EPSG:4326

Morning Meditation

Legacy High School

Finale

Libbey Park

Kafka Fragments

Ojai Valley School

Morning Concert

Evening Concert

Shifting Ground

A unique program for solo violin and video projections juxtaposing Baroque works by Bach and Matteis with recent music by Kaija Saariaho, Angélica Negrón, Paul Wiancko, and Salina Fisher. Produced in collaboration with the Baryshnikov Arts, New York.

 Ojai Dawns

Besant Hill School

Opening Concert

Libbey Park 

Two-part session with Music Director Mitsuko Uchida and featured artists, hosted by Ara Guzelimian and John Schaefer of WQXR New Sounds.

Ojai Talks

A complete performance of Carlos Simon’s cycle Between Worlds, four solo string works placed in visual context by the remarkable paintings of Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949), chronicling nearly a century of Black American life.

Between Worlds

A musical summit and jam session featuring solos and collaborations among the bowed and plucked string instruments from cultures in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Finale: Strings Attached

Libbey Bowl

The tradition continues! A community concert fun for all ages and families.

Community Concert

Curated by Francesco Turrisi, a program of morning music spanning from ancient pipa music to works of Dowland and Monteverdi.

Early Music

Morning Mediation

Chaparral High School

An Ojai-commissioned chamber work for voices and small ensemble drawn from the opera Omar, by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, paired with the musical traditions of Senegal and the Carolinas.

Omar's Journey

A new staging of Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera for pipa and string quartet evokes the spirits of Bach and Shakespeare, standing with the ancient folk traditions of traditional shamanistic Chinese music.

Ghost Opera

Works by composers of the Iranian Female Composers Association.

Ojai Dawns

An intimate acoustic concert with Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi with music ranging from Baroque, Appalachian ballads to traditional Black American songs.

An Evening with Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi

Vis-À-Vis

The Festival opens with Gabriela Ortiz’s Liquid Borders performed by red fish blue fish conducted by Steven Schick. The second half welcomes back the Attacca Quartet performing a curated playlist made especially for Ojai audiences.

Liquid Borders

Two-part session with Music Director Rhiannon Giddens and featured collaborators, hosted by Ara Guzelimian and John Schaefer of WQXR New Sounds.

Ojai Presbyterian Church

This new work – conceived and composed by Doug Balliett – tracks the fall of Rome in the form of a high-energy opera in the Libbey Park gazebo. Bringing together members of AMOC and Ruckus – the critically-acclaimed early music band with a fresh approach to baroque music – Rome is Falling presents an exciting new telling where song, spoken word, and driving music come together to contextualize the action. Complete with audience engagement and the performance of members of a local children’s choir, Rome is Falling is a free, public opportunity for Ojai Festival-goers and locals alike to bring a picnic blanket to enjoy.

Rome is Falling

A multi-dimensional performance piece, EASTMAN reflects the performers’ consideration of Julius Eastman’s art and the larger context of his life, creativity, and humanity. The program will include performances of some of Eastman’s most affecting works, including Buddha, Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, and his epic, joyous Stay on It.

Eastman

Harawi is a deeply affecting hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano written by Olivier Messiaen. In addition to Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick’s performance of this sweeping work, this production breaks open Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death into a newly physicalized and theatrical dimension.

Harawi

This concert brings together improvisatory works by two of the most formidable composers of our time, Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis. In the composer’s words, Lewis’s Artificial Life “[presents] a model of group improvisation as an emergent phenomenon arising from negotiation and local intelligence.” Mitchell’s “Cards from At 440 Oakwood Drive” are excerpted from an in-progress multi-movement work that is being composed for Emi Ferguson, Ruckus, and the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet as a co-commission with Metropolis Ensemble.  The “Cards” invite the performers into Mitchell’s language through unmeasured melodic and harmonic material, leaving the creation of the musical structure to the performers.

Ojai Dawns: Mitchell & Lewis

Dance in the Park, a free happening in Libbey Park, celebrates tenderness, togetherness, and fierce joy. The piece is by the dance duo Eichterling, an ongoing collaboration between and across forms with Bret Easterling and Julia Eichten.

Dance in the Park

AMOC closes out the 2022 Festival with a culminating concert focused on pieces that showcase the company’s full ensemble, including Julius Eastman’s indomitable Stay On It and Anthony Roth Costanzo singing his trademark renditions of the music of Philip Glass. AMOC’s dancers make a Libbey Bowl cameo in a choreographed rendition of Schubert’s “Ständchen.” The program also features Costanzo and the early-music ensemble Ruckus in a vibrant array of Baroque music, ranging from Vivaldian virtuoso fireworks to a rarely-performed gem by Sigismondo d’India.

Finale Concert

A rare performance of The Book of Sounds, a remarkable cycle of 12 solo piano pieces written between 1979 to 1982 by the pioneering German composer, pianist, poet and visual artist Hans Otte (1926-2007). The work is a mesmerizing exploration of sound, shaped by Otte’s immersion in both European and Eastern spirituality as well as his championing of such composers as John Cage, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass.

The Book of Sounds

A new commission by AMOC, Carolyn Chen’s How to Fall Apart describes cosmic, natural, and human processes of disintegration, aging and falling apart. This one-hour work integrates text, gesture, and music, building upon Chen’s long-standing compositional work “in which sensuality and abstraction find common ground” (Los Angeles Times).

How to Fall Apart

About Bach features contemporary interpretations of J.S. Bach’s instrumental music. The program includes selections from Emi Ferguson and Ruckus’ Fly the Coop: Bach Sonatas and Preludes, followed by composers’ Cassandra Miller and Reiko Füting’s musical responses to the Bach Chaconne BWV 1004.

About Bach

The Cello Player is a dance-music piece excavating the complexity of ancient relationships: the tortured conception of friendship as a messy amalgam of love, hatred, insecurity, and neediness. Each performer attempts to share their tales, the scarring curiosity of the unknown, and the haunting sensations that come as a consequence of their actions.

The Cello Player

This program features the first Ojai Festival performance of music by Andrew McIntosh, one of Southern California’s most vital and distinctive musical voices. Pianists Conor Hanick and Matthew Aucoin and percussionists Jonny Allen and Mari Yoshinaga will perform McIntosh’s Little Jimmy, a 30-minute work inspired by a visit the composer made to a backpackers’ camp called Little Jimmy, located on Mt. Islip in the Angeles National Forest.

A cycle of mini-concertos commissioned by the Ojai Festival, Family Dinner aims to capture the raucous, joyful energy of a multi-course dinner with beloved friends. The music ranges from introspective to riotously dancelike; it is also punctuated by spoken “toasts” composed by writers and thinkers who are collaborators of AMOC’s artists.

Little Jimmy + Family Dinner

A new collaborative dance-theater piece by Bobbi Jene Smith, made specially for the 2022 Ojai Festival. This work, evolving and adapting parts of her most recent film Broken Theater, which was developed and shot at Mass MoCA and La Mama, explores themes of power, love, and trust through the theatrics of rehearsal. It presents a theater company caught in the midst of preparing for their show. Company members perform music by Schubert, Bach, Connie Converse, Pete Seeger, exquisitely curated and choreographed. But signals are crossed; the chain of command breaks down; the artists repeat, rebuild, and take apart the moment of performance.

Open Rehearsal

A new song cycle, the echoing of tenses, commissioned by the Ojai Festival from Anthony Cheung, sets poetry by Asian-American writers interconnected by the larger theme of memory, made complicated by the circumstances and tensions of cultural and personal identity, family, migration, loss, and reflection. The various poems by Arthur Sze, Monica Youn, Jenny Xie, Ocean Vuong, and others, will be sung, spoken, and interwoven throughout. The work features Paul Appleby, Miranda Cuckson, and Anthony Cheung, and a score that mixes live performance with pre-recorded sound design, in collaboration with David Bird.

the echoing of tenses

This musical-poetic meditation weaves together a tapestry of original compositions, traditional songs, and familiar refrains, melding original music with Irish, Scots, and Tamil tunes. Featuring original work by poet Divya Victor, composer Carolyn Chen, and violinist Keir GoGwilt, it seamlessly integrates music and poetic recitation in an intimate and moving reflection on displacement and belonging.

Ojai Music Festival

Jun 9, 2024

Morning Meditation

Jun 9, 2024

Finale

Ojai Music Festival