Ojai Festival Is Music to the Ears of Merchants

For the next several days, Ojai merchants and restaurateurs will march to a different drummer--that of the Ojai Festival, which rolls into town Wednesday for its 53rd annual production.

On a basic level, the Ojai Festival “brings a lot of people to town,” said Nina Shelley, former mayor and City Council member for 16 years until her retirement last fall. “There are approximately 300 beds in our hotels and motels, and they fill up. Quite a lot of the economy of the city of Ojai comes from the visitor or tourist source, and the festival is something that the businesspeople like to see coming.”

Jacqueline Saunders, the festival’s executive director, said one of the event’s draws, apart from the music, is “that it’s an hour and a half from downtown L.A. It’s an easy ride, and suddenly they’re out of their normal daily run. It’s a place that’s out of time and place.”

Ojai Festival audiences are diverse but follow certain patterns, said Karen Collins, who is in charge of marketing and development. A poll taken last year revealed that 70% are returning visitors and 76% are ages 40 to 75. From a fiscal perspective, 77% make $51,000 a year or more, and a third of that group make $100,000.

Collins also reported that most of the people who come to the festival spend $500 to $1,000 while in town. She pointed to the general festival-goer’s profile as involving “high education and high income, and they do spend money in Ojai.”

Among the regulars, certain shopping habits prevail. Many festival-goers, for instance, make a beeline for Bart’s Books, off the beaten path of the downtown arcade. This indoor-outdoor haven for used books has been around for 35 years.

“We get a nice crowd of people who come in after the concerts, and they buy music books,” Bart’s employee Jack Randolph said. “Normally, our classical music section is not one of the hot areas during the year. We do notice a dramatic increase in sales in that section.”

This is one of the businesses whose commercial rhythm is dictated by the festival schedule. “When the festival is going, it gets a little slow here, but the minute there’s a break or intermission, the place just gets packed,” Randolph said.

The same goes for Tottenham Court, along the Ojai arcade--a tea, lunch and gift emporium with a British accent that does a brisk festival-time business. “We have the program up here,” said owner Andi Bloom, “so we know what time they get out and what time they go in. We’re tuned in to the whole thing. On Saturday morning, they’re out at 11 and don’t go back until 2. So, that’s good for us.”

Bloom’s review of the festival? “It’s wonderful,” she said. “The people who go to the festival love this store, to come and have tea or lunch or anything. . . . They’re upper-echelon people, with taste. . . . It’s the best of the year for us.”

As always, concerts in Libbey Bowl will showcase world-class music and musicians, with a special emphasis this year on music from Finland, courtesy of music director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

The community involvement also changes this year, with other arts organizations invited into the festival. In the past, the festival has been a fairly autonomous organization, its program designed from outside the town. But on Thursday, the Ojai-based Flying H Theater Group will present “Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti,” written by Bertolt Brecht while in Finland, and the Ojai Arts Center is presenting an exhibition of Finnish art.

The expansion of artistic focus is something new but also something old. It goes back to the roots of the festival, Saunders said, “which was envisioned as a festival presenting many of the arts--including theater, poetry readings, dance and also music.”

Another aspect of community involvement is the festival’s increasing commitment to music education and outreach. At this point, it spends $75,000 on a program that has included about 60 events reaching 6,000 area schoolchildren. In part, this effort exposes young people to classical music, which they might not get elsewhere, seeding interest in potential musicians--and audiences.

“Who are the audiences of tomorrow going to be, if we don’t do this kind of cultivation?” Saunders said. “Who is the keeper of the flame? If someone doesn’t get proactive, we could all have good intentions and a good attitude, but we might get a nasty surprise when there isn’t anyone out there who cares about it in a few years.”

At times, the Ojai Festival has engendered controversy due to its forward-thinking outlook. By emphasizing contemporary work rather than the standard repertoire, the festival attracts a specialized audience. “They try different things,” Shelley said. “Sometimes, that works really well; sometimes with listeners who are not familiar with the exceptionally contemporary music, it doesn’t go over so well. The festivals are never what I used to call, as a teenager, ‘swoopy music,’ waltzes and so on.”

Still, Shelley speaks for Ojai residents in saying that “it’s something that we’re really proud of. Sometimes, these performances seem cacophonous and hard on the ear. But that is not the way I think most music listeners from this community see it. They listen to something new and maybe startling with the thought that this can be music, too.”

Last year, the program had a more conservative leaning, which artistic director Ernest Fleischmann admits was a calculated move to soften the challenge of this year’s more adventurous agenda. As a result, the 1998 festival experienced the biggest attendance yet.

That buzz seems to have spilled over to this year, if pre-sales ticket figures are an indication. “It’s not over until it’s over,” Saunders said, “but the benches are sold to near-capacity on every concert. That is really good news to me, because I was sure we were going to have a hard time this year. But in fact, people are flocking here.”

Part of that excitement may be due to the fact that, while the musical program includes a sizable amount of new and potentially ear-challenging music, Salonen is a charismatic and popular conductor who can convey energy behind even so-called difficult music.

“The feeling I’m getting out here in Ojai is, ‘Yes, he’s young; he’s dynamic. There’s a lot of magnetism there,’ ” Saunders said. “People really want to know what he’s up to. There is this sense that he has, if not an entirely free rein, it’s his canvas this year in Ojai. He’s filling it in the way he wants to, by and large.”

Whether the listener is a new-music devotee, a casual weekend escapee from Los Angeles or a curious local, Ojai is a burg transformed come festival time.

“Whether people attend or not, everyone is aware that there is a music festival,” Shelley said. “We’re in this shallow little valley, and the music bounces around from one side of the hills to the other.”

Music is literally in the air for a few days in late spring.

“If I can’t go and I’m in town, if I open my bedroom windows, I hear the whole thing,” Shelley said. “Of course, it’s not the same thing as being there.”