OJAI, California – “We are plural, fickle and free,” sang a trio of fake-formal voices here on Saturday night. “We call you to the table of a loving family.”
As a mission statement for the Ojai Music Festival in 2022, you couldn’t do better. Each year, this four-day event is programmed by a different musical director – it could be a violinist, a conductor, a composer – who puts a stamp on the offering.
This time the stamp was collective. This fertile, post-bohemian valley north of Los Angeles was overrun last week by the burgeoning American Modern Opera Company — known as AMOC, pronounced running… well, you know.
Many in the arts today talk a big game about interdisciplinary collaboration, but few walk the walk like AMOC, which counts composers, choreographers, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, and a director among its 17 core members.
At his best – whether performing a crazy new pop musical about the fall of Rome; a witty dance theater piece about rehearsing; or the intense, expansive music of Julius Eastman – AMOC is a celebration, a communal happening, a family dinner.
AMOC pursues a vision of opera as free-floating, lightly staged assemblages, beyond traditional score-and-libretto productions, and works in varying configurations. Many of these were put on display here this past weekend in various spaces – indoors and out, under the blazing midday sun and, luckily, the mild stars.
How close is this group? As Ojai proved, enough to confidently perform complicated, expansive structured improvisations from George E. Lewis (shy) and Roscoe Mitchell (luminous) – at 8 a.m.
THERE’S NOTHING IN IT music like Ojai, now three-quarters of a century old, with that overcrowded morning-to-evening program, its variety of spaces and the loyal curiosity of its audience. The festival, led by a steady hand Ara Guzelimian, is relaxed Southern California—T-shirts and shorts, maybe a hoodie at night—but the repertoire is rigorous and secretive.
Even the warning that a concert is about to begin isn’t the usual docile bells, but a spreading roar of electronics from Pierre Boulez’s “Répons,” a guardian spirit here for decades.
There was no hyper-complex Boulezian modernism this year: composer Matthew Aucoin, who co-founded AMOC in 2017 with director Zack Winokur, wrote perversely in The New York Review not long ago about the “oversaturated equality” of Boulez’s music.
What was the prevailing style then? In keeping with the openness of many young artists now, it was broad. Adaptations of folk music were in – including spirituals, the feathery fiddling of Scottish ballads by violinist Keir GoGwilt, and Aucoin’s hoedown “Shaker Dance”.
So did playing with lyrics, including explorations of how song and spoken word could share space in a musical context. But the greatest new pieces in this vein – Carolyn Chen’s collaboration with poet Divya Victor and Anthony Cheung’s “The Echoing of Tenses” – would benefit from careful finishing.
VARIOUS FACETS AND MOODS of minimalism and its legacy were represented, including Philip Glass songs and, performed in the middle of Libbey Park, as part of Tom Johnson’s 1979 solo “Nine Bells.” Percussionist Jonny Allen jogged a precise route around the bells, hitting a gradually evolving riff – sometimes with delicacy, sometimes with violence.
To swirling music, Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together” (1971) harps on the text, a letter written by an Attica prisoner who died there in the uprising, here spoken with ironic bravado by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, the most valuable player of the the weekend . A very different definition of minimal: Sunday morning there was a rare opportunity to hear Hans Otte’s “The Book of Sounds”, a solo piano epic from the late 1970s and early 80s, played by Conor Hanick with control and sensitivity.
The material here is deceptively simple: wavy lines, sometimes slowed down to expansive chords and sometimes sped up to a glassy arpeggio flood. The harmonies get subtly thicker and thinner; the emotions remain ambiguous, the mood meditative.
The birds in the trees around the Libbey Bowl outside, the festival’s main space, added flickers and acoustic illusions began to emerge from Otte’s trance; I could have sworn by the end there was a soft horn coming out of the piano textures. And on Saturday morning, turning your head, as cellist Jay Campbell suggested, brought out different pitches of the densely vibrating mix as he played Catherine Lamb’s “Cross/Collapse” (2010), his long drones hovering alongside oscillating electronic tones.
AS GOOD AS EVERYTHING this weekend was Andrew McIntosh’s “Little Jimmy” (2020), a quartet for two pianists and two percussionists that takes its name from a campground in the San Gabriel Mountains. McIntosh shot field shots there a few months before it was destroyed by fire, and the resulting piece is a subtly harrowing reflection on the climate crisis and what can be rescued from the ashes.
Reluctant to use the shots, McIntosh conjures up an enigmatic, shadowy, quietly colorful world, sometimes bone-dry, sometimes softly shimmering. Piano strings are manipulated with fishing line for a metallic whine; bending a vibraphone while gently hitting a tubular bell ends up sounding like what a shiver feels like.
When you attended Ojai this year, you may have been convinced that no music was written between 1800 and 1970. The early-to-contemporary pipeline was in full swing here, with historical and modern instruments mixing freely. Composers such as Cassandra Miller, Michael Hersch, Kate Soper and Reiko Füting played with antique styles and fragments; Ruckus, a small baroque band that shares members with AMOC, were guests all weekend along with flutist Emi Ferguson, her tone silky and tender and her haunting multiphonics stunning, in spirited Bach on Saturday morning.
Some of the weekend’s collaborations were more genuine than successful. It wasn’t clear what sudden, stretching choreography added to Allen’s already mesmerizing movement in “Nine Bells” or in Iannis Xenakis’s “Rebonds.” In Chen’s “How to Fall Apart” (a disco ball swings, a croissant is thrown) and in dancer Or Schraiber’s “The Cello Player” (a musician carries a cabinet on his back; a metronome taps solemnly).
But “Open Rehearsal,” directed by choreographer and dancer Bobbi Jene Smith, felt more nuanced. An outgrowth of Smith’s recent work “Broken Theater”, it’s a wry, sometimes rowdy and gripping metaaatrical riff about the creative process.
The performers inhabit archetypes – the moody director, the horny actor, the warring brothers – in charged, wild episodes that suggest auditioning, sifting through material and putting it on stage. Life and art fade, as do traditional roles: instrumentalists dance; dancers sing.
The piece had one significant absence: The great soprano Julia Bullock tested positive for Covid just before flying to California. She would have been on display all weekend and her staged version of Messiaen’s ‘Harawi’ promised to be a highlight.
IT SPEAKS TO AMOCs agility and the depth of its bank that it was able to replace “Harawi” with Tines’ “Recital No. 1: Mass”, a blend of soul songs and spirituals with Caroline Shaw’s graceful settings of the words of the Latin Ordinary. (Ariadne Greif bravely stepped in for Bullock in other pieces.)
Although he sounded tired and muddy in two Bach arias, Tines was radiantly powerful in ‘Mass’, his voice went from lighthearted to hard-hitting in Moses Hogan’s ‘Give Me Jesus’. “Mass” traces a path from being lost to being healed – here, through Tines’ impromptu preacher-esque account of what he described as a racially charged comment from an audience member the night before.
He was also the magnetic centerpiece in a Friday morning performance of works by Eastman, the once-forgotten and now much-acclaimed gay black composer, who conveyed the mix of rigor and excitement, the ingenuity and malleability of this music.
Tines was commander in the sung admonitions of “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc.” “Gay Guerrilla”, originally done on four pounding pianos, was more kaleidoscopic here with a more varied ensemble; the quote from the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” commonly played took on new strength when Tines girded it. Starting out as a peppy jam, “Stay On It” headed toward a vigorous march before drifting into a quiet, lilting elegy.
“We call you to the table of a loving family” worked as a metaphor — but for AMOC it was also literal, evoking the meals that are a regular part of the group’s annual retreats in Vermont. The line was sung in Aucoin’s “Family Dinner”, which premiered on Saturday. Billed as a series of mini-concerts evoking collective energy and individual talents, the piece felt like an awkwardly paced work in progress, the mix of instrumental passages, narration and poetry settings still taking shape, ending an abrupt anticlimax.
The more riveting family dinner was “Rome Is Falling,” Doug Balliett’s intelligent chewing gum, lovingly rough summary of ancient history — and its obvious contemporary parallels — reminiscent of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and “Hamilton.” The performers grinned as much as the audience.
And as a family dessert, a reprise of “Stay On It” closed the festival early Sunday night. Presided over by Tines, it was a sweet-dancing, full-ensemble jamboree – like both Ojai and AMOC, multiple, rough and free.