In a tranquil southern Californian park, shaded by oak trees, the Libbey Bowl transforms each June into an epicentre of contemporary classical music as the home of the Ojai Music Festival. Now in its 79th season, the immersive four-day festival continues to redefine the boundaries of new music, championing adventurous programming that spans centuries and transcends traditional categorisation.
This June, the festival prepares to celebrate its remarkable legacy while charting new territory under the leadership of flutist and curator Claire Chase. Her programming reflects an active, vibrant conversation across generations that embraces both tradition and innovation. Ojai 2025 honours a striking convergence of composer milestones: Terry Riley’s 90th birthday, Annea Lockwood’s 86th, and Tania León’s 80th, as well as percussionist Steve Schick’s 70th. The festival also pays tribute to Sofia Gubaidulina, who died earlier this year, and celebrates the spirits of the groundbreaking composers Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman. In dialogue with these significant artists are younger generations of composers who will have their works performed, including Bahar Royaee, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Liza Lim, Craig Taborn, Marcos Balter, Susie Ibarra, Eduardo Aguilar, and Vincente Atria.
“All of these works are an invitation to the listeners and to the performers, not just to imagine a world in which people listen to one another – these pieces enact that world. They create that world for the duration of these performances,” Chase told me in a recent interview. From Pauline Oliveros’ meditative, participatory soundscapes to world premieres of commissioned works, the festival promises opportunities for musical discovery that, as Chase puts it, offer, “a portal to listening and being and actualising – just for that one brief fleeting moment – a world that we actually want to live in.”
Chase’s relationship with Ojai spans much of her life, first as an “ardent fan” growing up in southern California, and later as a performer in 2015 under the direction of Steve Schick, with whom she has had a long collaborative relationship. Describing the first time she saw Schick perform, Chase recalled, “It was one of the most exhilarating and intimate performance experiences that I’ve ever had. The bug bit me and I was in.” Now with her turn as Ojai’s music director, Chase has assembled a programme that celebrates inheritance. “I’ve tried to choose not just the greatest artists that I have ever known, but the greatest, boldest, and most courageous, most generous, loving human beings across all the generations,” Chase explained. “These elders, all of them together, individually, collectively, have touched everything that makes everything we imagine possible.”
Among the festival highlights is the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban-American composer Tania León, whose works Ritual, Singsong, Hechizos, and Abanico will be performed. León, a close friend of Chase (“We have Taurian bonding,” she joked in our interview, noting their May birthdays), brings a rich musical perspective shaped by her childhood in Havana and her dramatic journey to America.
“When I left Cuba, I was to use the States as a trampoline to get to Paris,” León explained. “Moments before boarding the plane, the Cuban government took the passports of everybody and cancelled our citizenship. I arrived here a citizen of nowhere.” Within a few weeks of landing in Miami, she secured a one-way ticket to New York and restarted her remarkable musical career from a friend’s sofa in the Bronx. Chase will perform a solo flute version of León’s work Singsong, which sets poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (and will be premiered in its full version next year by Chase and The Crossing choir at Carnegie Hall). León says of the piece, “Singsong is very dear to me because it’s one more work that I have set to the poetry of Rita Dove. [She] and I are very close, too.” When asked what the piece will be like as a solo work, León laughs and says, “Anything that Claire does is okay with me.”
One of the new commissions for this year’s Ojai festival is a work by Iranian composer Bahar Royaee for percussionist Ross Karre. Royaee’s work explores memory fragmentation, a theme she has been developing since 2020. “I realised I am dealing with this phenomenon of failing, and of trying to remember things,” Royaee explained. “Something that I was trying to grab in the horizon of my mind or my memory, and every time I tried, it was just breaking, collapsing in on itself, shaping a new thing.” This philosophical approach has led Royaee to embrace imperfection in her compositions. What might otherwise be considered “errors” become central material, with small sound “pixels” undergoing subtle alterations through repetition.
For her Ojai piece, Royaee has been collaborating with Karre using repurposed styrofoam objects as resonant bodies. “When you put metal on these boxes of styrofoam, they resonate and create a new world of sound,” she said. The resulting sounds are almost “human, but very raw.” The work incorporates LED lights and AM radios, creating electromagnetic interference patterns that transform the sonic landscape. The piece will be performed in one of the festival’s “morning meditative spaces,” where audiences are free to experience it however they wish – watching intently, eyes closed, or even sleeping.
Audience participation remains central to the Ojai experience. Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, a tribute to her late friend Pauline Oliveros, immerses listeners in the layered sounds of river systems. The work continues Lockwood’s lifelong engagement with ecological soundscapes, including her iconic A Sound Map of the Housatonic River, which Ojai audiences can experience as a four-channel sound installation. Complementing this tribute is Oliveros’ own The Witness, a meditative work of deep listening that guides performers and audiences into a shared space of presence, memory, and attentive transformation. The natural sounds of Libbey Park – including its resident crows – become part of the experience.
The opening night culminates in the return of Marcos Balter’s Pan, a large-scale work that he and Chase have developed over a decade. Friday’s line-up features the U.S. premiere of Liza Lim’s recent solo violin work Cardamom and the West Coast premiere of her bold, corporeal Sex Magic (2020) for contrabass flute with live electronics and kinetic instruments. Leilehua Lanzilotti’s programmed works include ko‘u inoa, a strikingly beautiful solo string work described as “a homesick bariolage based on the anthem Hawaiʻi Aloha,” and her string quartet ahupua‘a, a piece addressing the traditional Hawaiian system of land management and food production. Other highlights include Susie Ibarra’s radiant Sunbird, Gubaidulina’s mystical Mirage: The Dancing Sun for eight cellos, and Tania León’s sparkling Abanico.
For Chase, the music she has programmed offers an opportunity for respite. It is “a place that we can go and have our minds and our beings changed, expanded, renewed.” This vision of music-making emphasises vulnerability and presence. “I count myself among a group of devotees, students, and lifelong learners of this ethos of music-making that invites performances and explorations that happen only one time,” Chase said. “When they’re performed with integrity, they are intensely vulnerable experiences for the participants, and for the listener, and they’re also exhilarating.”
As the festival brings together musical pioneers with younger voices, Chase is intentionally creating a “space for artists and audience members, but also for programmes – and the inspirations behind programmes – to talk to each other.” In doing so, Ojai continues its tradition of fostering musical conversations that span generations, cultures, and artistic approaches, creating transformative worlds of sound in the California sunshine.
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