OJAI, Calif. — In Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, an apt 2022 documentary shown at the refurbished and upgraded Ojai Playhouse during the 79th annual Ojai Music Festival, someone describes the music emerging out of the 1960s experimentalists and avant-garde as “Not fun, not easy, and it goes on forever.” The comment generated knowing laughter from the full house.
Except for the “not fun,” that’s an accurate general description of programs at Ojai. The festival ran June 5-8, and its music director (a new one is chosen annually) was Claire Chase, a collaborative artist and experimental flutist.
The Southern California-born Chase, 47, worked with Oliveros, a pioneer of American music who died in 2016. Her spirit, along with composer Terry Riley’s (he turns 90 on June 24), enlivened the four crammed days of music-making, which included off-site indoor and outdoor events in the park. Most of the concerts took place in the ever-ambient (sounds of crickets, birds, frogs) outdoor Libbey Bowl.
Chase, who founded the influential International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, went solo in 2017. She’s known for exploring sounds on a variety of flutes and flute-like instruments, including tin, Aztec whistles, and a contrabass (two octaves lower than a standard flute) she calls “Big Bertha.”
As usual, the festival gathered cumulative interest. At the Saturday mid-morning concert, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s ahupua’a stood out as a languid deconstruction of a string quartet, expertly performed by the JACK Quartet (Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello). Instruments are initially brushed, then the cello adds a bit of percussive col legno textures, with the stick of the bow falling on the strings, before the piece finds a brief repose.
Marcos Balter’s strident, slashing Chambers sank under a kind of relentless, over-complicated academic weight, while Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique began promisingly, with rumbling electronics and Chase’s glacial contrabass line. But 52 minutes of plucking piano strings, striking of instruments, and Chase’s signature breathiness and growling on the flute started to feel gimmicky, suggesting how new music’s arteries can harden into a deadening orthodoxy of extended techniques. It will be interesting to see if Chase can find ways to keep both the musical and performance aspects of her art fresh and involving. She’s at a point where Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun might sound newly minted.
One of the most outstanding scores at the festival was Sofia Gubaidulina’s Mirage: The Dancing Sun, played on Friday night by the USC Cello Ensemble. (The composer died in March at age 93.) Steven Schick, a conductor and percussionist extraordinaire who was Ojai’s music director in 2015, conveyed Gubaidulina’s purity of intention and understanding of structure. Sure, strings were scraped, but the 12-minute work was a sustained adventure. Mirage, as well as her Meditation on the Bach chorale “Vor deinen Thron” (BWV 668), performed by the JACK Quartet on Saturday night, are worth revisiting.
Total cello immersion continued with Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Schick, the USC Cello Ensemble, and cellists Campbell, Katinka Kleijn, and Seth Parker Woods handled the restless score’s shifting dynamics seamlessly, allowing layers of intensity to emerge. The work’s sheer density of accumulating sound was compelling.
After intermission, a selection of movements from Riley’s ongoing project, The Holy Liftoff, adapted for Ojai’s stage — 46 minutes’ worth — gave a vivid sense of the man’s musical expansiveness. Riley reportedly bristled at being called a forerunner of minimalism, but his In C (1964) inspired the likes of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, Eastman, and others.
Riley, along with Oliveros, became the festival’s shamans-in-residence. Watching the concert via streaming from his home in Japan, Riley heard us all shout “Hi, Terry!” at Chase’s request. Chase rendered the long opening Liftoff solo with flair as the JACK Quartet picked up the main theme, the five musicians alert to every dynamic change. There was also Riley’s voice on tape intoning late in the piece, “All Rise.” The moment elicited many smiles from the audience.
More smiles arrived Sunday mid-morning when sheng master Wu Wei presented the premiere of Susie Ibarra’s Nest Box, composed for Ojai in honor of Schick’s 70th birthday. The sheng is a Chinese mouth organ capable of playing harmonies and chords. In Wei’s hands, it could sound like a harmonica or as pure as an oboe. Ibarra accompanied him on percussion using wooden blocks, like a woodpecker speaking to Wei. Actual bird responses from around Libbey Bowl made Wei pause and look out into the trees.
Composer Tania León’s devilishly difficult Rituál for solo piano (1987) received a transcendentally headlong (the only way one can perform it) rendition from Alex Peh. The pianist’s deep dive into the bass register anchored the fiery, propulsive piece throughout.
Ibarra’s 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning Sky Islands ended the concert on a high. Here was a score with a bit of everything: Percussionists Ibarra and Levy Lorenzo opened the piece by striking bamboo poles on the ground, Chase played to the edge of audibility against the JACK Quartet, then, with Peh again on piano, the eight players jumped into an exhilarating jazz groove. The piece’s various moving parts somehow held interest. There was more hissing and growling into the flute, but also rubbing and shaking of banana plants. To end, Chase, a 21st-century pied piper, played a simple figure, leading the musicians — each tapping a small percussion instrument — single-file out of the venue.
How do you top that? You don’t. The festival’s late Sunday afternoon finale brought Oliveros’ The Witness, a rambling, seemingly improvised score for 12 musicians, with Chase displaying her reliable technical assurance. It’s a very busy half-hour collection of sounds that I imagine Oliveros might have loved. As was said of John Cage, Oliveros reportedly remained a musician who “made the world seem safe for creativity.”
The long weekend ended with Riley’s Pulsefield — three Pulsefields, actually, each rising louder and louder. Schick on percussion swayed and gestured to signal transitions. There’s a stirring section that would not be out of place in a triumphal movie sequence. The sense of everyone jamming, with musicians singing and a trumpet and trombone wailing away, concluded the celebratory festival on an exuberant note. Perhaps too long, not easy, but fun.
Conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen is slated to return as music director for the festival’s 80th season June 11-14, 2026, which also marks the conclusion of artistic and executive director Ara Guzelimian’s tenure.
