Over in Ojai: Chase-ing the New

Claire Chase, the innovative virtuosic flutist who has “world premiered” hundreds of compositions by a new generation of artists, was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (2012) as well as the nearly-as prestigious Avery Fisher Prize (2017). Two years later, she was a Mosher Guest Artist at Music Academy of the West, where her recital broke all sorts of classical music boundaries. In 2020 she joined MAW’s remote learning platform as an Innovation Speaker – giving evidence to the recent New York Times story calling her “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe.” 

This weekend, Chase returns to the area to serve as music director for the 2025 Ojai Festival, expanding upon her visits as a performer in previous years. Plans are for the always-expansive and groundbreaking fest in the mountain village to push the new-music frontiers even further – with four days of programs that run from Marcos Balter’s Alone on Thursday night to an appearance by all of the festival artists on Sunday afternoon. That rousing final curtain will include the JACK Quartet (who played at Hahn Hall for MAW’s Mariposa Series earlier this year) performing the world premiere of Terry Riley’s Pulsefield 3.

This year’s fest also features the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s Sky Islands, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music in May.

In a recent email list post, Chase called Ojai “a four-day feast of wonder, exuberance, reflection, and renewal,” terming the weekend’s works “divergent in their stylistic and notational approaches” yet bound together by “a courageous commitment to an ethos of making music in community… On stage, a spirit of generosity grows like a ginger root, wild and multidirectional.”

Chase, who will perform in an astounding 10 different programs over the weekend, also invited the festival artists – a multigenerational cohort of performers, composers, improvisers and sound artists “working at the fissures of different disciplines” – to incite new collaborations with one another. 

“We’ll be treated to world premieres of work written expressly for this place and this gathering, and we’ll have our imaginations set ablaze while witnessing improvisations that come into being before our very eyes, in dazzling encounters that will only happen once, here, never to be repeated.”

The open-form scores concept of several of the pieces not only nods to a culture of creativity – as the musicians as the performers sculpt the compositions in real time with one another, the audience and the surroundings – but also one that can counteract our current cultural divides, Chase said. 

“These pieces are playful provocations to listen unconditionally to one another, in delighted deference to the unexpected outcomes that such listening inspires. What results is not just speculation about a more compassionate world; the music creates and enacts that very world, where life’s tenderness and brutality, grief and uplift, are embraced. However briefly, we get to live in a more capacious world, one shaped consciously and lovingly by our deep and unruly interdependence.”

Amen. 

Visit www.ojaifestival.org