Ojai Music Festival Names Music Director for 2025

Flutist, curator, and pedagogue Clare Chase will step into the role

The Ojai Music Festival, which selects a new director for each summer festival season, recently announced that flutist Clare Chase will serve as Music Director for the 2025 festival. The 2025 edition will be held between June 5 and June 8.

Chase is a regular performer at Ojai, having appeared as part of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2015 with that year’s Music Director Steven Schick, in 2016 with Music Director Peter Sellars, and in 2017 with Music Director Vijay Iyer.

Committed to the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works. In 2013 Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, which aims to create a new literature of contemporary flute works through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.

She was the co-founder of the ICE in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2017.

"Claire Chase is one of the boldest, most inventive and irresistibly joyous musicians I have ever known," said Ara Guzelimian, Ojai's Artistic and Executive Director. "She is such a generative force in all that she does, embracing composers, audiences, and entire communities with generosity. She is the perfect match for Ojai’s spirit of adventure, and I can’t wait to imagine the possibilities together for the 2025 Festival!"

"When Ara called me with the invitation, I nearly dropped the phone!" Chase said. "The Ojai Festival has been a kind of dreamland for me since I was a kid growing up in Southern California, and I have the deepest affection for the audiences at Ojai – I don’t know that a more curious, adventurous, and open-eared group of listeners exists anywhere in the world."

"I’m tremendously excited to work with Ara to craft experiences that I hope will animate, complicate, and celebrate the connections between music of the past and the beating-heart present."