Music Department/Bill Wagner

Ojai Chamber of Commerce

Ojai Citrus Growers

Ojai Valley Museum

Ojai Valley School

Ojai Wesleyan Church/Pastor Lyn Thomas

Pacific Western Bank

Pure Wild Co.

SANE Living Center/ Aubrey Balkind

Louise Sandhaus

Steinway & Sons LA/Benjamin Salisbury

Ventura Rental Center

Ventura’s Water Store

Viniberia Selections/Jill Cohent

OJAINEXT is the Ojai Music Festival program to welcome and build community for new audience members - from college students, recent college grads to young professionals.

OJAINEXT friends are invited to special events and performances during the year and the Festival.

OJAI FESTIVAL WOMEN’S COMMITTEE

Heartfelt thanks to the Ojai Festival Women’s Committee for all they do in support of the Festival throughout the year. Special thanks to those members who host the Festival Lounge.

FESTIVAL HOUSING HOSTS

An important part of the Ojai Music Festival community is the housing hosts. They graciously open their homes every year to visiting artists, interns, and the production crew. Their wonderful hospitality makes each visit a memorable occasion for Festival guests. If you are interested in being a Housing Host, call Deirdre Daly at 805 646 2094 or email ddaly@ ojaifestival.org.

Thanks to our OJAINEXT Ambassadors who help spread the word!

Shelley Burgon

Lisa Casoni

Sierra Dudas

Thomas Kotcheff

Mia Orozco

Dominique Wright

Madeline Doss Learn more about OJAINEXT on our website or ask our Box Office staff how to get involved.

Guests at the OJAINEXT event, Hike & Hear, in partnership with the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy in the spring.

Work With Us to Help Fight Climate

Many thanks to Festival Volunteers for their tireless efforts in helping make this year another tremendous success!

Loni Anderson

Gabriel Aubert

Vicki Aubert

Shayan Barati

Arshan Barati

Daryan Barati

Evalina Barth

Tom Boyles

Barbara Britton

Ursula Britton

Dianne Bullard

Kat Burke

Susan Carpenito

Kelly Carrol

Jill Chesley

Daphne DiFrancesco

Donna Elam

Luka Falvo

Wonu Familoni

Brenda Farrant

Jacqueline Francis

Meg Goffredo

Wendy Gray

Jodine Hammerand

Gretchen Hays

Birgit Jung-Schmitt

Blake Kasting

Kevin Keating

Christina Kim Lane

Sophie Loire

Margaret Marapao

Sheila McCue

Gillian McManus

Allison Monahan

Kasey Moore

Tisha Morris

Karen Nelson

Peter Parziale

Vickie Peters

Irene Ricci

Caren Rich

Barbara Rosen

Kate Russell

Beverly Schuberth

Carol Shaw-Sutton

Carla Sherman

Jackie Sherman

Antoinette Tivy

Barry Verga

Ruth Walker

Paula Wayne

Christine White

Devoney Wolfus

Mary Ann Zalokar

list as of May 11, 2023 If you are

ARA GUZELIMIAN

Artistic and Executive Director

GINA GUTIERREZ

Managing Director/ Director of Marketing

ANNA WAGNER Director of Philanthropy

FIONA DIGNEY

Producer and Artistic Administrator

AMBER YOUNG

Operations & Events Manager

BRYAN LANE

Patron Services Manager

JEANNINE COBB Finance Manager

ELIZABETH HERRING Development Associate

MADELINE DOSS

Patron Services & Office Administrator

LAURA WALTER BRAVO Education Coordinator

Festival Production

KATHRYN STURCH

Technical Production Manager

MELISSA SOMRACK GORRIS

Libbey Bowl Stage Manager

JONATHAN BERGERON

Production Assistant/

Zalk Theater Stage Manager

ANNA DROZDOWSKI

Greenberg Center

Stage Manager

MADDI BAIRD

Libbey Park Stage Manager

EMILY PERSINKO

Assistant Stage Manager

MARK GREY

Sound Designer/ Head Audio Engineer

NATHAN GRATER

Associate Sound Designer

TOBY TITTLE

Monitor Engineer

CHRISTINA GASPARICH

Sound Assistant

MOMENTUM MEDIA/

VINCE PECCHI

Lighting Provider

JEFF CLINTON

KEITH FENTON

DAVID GUTHRIE

ALEX HALL-MOUNSEY

KIRK ZAHARRIS

Lighting Techs

CLAIRE CLEARY

Lighting Designer, Zalk Theater

NICHOLAS HOUFEK

Lighting Designer/ Light Board Operator

MIKE’S TECHNICAL SERVICES/

MIKE TREGLER

Ancillary Event Engineer

LUKE TAYLOR

Steinway Piano Technician

RICHARD NEWSHAM

Green Room Manager

MICHAEL COOLEY

Rigger

DAN RILEY

DOOJIE SELINGER Stage Crew

TRISTAN COOK

Live Stream Director

GROPIOUS PRODUCTION/

WALTER PARK

Live Streaming Production Company

RAY SULLIVAN

On-Site Libbey Park Manager

EMILY DEL SIGNORE

BILLY RUSSO

SHANE SCHAFER

Park Operations Crew

CARISSA CORRIGAN Operations Assistant

DEIRDRE DALY

Housing Manager

MARY ANN MAKEE

Front of House Manager/ Covid-Safety Consultant

JUDITH PIAZZA

Associate Front of House Manager

JANE ROBERTS

TERRY WRIGHT Head Ushers

BRIAN TURNER

Security Manager

DAVID ABE

JONATHAN ABE

XANDER DUBEAU

LORI ECKBERG

ANGELA MCHALE

LARRY MCMILLAN

HOLLY MEADOWS

MARSHALL THOMAS

JIM VERKUIL Security Team

LOUIS ALMARAZ Retail Consultant

ELIZABETH SPILLER

DOMINIQUE WRIGHT

Pop-Up Retail & Concessions Managers

SHEILA COHN Festival Concierge

TIMOTHY TEAGUE Photographer

DIEGO AZARTE

NATHAN CARDENAS

JOE NORRIS

RICHARD WARNER Parking

NIKKI SCANDALIOS Public Relations

KERI SETNICKA Social Media Coordinator

JERRY MARYNIUK, MD Medical Tent Volunteer Coordinator

TARA SAYLOR Volunteer Coordinator

LYNN MALONE Suppers in the Park Coordinator

GLENDA YOUNG Craft Services

LORRAINE LIM CATERING Catering Services

MIMI ARCHIE

KATHLEEN KENNEDY Graphic Design

BITVISION TECHNOLOGY IT Providers

DOMINIQUE WRIGHT Intern Assistant Coordinator

LANDON WILSON Rothenberg Fellow

HITESH BENNY

ELIZABETH CALLAHAN

ELIANA CHOI

MIA CONDON

WILLIAM JAE

SOPHIE LITTLE

NIAV MAHER

DIEGO MARTINEZ

MARIAH DIVIANNE MUSNI

DANI NOLLENBERGER

MARGARET RODENBURG

KEVIN SPOONER

MATTHEW THACHER Interns

Gina Gutierrez, managing editor Thomas May, program book editor and annotator Doug Adrianson, June Behar, editorial assistants

Kennedy of Waller Design, graphic designer