{"id":4215,"date":"2019-06-04T10:29:36","date_gmt":"2019-06-04T17:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=4215"},"modified":"2019-06-04T10:52:13","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T17:52:13","slug":"ojai-music-festival-and-jack-quartet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2019\/06\/ojai-music-festival-and-jack-quartet.html","title":{"rendered":"Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo: Timothy Norris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which runs this Thursday to Sunday. I\u2019m looking forward to this year\u2019s festival, which was programmed by soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ojai is \u2013 in my two decades of attending most years \u2013 always good and sometimes great. It reminds us that classical music, for all the enduring work of the past, is a living art, unfolding in our own time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2019 installment is especially appealing because it\u2019s got a healthy serving of jazz \u2013 a number of pieces by longtime downtown innovator John Zorn, as well as young composer\/ percussionist Tyshawn Sorey. There are some short pieces by John Luther Adams, one of our day\u2019s finest composers and one, like the festival itself, attuned to the outdoors. And the group that\u2019s playing a lot of these pieces \u2013 the New York-based JACK Quartet \u2013 is clearly one of the bright lights of the new-music scene. (The group made a very good impression at a festival preview event in Los Angeles a few months ago, explaining things like temperament and intonation in an accessible way, and playing examples with a startling kind of eloquence and control.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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JACK Quartet (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The other day I spoke to Jay Campbell, the group\u2019s cellist. Campbell grew up in the Bay Area, skateboarding and listening to a wide range of music, from indie rock to the free-jazz improvisation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. \u201cSo it was kind of a logical move,\u201d he says, \u201cto be interested in what was happening now in classical music.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was lucky enough to meet John Adams, and played a piece of his music while still a young kid. \u201cIt kind of blew my mind that a composer could be not <\/em>dead,\u201d Campbell says. He realized that all of the composers he played had been alive at some point; it reframed his sense of where the music came from. Later he discovered Ligeti and the Minimalists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This didn\u2019t, though, make him any more attentive a student. He spent most of his early years, he says, \u201cnever, never practicing.\u201d When he applied to study at Julliard, he didn\u2019t get in and felt unmoored. After a year, he applied again, got in, and decided to take things seriously for a change. \u201cSo I basically locked myself in a practice room for eight hours a day, for four years,\u201d he says. At night he\u2019d play new-music gigs around New York and absorbed as much as he could. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discovering the work of Austrian microtonalist George Friedrich Haas, and the school of spectral music Haas is associated with, made a strong impression on Campbell. \u201cIt change my life, musically,\u201d he says, orienting him to \u201ca more sensual sound,\u201d and turning him on to the power of the drone and the complexity of intonation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days Campbell and his colleagues in JACK Quartet often work on world premieres. \u201cHow can I bet a better collaborator with living composers?\u201d he asks. \u201cI find that to be the most exciting stuff. To be at a world premiere of a piece, with someone you collaborated with\u2026 It\u2019s very different than playing a Bach suite.\u201d Campbell also plays the core repertoire with a piano trio. But with new music, \u201cIt expands what is possible with my instrument. It makes me feel a little bit expanded.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked Campbell to describe a couple of the pieces he\u2019s playing at Ojai. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday morning JACK will perform the world premiere of a string quartet by Catherine Lamb. \u201cShe\u2019s a composer of most intonation-based, droney, slowly developing music \u2013 it\u2019s about the sounds behind the sounds.\u201d The piece begins with all four musicians holding the same tone, a C natural. \u201cIt depends on the music unfolding slowly over time; it\u2019s intense and meditative at the same time.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Friday night, Campbell and the JACK lads will perform Schoenberg\u2019s second quartet. He calls it, \u201cvery deep on so many levels. You feel a lot of his angst and conflict at the time: His chamber symphony had just been premiered, and was a total disaster.\u201d Partway into the piece, it adds a free soprano part \u2013 sung by Hannigan \u2013 and an old German song from the plague years. (Only an upbeat Californian like Campbell could describe this piece as \u201creally fun.\u201d) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, he\u2019s excited about Ojai and was pleased with what he saw when he visited last year. He was struck by \u201chow open and interested the audience is, and how willing they are to be taken on a journey. The fact that they\u2019re game for that is really cool.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Campbell, \u2013 who also spoke about the liveliness of the new-music scene in LA and elsewhere, as well as the persistence of Minimalist composers \u2013 mentioned something that keeps coming up among my music friends: The growing interest in site-specific, immersive and very long pieces of music in a world that constantly seems to be speeding up. (We spoke a bit, for instance, about Max Richter\u2019s Sleep.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sensory overload, always-on tempo of contemporary culture has led a lot us to crave more meditative and gradually unfolding work \u2013 and this is true for musicians as well as audiences. \u201cI find something very ecstatic about that music \u2013 the way it unfolds over a very long time,\u201d Campbell says. \u201cThat\u2019s something that other cultures have known\u201d for many centuries. Now we in the secular, post-industrial West are kind of waking back up to music as ritual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

See you in Ojai! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which runs this Thursday to Sunday. I\u2019m looking forward to this year\u2019s festival, which was programmed by soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ojai is \u2013 in my two decades of attending most years \u2013 always good and sometimes great. It reminds us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,1],"tags":[804],"class_list":{"0":"post-4215","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-classical-music","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-ojai-music-festival","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4215"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4224,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4215\/revisions\/4224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}