Ojai Festival
| Ojai Music Festival | |
|---|---|
| Genre | classical music |
| Location(s) | Ojai, California |
| Years active | 1947 to present |
| Founded by | John Leopold Jergens Bauer |
| Website | |
| www |
|
The Ojai Music Festival is an annual classical music festival in the United States. Held in Ojai, California (75 miles northwest of Los Angeles), for four days every June, the festival presents music, symposia, and educational programs emphasizing adventurous, eclectic, and challenging music, principally by contemporary composers. A secondary focus of the Festival is the discovery or rediscovery of rare or little known works by past masters.
The primary performance venue is the Libbey Bowl, an open-air setting not far from the center of Ojai.
Before the music festival itself was established, the Ojai valley itself had attracted artists, musicians and thinkers. In the early 1920s, a trust organized by Annie Besant, the head of the Theosophical Society, bought 40 acres (160,000 m2) in the valley. This land was eventually used for the official residence of her young Indian protégé, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti proved to be a respected spiritual thinker in his own right, and Ojai became one of his bases. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, his talks in the valley drew a diverse group of notable Southern Californians, including Igor Stravinsky, Greta Garbo, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Charles Chaplin, Bertrand Russell and Charles Laughton. The composer John Cage wrote to his lover in 1935, "I was walking and thinking of you in Ojai, an open space of country, and suddenly I knew what wildness was. I am sure there is something unexplainably and mysteriously sacred about the Valley, something including evil." The idyllic setting even famously served as Shangri-La in the 1937 Frank Capra film, Lost Horizon.
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