8 minute read
Ojai Music Festival Turns 75
by KAREN LINDELL
In 1947, gas cost 15 cents a gallon, Harry S. Truman was president, India and Pakistan gained independence from Great Britain, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, Jackie Robinson became the first Black man to play Major League Baseball, the future Queen Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, and Charles Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for music.
In May of that year, an event less celebrated around the world took place: the inaugural Ojai Music Festival. Perhaps the lack of attention was shortsighted. The Ojai Music Festival, celebrating its 75th year in 2021, has become renowned around the world for showcasing the most innovative music, by the most visionary performers and composers, for the most receptive audiences, in the most picturesque place. The music director in 1947 was Thor Johnson, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; he returned to Ojai nearly every year through 1953. In 1954, the festival’s first artistic director, Lawrence Morton, started two traditions: focusing on new music and appointing a different distinguished music director each year (although some have returned more than once), including Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Calvin Simmons, Peter Maxwell Davies, Eighth Blackbird (sextet), Dawn Upshaw, Peter Sellars and John Adams. As the festival celebrates its 75th year, it has a new artistic director, Ara Guzelimian, who also held that position from 1992-97. Guzelimian, who just stepped down as provost and dean of The Juilliard School, and also served as artistic adviser at Carnegie Hall, is familiar to festival goers for his “Ara Talks” discussions with festival participants. Guzelimian takes over from Chad Smith, who was appointed in 2018 but announced his departure in 2019 after being promoted to chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Guzelimian has great respect for his predecessors, especially Morton. “Lawrence was, in many ways, the founding spirit of the festival,” Guzelimian said. “He wasn’t the literal founder, but when he took over, he created this pattern of a very inventive festival. I knew Lawrence at the end of his life; he was a huge influence in his fierce devotion to adventurous music and exploration.” Guzelimian doesn’t plan to do a lot of reminiscing, however. For the 2021 festival, he wants to follow the lead of Lawrence and his other predecessors who have all “honored the spirit of what’s preceded them, yet expanded what was possible.” This year, that includes a new date for the festival. To allow for the most optimal health and safety conditions due to the coronavirus, the event, originally scheduled for June 10-13 (online if that had been necessary), will instead take place Sept. 16-19, in person. All the original performers agreed to the rescheduled date. Patrons can still enjoy festival activities throughout the summer, however.
Ara Guzelimian returns this year as artistic director.
2021 music director John Adams
The festival will offer live outdoor pop-up surprise musical performances in Ojai, as well as online programs throughout the summer. Also eager to look to the future on this 75th anniversary is the 2021 music director, John Adams.
“I think most people would agree he is the leading figure in American classical music — the leading composer of our time,” Guzelimian said. “In a way, he is like Copland when he came to the festival in the 1950s.”
Adams, who also served as the festival’s 1993 music director, has conducted orchestras around the world. Some of his well-known compositions include Harmonium, a setting of poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson for chorus and orchestra, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls, written in memory of 9/11 victims. His opera and stage works include Doctor Atomic, about scientists who created the atomic bomb, and collaborations with Peter Sellars, including The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoer. Guzelimian said when he and Adams first spoke about the 2021 festival, the composer “adamantly didn’t want a looking-back event. He wanted to be true to the Ojai spirit, which is always looking ahead, and full of surprises and the unexpected. He also didn’t want this to be a retrospective of his music, but about an emerging generation of composers.” Adams will thus showcase the music and talents of mostly American composers in their early 20s and 30s: Samuel Carl Adams, Timo Andres, Dylan Mattingly, Gabriela Ortiz, Gabriella Smith and Carlos Simon.
Adams said their works will be combined with “some classics from the 20th century — Stravinsky, Steve Reich, even a little Mozart.”
Performers include the Attacca Quartet, which won a Grammy in 2020 for best chamber music/small ensemble performance; violinist Miranda Cuckson, a member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), which will be the festival’s 2022 music director; pianist Víkingur Ólafsson; and the LA Phil New Music Group. Icelandic pianist Ólafsson, Guzelimian said, “has this amazing capacity to combine older and new music.” He has released albums of works by Bach and Philip Glass and paired music by composers hundreds of years apart, such as the French composers Rameau and Debussy. “He makes you sit up and listen, and hear how the centuries talk to each other,” Guzelimian said.
The Attacca Quartet plays music by their peers. “With each younger generation of composers and performers, the streams that feed what constitutes classical music just grow bigger,” Guzelimian said. “World music and the European tradition aren’t separate; popular and classical aren’t separate; ritual, theatricality, and concert performance aren’t separate. We’re in a generation that speaks multiple musical languages naturally, natively and fluently.” Guzelimian’s history with the festival — and Ojai — goes back much further than his previous artistic director tenure in the 1990s. As a teen, he often visited Ojai, and as a college student, performed at the festival in 1974. “That sounds grander than it really is,” he said, laughing. “I was a member of the UCLA chorus, which came to sing with Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director that year.” The choir performed little-known pieces by Beethoven, including “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” a cantata setting of two poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; “Elegiac Song” for chorus and orchestra; and incidental music for a play called “King Stephen.” So much of what is onstage at Ojai, “even if it’s by a composer as central as Beethoven, expands our knowledge and goes beyond the expected,” Guzelimian said.
He sees the 75th festival as a bit of a homecoming, but not the high school kind with pep rallies and parades. “It’s making a closer connection to and acknowledging the setting of the festival within Ojai — physically, spiritually, and in the community,” he said.
Although festival organizers are keeping their eyes on the future, they also plan this year to venture way, way back in Ojai history. At a 2020 outdoor performance that was part of the festival’s BRAVO education and community program, local Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie shared songs and stories of her people, who lived in the area long before anyone else. “Music was central in every single thing we did,” she said during the performance. Tumamait-Stenslie will be part of the festival lineup in September, sharing Chumash stories.
Tumamait-Stenslie also shared a verse in the Chumash language that translates to “we’ve been created by the breath and taken to the other side.”
What is the other side? Surely Ojai will help come up with a novel answer.
Background photo: Timo Andres (photo Michael Wilson). Right, from top: Carlos Simon, composer (photo Wikimedia). Violinist, Miranda Cuckson (photo Henry J Fair), Samuel Carl Adams, and composer Gabriela Ortiz. Below center: Music director John Adams (photo Richard Musacchio). Below top: The Attacca Quartet (photo David Goddard). Below bottom: Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson (photo Ari Magg).
The Ojai Music Festival is scheduled to take place in person from Sept. 16-19 at Libbey Bowl and other venues, and other activities will take place online throughout the summer. For tickets and information, call 805-646-2053 or visit www.ojaifestival.org.
Ojai Magazine writer, Karen Lindell; @karen.lindell
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