The 74th Ojai Music Festival will still take place June 11 to June 14, but due to the pandemic, it will occur virtually as we learn from Ara Guzelimian, who takes over from Chad Smith as artistic director after this year's festival. Guzelimian is busy planning for the 75th anniversary festival for June 2021, with minimalist legend John Adams as music director, putting modern American composers in the spotlight. 

As for 2020's festival, he urges everyone to go OjaiFestival.Org to keep in the loop as there will be streaming events each day. Although the 74th Ojai Music Festival will have an asterisk next to it because of its virtual nature, a t-shirt, program book and other swag will be available, and could very well become collector's items. 

Guzelimian has been coming to the festival for more than 50 years, attending with his parents (second-generation refugees from the Armenian Genocide) from Los Angeles. He was the festival's artistic director for six years from 1992 to 1997. His day job is as dean of the Julliard School in Manhattan. at the Lincoln Center, with his nearest neighbors the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York Philharmonic. "But I live just outside the city, I need a few more trees and leaves than is available in mid-town Manhattan. He said between the pandemic and the protests, downtown is a city of "ghost canyons."  Despite the protests and "heart-wrenching anger and acts of violence," he says the way forward is get involved in service. "Are you feeling sorry for yourself? Go out and help someone," he said.

He's excited about 2021's festival. John Adams, next year's music director, "has occupied place in American life like Aaron Copland, the spirit of American music." Fittingly, Adams himself will turn 75 next year. We talk about favorite festival moments, such as a performance of John Luther Adams music staged by previous artistic director Tom Morris at Meditation Mount, in which strategically placed piccolos blended in seamlessly with the bird song. Or how Michio Uchida's performance of Schubert's Sonata in B flat on a hot afternoon transformed the audience with a mesmerising performance "that willed the heat away, and intensely inward collective experience." Another example was a Boulez-conducted performance of Schoenberg about moon madness in which, right on cue, a full moon rose up to hang heavy in the sky above "Libbey Bowl, a place where the wall between the audience and nature melts away ... there's something incredibly hospitable about the Ojai Valley that welcomes exploration, adventure and creativity."

To sum up the Ojai Music Festival, Guzelimian offers this: "Experience and discovery. If you could bottle that, that's the essence of the Ojai Music Festival." We also talk about Rains and Bart's Books, about Chumash sacred art, the Thomas Fire and the influence of Ghanaian drummers on Steve Reich. We indulge in the age-old East Coast v. West Coast cultural supremacy argument, coming down firmly on the West Coast/Best Coast side because of the "openness to the unexpected that comes from living on the edge" of the Pacific Rim.

We don't talk about Sandy Koufax, drop D guitar tuning or Barney's Beanery.