2016 Festival Update from Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris

This past week, Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris met with 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars and soprano Julia Bullock as they rehearsed Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone. He wrote us a brief update on the project, its history, and the plans for Ojai…

Kaija Saariaho’s great work La Passion de Simone was written in 2006 for large symphony orchestra, large chorus and soprano soloist. Its first performances, with Dawn Upshaw, were staged by Peter Sellars in numerous cities around the world. In 2014, Saariaho, as a centerpiece of the Festival Saint-Denis in Paris, made a new version of the piece for an ensemble of nineteen players, a small chorus of four to eight singers, and soprano soloist. The work, conceived as a “Musical Journey in Fifteen Stations”, assumes the form of a contemporary passion play, interpreting the life and thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. The original libretto by French author Amin Maalouf constitutes the majority of the oratorio’s text, supplemented by spoken fragments from Weil’s work.

2016 Festival

2016 Music Director Peter Sellars
frames programming for 70th Ojai Music Festival
June 9-12, 2016

The Ojai Music Festival marks its 70th year in 2016 and to curate this milestone, Artistic Director Thomas W. Morris has invited opera and theater director Peter Sellars to serve as Music Director. For the 2016 Festival, Peter Sellars is shaping a program deeply rooted in the cultures of Ojai, starting new traditions and setting out fresh agendas for the 70 years to come. The Festival will take place June 9-12, 2016.

As the 69th Ojai Music Festival opens this week (June 10-14, 2015) with Music Director Steven Schick, the Festival’s 2016 Music Director Peter Sellars shares thoughts on his distinctive approach to programming the Festival:

Christina McPhee: How Ojai Inspires Me As An Artist

The audience members of the Ojai Music Festival are as eclectic, imaginative and passionate as the music performed and the artists who are engaged in the creative process. Once such patron is Christina McPhee, visual artist from the Central Coast, who shared her work with us inspired by the 2014 Festival. 

The Muslin-Drum // Ligeti Iterations :
As a child, I found sanctuary in piano practice. Each evening the required hour came with the delight of the fall of the keys, the fascination of synaesthesia’s colors with chromatic chords, and escape from external pressures. For no audience but my own brain, my ears connected with digits, and with structures of flight. Later I sought to materialize this experience in painting.

With my partner I built canvasses in translucent muslin, coated in clear, slightly crystalline rabbit skin glue, with taut surface like a drum. From the first the support and surface conditions set up a performance situation around color-shapes, linear thresholds and tensions of the stretched canvas. Interacting with these constraints set me into a graphic predictive process, to ramify lines from sound. The delicate surfaces pinged as the graphite slides across the rabbit skin. Dyes threw across the slightly glittering crystals of rabbit-skin embedded in the glue ground. The soft swish of liner brush extended murmur and glissando. Tcherepnin, Varese, Cage and Harrison crossed through this matrix. None stayed as long as Ligeti. Hundreds of repeats, listening to the cd of György Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, Books 1 and 2, as performed by Jeremy Denk in a Nonesuch recording of 2012, cast the studies into iterative material abstractions. Then I heard Denk play them live in concert at the Ojai Music Festival, in June 2014. An indelible impression, almost, a neurologic imprint…Elements of surprise, hurling passages, glissandos, rushes and stillnesses, darknesses leaching into light, shapes tumbling and subsisting in secret rhythms— these formal and performance incidents translate a code for a kinetic action through the instrument of the body onto the radiant surface.

10 Questions with John Luther Adams

Written by M. Sean Ryan with permission from BMI.

In writing or analyzing a piece of music, the notion of space is both multifaceted and unavoidable. For John Luther Adams, it is the root. His environmentally-minded compositions aren’t just inspired by geography and places he finds meaningful. Sometimes their performance demands musicians forgo the stage, scattering strategically instead around vast indoor and outdoor venues.

In this way, Adams has garnered a reputation for highlighting how we fit in to the world around us, musical or not. Pieces like “Inuksuit,” or, more recently, “Sila,” continue to redefine the immediate environment in which they’re performed, while his titanic opus “Become Ocean” has earned him two GRAMMY nominations as well as last year’s Pulitzer Prize in music. In addition to these prestigious honors, Columbia University’s School of the Arts recently announced that Adams will be awarded their $50,000 William Schuman Award this fall. The award recognizes “the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.”

On a recent call from New York City, the 62-year-old Adams opened up about the road that’s led him to his current standing as a world-renowned composer.

How did your relationship with BMI begin?
It would go back to the 1980s. I was a young composer thinking about affiliating with a performing rights organization, and ultimately what persuaded me — what did it was Ralph Jackson. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on Ralph’s retirement singing his praises and talking about who he is and the difference he has made, not only in my life but in the lives of so many other composers.

In the larger musical landscape of new music, classical music, contemporary concert music — whatever you call this stuff that I’m involved with — Ralph is truly a force of nature. Now Deirdre Chadwick has taken over and like Ralph she’s an oboist. And like Ralph she’s a strong personality who cares passionately about this music. I feel really lucky to be working with her now.

In that stage of your career, when you moved to Alaska in the late ‘70s, your focus was political. Was music on the backburner?
Nothing took a backseat to anything else. I thought I could do it all: I thought I could be a full time environmental crusader; I thought I could live like Henry David Thoreau in the woods; I thought I could be a working composer, and I thought I could have a serious personal relationship and also play in the Fairbank Symphony. It took me a decade or so to realize that I had to make some choices. It was a very heady time. To be young and idealistic in Alaska in the late ‘70s and then into the early ‘80s — I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Q & A With Festival Producer Elaine Martone

Congratulations to Festival Producer Elaine Martone for her Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year in the classical music category!

Elaine was brought on as the Festival producer in 2012. Prior to joining us, she was executive vice president of production at Telarc Records for 29 years. As a key executive in planning and creative decision-making, she managed more than 1,500 projects and was accountable for more than $6 million annually in production costs. A world-class producer, she is a five-time Grammy Award winner in both Classical and Jazz.

Born in Rochester, New York, Elaine moved to Cleveland to study oboe with aspirations of playing with a symphony orchestra. A graduate of Ithaca College with a Bachelor of Music degree, she was taught the basics of the industry by Telarc founders Robert Woods and Jack Renner, quickly grasping what determined the famed Telarc sound and becoming an accomplished editor and an integral part of the management team. Elaine has served as producer on more than 200 recordings, both classical and jazz, including those by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with Robert Spano and Robert Shaw, The Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Möst, the Philharmonia Orchestra with Ben Zander and jazz greats Ray Brown, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Tierney Sutton, and McCoy Tyner to name a few.

Elaine was executive director of Spring for Music produced at Carnegie Hall with founding directors Thomas W. Morris, David V. Foster and Mary Lou Falcone, music industry legends.

With her husband, Robert Woods, she has formed a music enterprise, Sonarc Music, and is pursuing her passion, producing great music and musicians, as well as working with talented young people. She was a founding board member of Red {An Orchestra}, which completed seven seasons in Cleveland, Ohio.

A Design Preview by Digs Floral Designer, Lynn Malone

Lynn Malone, floral designer and owner of Digs Floral and Botanic Design in Ojai, will be making her 2014 Holiday Home Look In debut at the Schmidt home in Rancho Matilija. Lynn sat down to write us a blog about her plans and inspirations for the decor.

With the excitement of fall color in full bloom it was tempting to style the Schmidt home for Thanksgiving this year, but as a floral designer, I’m equally excited about holiday cheer and winter whites. When the homeowner and I met to plan the floral décor within this beautiful palette  of a home, we decided that it would be fun to use floral designs that could be versatile for both holidays so that they could be used for the entire season. In designing the florals, we agreed upon a few priorities. While a few pieces will be works of art, designed to compliment the exquisite art collection in the home, we wanted to keep many of the floral designs simple, so that guests could easily replicate them in their own homes.

Entering the home through the massive front doors, guests will be greeted with warm traditional holiday looks designed to inspire a holiday mood. Inside, fresh, contemporary holiday designs will be showcased, along with a bit of the unexpected, and a touch of whimsy here and there for fun. Floral colors have been chosen to accent the magnificent collection of artwork displayed throughout the home.