The People United!
September 11, 2026
Since its inception in 1947, the Ojai Festival has served as a center for American experimental music. Mahler Chamber Orchestra had the privilege to play there in 2018 with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and in 2024 with pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Ojai continues to build on its legacy of new and experimental music, partially grounded in relationships with the many European expatriate musicians who landed (often confusedly) in Southern California. Stravinsky was Music Director in 1955 and 1956; the Schoenberg family was nearby, as were Ingolf Dahl, Lukas Foss, and Gerhard Samuel, all influential on new music. To play in Ojai is to join the ongoing tangled history of American classical music. I’m proud to say that we were the first in the history of the festival (which also includes such prominent American names as Michael Tilson Thomas, John Harbison, Aaron Copland, and John Adams, among many others) to play the music of Johnny Cash, who lived about ten miles away in Casitas Springs.
The threnodies of Aaron Copland were first played together at the Ojai Festival in tribute to two festival fixtures: Igor Stravinsky and Beatrice Cunningham, a longtime supporter of the festival and friend of Copland. We offer them plainly in honor of those lost twenty-five years ago today.
We offer also Frederic Rzewski’s epic set of variations on ‘The PeopleUnited Will Never Be Defeated!’, a Chilean revolutionary anthem which caught his ear. Rzewski’s outlook comes clearly from the left: the song was used by the unsuccessful resistance to Augusto Pinochet and contains a quotation from Hanns Eisler’s ‘Solidaritätslied’.
It is, however, the power of the anthem—an active call for unity—which drives our presenting it today. Rzewski composed with extraordinary rigor and clearly modeled this work on the rigorous numerical systems of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In ‘The People United...’ he writes 6 groups of variations with 6 variations each, over a theme of 36 bars. Within this are further nestings of rhythms and styles, all in the service of a tremendous rising strength. We hope that this epic work will salute the power of a united American people.
–Tim Summers
The threnodies of Aaron Copland were first played together at the Ojai Festival in tribute to two festival fixtures: Igor Stravinsky and Beatrice Cunningham, a longtime supporter of the festival and friend of Copland. We offer them plainly in honor of those lost twenty-five years ago today.
We offer also Frederic Rzewski’s epic set of variations on ‘The PeopleUnited Will Never Be Defeated!’, a Chilean revolutionary anthem which caught his ear. Rzewski’s outlook comes clearly from the left: the song was used by the unsuccessful resistance to Augusto Pinochet and contains a quotation from Hanns Eisler’s ‘Solidaritätslied’.
It is, however, the power of the anthem—an active call for unity—which drives our presenting it today. Rzewski composed with extraordinary rigor and clearly modeled this work on the rigorous numerical systems of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In ‘The People United...’ he writes 6 groups of variations with 6 variations each, over a theme of 36 bars. Within this are further nestings of rhythms and styles, all in the service of a tremendous rising strength. We hope that this epic work will salute the power of a united American people.
–Tim Summers