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( 3 / 742 )Of course fans of Ojai know that contemporary music is an aphrodesiac. But the conventional wisdom in the orchestra world is that modern music is a box-office killer. But maybe that's just because orchestras were just a little late figuring out how to do it.
Over at the Atlanta Symphony Robert Spano has been featuring contemporary music by a group of composers that are starting to be known as the Atlanta School.
They're Atlantan not because the composers all hail from there; it's because the orchestra has made a thing of performing composers that belong to an aesthetic that the orchestra believes in. By giving the music context and suggesting clear reasons why these composers belong together, Atlanta has helped define them in a compelling way.
And guess what? After a few years of building audiences, the contemporary music programs now outsell traditional programs.
The most significant aspect of the Atlanta School project may be the trust it is building for new music in general. A semistaged version of the opera "Dr. Atomic" by American composer John Adams sold at 88% of paid capacity during the depths of the economic recession. In a reversal of usual box-office patterns, concerts with music by Atlanta School composers typically sell at about 84% of capacity, says marketing vice president Charles Wade, versus an average of 78% for other classical events.
At Ojai, the performances are assumed to be great. But the programs need to be something more as well. We have to answer questions for every piece, for every performer: why this music? Why now? This isn't a randomly assembled set of pieces or performers. They fit into some sort of tradition and aesthetic; they convey something we think is important. They provoke certain kinds of responses. There's Ojai DNA sewn into the fabric of every concert. The trick is how to make it clear even to people who are visiting for the first time.
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( 3 / 628 )Curious about the music and performers featured at Ojai this summer? Naxos has recorded some of it/them, and the enterprising recording label is currently featuring recordings by Messaien, Schoenberg and Varese on its blog. More about them here.
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When Tom Morris called me to invite Wildcat Viols to play Purcell Fantasias at Ojai, I thought it was one of those random strokes of fantastic good luck that we all dream of. As performers firmly ensconced in the early music world, we usually operate in a variety of big-fish-in-a-little-pond situations, so it was very exciting to be invited into a larger body of water! Lucky, yes, but the more I thought about it, the less random it felt – in fact, in many ways it’s the perfect fit. There are very few professional viol consorts in the world, and of those, even fewer dare to delve deeply into Purcell’s Fantasias, which are considered the most technically and musically challenging pieces in the entire two hundred years’ worth of viol consort repertoire. But it just so happens that Wildcat Viols has made a specialty of the music of Purcell and his contemporaries. And to top it off, our first recording, focusing on this amazing music, has just come out. I don’t think Tom knew all of this when he invited us to Ojai -- so maybe the luck goes both ways! I’m intrigued by George Benjamin’s idea of juxtaposing Purcell’s Viol Fantasias with Indian ragas. I must admit my relative inexperience with Indian music, but I can see how this programming will immerse the audience in two contrasting sound worlds -- each in its way deeply intense, compelling, almost mesmerizing -- that might be less familiar to mainstream classical audiences. And it’s interesting to reflect that both Indian music and early music first appeared on this country’s radar screen at around the same time, as part of a larger, counterculture-driven interest in exploring musical worlds beyond the standard classical repertoire.
If only I could be in two places at once… I would love to experience the contrasts and similarities of our concert from the audience’s point of view. I hope we’ll get a chance to hang out and chat with audience members afterwards – I’m eager to hear what people think of George Benjamin’s unusual and ingenious programming idea.
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( 3 / 674 )What exactly defines an Ojai Music Festival experience? What ties together the music and people featured at Ojai? It's lineage, says Tom Morris. This might be the first year composer George Benjamin is the festival's music director, but he has ties to it that go back through his entire career. As recounted in last weekend's LA Times:
Olivier Messiaen, a composer whose work has been a staple at Ojai since 1969 and who visited the festival in 1985, was Benjamin's composition teacher. Benjamin had a close relationship with the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti, another oft-performed composer at Ojai. Pierre Boulez, one of Benjamin's most stalwart mentors, has served as the festival's music director seven times. Several other Ojai music directors in recent years — including the British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen, the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard;and the American conductor David Robertson — also share longstanding friendships with Benjamin.
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