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.