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