Ojaipedia

Everything you need to know to immerse yourself in the 2025 Festival!

The Basics

Every spring since 1947, the Ojai Music Festival is four days of adventurous programming that blends contemporary, classical, and experimental approaches to music-making. The Festival is curated by a new music director each year. Each music director brings their unique experience, skills, and personality to the Festival, fostering innovation and collaboration among world-class artists in the scenic setting of Ojai. Seven core concerts are held at the historic Libbey Bowl, and numerous off-campus and free events are held throughout town as part of the Festival, from small-scale theatrical concerts to symposiums with performers/composers to family-focused pop-ups, and more.

For the 2025 Festival, June 5-8, the music director is Claire Chase: expert flutist, interdisciplinary artist, and community-focused educator. Among many other accolades, Chase is known for launching the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, and educational initiatives. Works that are part of Density 2036 punctuate the Festival’s programming in Thursday night’s opening concert with Marcos Balter’s Pan and on Friday afternoon with Liza Lim’s Sex Magic.

Under Claire Chase, this Festival’s programming centers on responses to landscape as caretakers and participants, and celebrates collaboration and dialogue across multiple generations of composers and performers. The 2025 Festival includes four World Premieres of works by Susie Ibarra, Tania León, Terry Riley, and Bahar Royaee; the US Premiere of Liza Lim’s Cardamom; eight West Coast Premieres; and seminal works by John Coltrane, Julius Eastman, Sofia Gubaidulina, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and more.

Central threads of the 2025 Ojai Music Festival include:

Connection to and conservation of ecology and nature
Using music as a means to symbolize an idea or meaning
Meditative and mindful contemplation
Deep listening

When you hear music at the 2025 Festival, listen for:

Unique instrumentation, such as Claire Chase’s towering contrabass flute, or the use of bamboo as a percussive element in Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands
Extended techniques of traditional instruments, such as percussive flute playing or playing a cymbal with a double bass bow
Music that is part of or descended from minimalism, a 20th-century compositional movement that emphasizes repetition, drones, and/or gradual shifting between notes or techniques
Microtonal music (not necessarily atonal), which is music that utilizes pitches in between the 12 in the equal-tempered European chromatic scale

Schedule

Artist bios

Press release