Claire Chase at Ojai 2025, Part I

OJAI, CA  – The Ojai Music Festival lately has been swinging from one extreme to another as its music-directors-du-jour pass through the revolving door. The eclectic world-folk-based Rhiannon Giddens festival of 2023 gave way to the mostly mainstream verities of Mitsuko Uchida in 2024, while swerving way to the left this year with Claire Chase’s avant-gardism. Not that Ojai’s historically adventurous, if not entirely uncritical, audiences mind; they go with the flow, to the ever-amazed and delighted reaction of the performers at the Libbey Bowl. Ojai is the little-town festival that could. And does.

Chase, the hyper-energetic flutist/entrepreneur whom Ojai Artistic Director Ara Guzelimian likened to a “comet,” last appeared at the festival in 2017, when the boundaries of what is music and what is noise were being continuously tested. Like most comets, it took awhile for Chase to orbit back into view at Ojai—and this time, she arrived with more challenging installments from her immense Density 2036 project in hand.

Named in the spirit of Edgard Varese’s seminal work for solo flute, Density 21.5 (as in platinum, the metal of which some flutes are made), Density 2036 is a line of newly commissioned works for flute and various combinations that started in 2013 and will continue annually until 2036, the year of Density 21.5’s centennial. All of the commissions through 2021 have been recorded and issued through the auspices of Meyer Sound, the creators of the Constellation system that can convincingly simulate a plethora of acoustic environments. Those pieces are, as you might expect, a mixed bag, with an assortment of hits and misses.

At the 2017 festival, audiences heard an excerpt of Marcos Balter’s Pan. Now completed, it received its full, 49-minute production premiere the evening of June 5, the dark sky heightening its haunting, ritualistic atmosphere and feeling of a journey to inner space. As before, citizens of Ojai were recruited to form a circle onstage around Chase and her flutes to represent Pan’s community, bearing candles and tracing their fingers around the rims of tuned water glasses to produce an otherworldly high-pitched drone.  

Liza Lim’s Density 2036 solo for Chase, of a similar length to Pan, bore the provocative title Sex Magic. I suspect the implications of the phrase explained the sold-out house on June 6 at the nearby Ojai Valley School’s Greenberg Center. But those expecting something salacious might have been disappointed by this rather long-winded ritual about “the sacred erotic in women’s history” for Claire and her giant, pretzel-like contrabass flute (which she nicknamed “Bertha”). The relationship between Chase and “Bertha” seemed relatively chaste, though there were enlivening features. Two adjacent platforms loaded with tambourines, jingle bells, and other hand instruments produced rumbling vibrations that resembled earthquakes when electronically stimulated to the max. The keys of “Bertha” were attached to a transducer microphone in order to produce thundering percussive effects, and at certain points, Chase tromped down on a kick drum, trilled expressively on an ocarina, and cut loose a single terrifying scream on an Aztec “death whistle.” For at least two minutes, nothing happened at all, just silence bracketed by two strokes on a metal prayer bowl.

Moving on, the acclaimed Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottír’s contribution to Density 2036’s 2023 edition is Ubique, whose West Coast premiere occupied the better part of June 7’s morning concert. Written for flute, two cellos, piano, and electronics, Ubique is one of Thorvaldsdottír’s more forbidding pieces, marked by the drones that undergird so much Icelandic music. Electronic rumbling from the rear speakers open the piece (at first, I thought it was the sound of passing trucks on State Highway 150 that occasionally disturb concerts here) and reappear here and there later, concluding in a distant storm. While there is some agitation in a central passage, the piece is mostly just long sustained tones that, uncharacteristically for this composer, wear thin at this length (52 minutes).

The evidently ageless Terry Riley was represented in Density 2036 with excerpts from an ongoing long-form project, The Holy Liftoff, that delighted the ear with long, flowing melodic patterns for Chase and frequent Ojai visitors JACK Quartet, with pre-recorded multiple flutes (played by Chase) and the occasional reminder of Riley’s jazzy past. The final contribution to Density 2036 on the agenda was Craig Taborn’s de facto free-jazz jam, Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms, with Chase, clarinetist Joshua Rubin, drummer Susie Ibarra, and Taborn on piano and MIDI keyboard. I caught the second of two performances on June 8 in which a series of solos and duets among the performers seemed to be not getting anywhere except when Ibarra struck up a swinging second line groove for a short time. Finally, at the 55:55 mark, the power suddenly cut out on Taborn’s electronic equipment, and after a few seconds of uncertainty, the group wisely decided to call it a day.

Part II of Ojai Festival coverage will appear next week.

Top: Chase with "Bertha"; bottom: performing Liz Lim's Sex Magic