Why this year’s Ojai Music Festival was one of the best

OJAI — You can’t escape nature in Ojai. That meant that flutist Claire Chase, this year’s Ojai Music Festival music director who is often called a force of nature, fit right in.

Chase is the proudest flutist I’ve ever observed. And the most expressive. She holds her head high whether playing piccolo or the 6-foot contrabass flute, as if her instrument were a magic wand used to activate her voice in the highest registers and the deepest.

The activism is more than an analogy. Chase is also a joyous and entrepreneurial music activist, MacArthur “genius,” educator, founder of New York’s impressive International Contemporary Ensemble and commissioner of a vastly imaginative new flute repertory in her ongoing Density 2036 project. The current surge of interest in Pauline Oliveros is largely her doing.

For Ojai, Chase collected concerned composers on a quest for a kind of eco-sonics capable of conjuring up the pleasure of nature and, in the process, saving our sanity. Over four days of concerts mostly in the rustic Libbey Bowl, the names of many of the works gave away the game.

“The Holy Liftoff,” “Horse Sings From Cloud,” “How Forests Think,” “Spirit Catchers,” “A Grain of Sand Walked Across a Face, on the Skin of a Washed Picture,” are a few.

The festival’s proudest moment (30 minutes to be precise) was the West Coast premiere of Susie Ibarra’s “Sky Islands.” It was the last work in a resplendent Sunday morning program that Chase described as “multi-spiritual” and “multi-species.” The sun found its way through the trees as the composer and percussionist Levy Lorenzo stood in front of the stage and began with a ceremonial pounding of bamboo poles.

“Sky Islands” evokes the magical Philippines upper rainforests, where sounds scintillate in a thinned atmosphere that gives gongs new glories, where animals capable of great ascension exclusively live, where the mind is ready for enlightenment. Ibarra wrote the score for her Talking Gong Trio (which includes Chase and pianist Alex Peh) along with added percussion and a string quartet, here the Jack Quartet.

To the head-scratching surprise of the music establishment that has thus far paid little attention to Ibarra, “Sky Islands” won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for music. A Filipino American from Anaheim who is now based in New York, Ibarra is best known as a percussionist in experimental jazz and new music with a strong interest in environmental sound installations and Indigenous music.

The head scratching stopped in Ojai. In the three works by Ibarra on the program, she proved a capacious sonic visionary. She is a superb mimic of nature’s aural realm — the sounds of animals, of a river, of trees in the wind, of rocks falling down a hillside. She stirs spirits with the barely heard whooshes of drum brushes waved in the air. She connects with the underground as a resonant gong master. She stops to smell whatever there is to smell. She’s often funny.

Mainly, though, she simply entrances, whether she spread her percussive wares in “Kolubri” or writing for other musicians in “Sunbird” on a misty early morning at Ojai Meadows Preserve. Her lovingly sly Haydn-esque wit came out in the premiere of “Nest Box,” a duo for her and Wu Wei on sheng, the Chinese mouth organ.

Steven Schick (percussion), from left, Wu Wei (sheng) and Susie Ibarra (percussion) perform Annea Lockwood’s “bayou-borne” in Libbey Bowl at the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.

(Timothy Teague / Ojai Festival)

Gauging by the audience response, “Sky Islands” was the clear favorite of more than three dozen new or newish works. It is a complex piece that appears to set off on a well-apportioned journey led by Chase into the unknown. But at every turn, the music surprises with a melody that feels familiar until it suddenly doesn’t.

Ibarra leaves room for improvisation as a way for the performers to react to what they are encountering. Chase and Ibarra may, for instance, begin a dialogue as nervous chit-chat with staccato flute interjections with drummed responses that soon turn to broad expressions of wonder. At the end the musicians pick up percussion instruments and leave the stage in a slow, winding procession of dance steps, as if marching into the unknown.

Chase brought together other composers from all over. And she brought together superb musicians from L.A. (particularly members of Wild Up) and New York. The music was all of our time with the exception of three small pieces of early music, but even that was modernized. There was long-winded indulgence and lovely itty-bitty works, over in a flash but suggestive of a full and lovely life, like that of an insect.

The spirit of the Ojai festival need not be conveyed by a laundry list of composers and works or by value judgments. At its best, the event is a musical wilderness, like no other festival of its caliber. The audience goes on a walk in the woods, with nature calling for discovery.

Around every corner you encounter a different musical voice. Hawaiian composer and violist Leilehua Lanzilotti rocked. Cuban composer Tania León added dollops of exciting modernism. Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir commanded long stretches of empty landscape. Brazilian composer Marcos Balter conjured up the mythological Pan in a sometimes outrageous nine-part theatrical extravaganza for Chase.

New Zealander Annea Lockwood offered a 90-minute journey down the Housatonic River captured by loudspeakers in surround sound. In contrast, Australian Liza Lim, in raw instrumental outbursts, revealed the less agreeable possibilities of what forests may think (of us?).

And then there was, at long last for Ojai, the elephant in the minimalism room, the iconic California composer Terry Riley. His “In C” is the one piece Ojai has previously programmed. As Riley now approaches his 90th birthday (June 24), Chase unveiled three parts of an epic cycle of uncategorized pieces Riley has been working on since moving to the mountains of Japan five years ago.

“Pulsing Lifters,” in an arrangement for two pianos and harpsichord, is like a delicate dew. “The Holy Liftoff” realized by Samuel Clay Birmaher for flute and string quartet, opens with Chase on all five of her flutes, one played live, the others prerecorded. The effect is that of being submerged in a lush wash of beauteous flute chords. Riley then softens the spectacularly rigorous Jack Quartet with Ravel-like melody.

In “Pulsefield” pieces numbered 1, 2 and 3, Riley returns to the modular roots of “In C” a half century later. Here repeated rhythms are overlayed by a large ensemble featuring all the festival performers in ecstatic elaborations.

If this, one of the best and truest Ojai festivals in recent years, is meant not for explication but discovery, please do so. The festival has been slowly evolving a system of outdoor amplification, and it captures excellent audio on streams of the Libbey Bowl concerts. They remain archived on the OJai festival YouTube page.

Next year Esa-Pekka Salonen will return for the first time in a quarter century.