The Ojai Music Festival is an annual classical music festival in the United States. Held in Ojai, California (75 miles northwest of Los Angeles), for four days every June, the festival presents music, symposia, and educational programs emphasizing adventurous, eclectic, and challenging music, principally by contemporary composers. A secondary focus of the Festival is the discovery or rediscovery of rare or little known works by past masters.
The primary performance venue is the Libbey Bowl, an open-air setting not far from the center of Ojai.
Libbey Bowl
History
Background
Before the music festival itself was established, the Ojai valley itself had attracted artists, musicians and thinkers. In the early 1920s, a trust organized by Annie Besant, the head of the Theosophical Society, bought 40 acres (160,000 m2) in the valley. This land was eventually used for the official residence of her young Indian protégé, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti proved to be a respected spiritual thinker in his own right, and Ojai became one of his bases. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, his talks in the valley drew a diverse group of notable Southern Californians, including Igor Stravinsky, Greta Garbo, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Charles Chaplin, Bertrand Russell and Charles Laughton. The composer John Cage wrote to his lover in 1935, "I was walking and thinking of you in Ojai, an open space of country, and suddenly I knew what wildness was. I am sure there is something unexplainably and mysteriously sacred about the Valley, something including evil." The idyllic setting even famously served as Shangri-La in the 1937 Frank Capra film, Lost Horizon.[1][2]
There was no festival in 2020.
Founding the Music Festival
The Ojai Music Festival was founded in 1947 by East Coast music aficionado John Leopold Jergens Bauer. It was originally intended to be a "Salzburg Festival of the West" with eight weeks of music, opera, dance, and theater; but while those ambitious early plans were never realized, a more modest festival developed. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times described those early years:
Ojai's allure made it easy to attract not only name soloists but the best Hollywood musicians for its ensembles. By 1949, The New York Times was running a composite sketch of participants in that year's festival, illustrating the Juilliard String Quartet rehearsing, the pianist Shura Cherkassky performing and Thor Johnson conducting. Ladies in capes and fancy hats paraded. Bohos in sandals sat under oak trees.[1]
Artistic directors
In 1954, Lawrence Morton was appointed as the Festival Artistic Director. A man of broad musical tastes, Morton was a visionary whose constant curiosity and unwavering integrity shaped the Festival's future direction. Already heading up the famously progressive Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, Morton and his influence were described by Mark Swed:
... what [Morton] wanted was new plus old plus unusual. He was close to Stravinsky. At Ojai, he talked Copland into conducting for the first time. He brought the French composer Pierre Boulez to the Festival in 1967, when Boulez's career as a conductor was just beginning, and Boulez has been back six more times, most recently in 2003. [In 2005] I asked Boulez, who is 81, if he would ever return to Ojai. He said yes, he hoped so. . . .
. . . Like wealthy patrons most places, Ojai's often have traditional tastes, and Morton pushed some donors too far in the '50s. He left for Paris in 1960 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Festival immediately went pop with acts such as Anna Maria Alberghetti and Family.[1] [According to other sources,[citation needed] Morton had received a cable from the new Board president instructing him to "cancel all contracts", which resulted in the cancellation of intended music director, Nadia Boulanger.]
But it quickly swung back to the other extreme. In 1962, when Luciano Berio was the composer in residence, he, Milton Babbitt and Gunther Schuller debated for four days the direction of music and where the 12-tone technique, jazz and tradition all fit in. The great jazz flutist and clarinetist Eric Dolphy played Edgard Varèse's flute solo, "Density 21.5", that spring.[1]
Under Morton's leadership, the Ojai Festival began the practice of having the artistic director engage a different music director each year, building the scheduling around that person. Nine individuals have served:
Whereas Fleischmann tended to organize each year's Festival according to themes, Morris has eschewed this concept. As David Mermelstein reported:
"I'm not a big believer in too much dramaturgy", Morris says. "The idea of building programs or festivals around some kind of specific theme, I find not a compelling idea in general. You find some pieces that fit the theme well, and then you have to find something to round it out, and that can lead to some less good pieces being performed. There should be some rhyme or reason to programming, but it shouldn't be too restricted in its thinking."[5]
After a widespread effort by the Ojai community, the old Libbey Bowl shell and building, originally built in 1957 by local volunteers, was demolished in July 2010.[8] The new Libbey Bowl, opened for the 65th Music Festival in June 2011, features several acoustic, structural, environmental, and aesthetic improvements, while still retaining the familiar, rustic characteristics of the original structure.[9]
