New Music Festival director sounds upbeat tone
by Bret Bradigan

Tom Morris had an Ojai Music Festival moment during last year's performance of Olivier Messiaen's "From the Canyon to the Stars."
During this ambitious composition about the French composer's visit to Utah's canyonlands, "performed at such a high level" by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he leaned back in his chair and saw the moon surrounded by a nimbus of stars, peeking through the oak-tree arbor.
That moment, when music reaches perfect pitch with its surroundings, is "about as magic as it gets," he said.
Morris, recently announced as the successor to Ernest Fleischmann as the prestigious festival's next artistic director, spent the past few days this week getting to know the festival staff and board of directors, to meet the people who create that magic.
He was the featured guest at board member Linda Hodges' house Tuesday night and consented to an interview Wednesday morning at Joan Kemper's house.
Besides the fame and acclaim he has earned as the executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra, which has earned a reputation as one of the world's finest, Morris consults with symphonies and their boards about fund-raising and development.
He was hired by the Ojai Festival this past fall to conduct a board retreat, then was asked to apply for the artistic director post, which he will assume for the 2004 season.
"I've known about Ojai for years and years," he said. His first festival attendance was for Pierre Boulez's production in 1996.
Ojai's reputation as a showcase for edgy dispatches from the frontiers of musical expression excites him. He used the divided reaction to Messiaen's "From the Canyon to the Stars" as an example. "Great music should create a reaction," he said. "The worst thing is indifference."
While saying it was premature to declare what personal imprint he planned to make on the festival, some hint might emerge from the young composers he admires.
One composer, Matthias Pintscher, is currently the Daniel K. Lewis Young Composer Fellow on a two-year seat with Morris' Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, with a debut of his new work by the orchestra scheduled for May.
Other he admires are Brits Mark Anthony Turnage and Tom Ades, American Augusta Read Thomas, as well as Austrian Olga Neuwirth, and Swede Magnus Lindberg, who was co-founder in the early 1980s, with LA Philharmonic's Esa Pekka Salonen, of Toimii, an ensemble dedicated to musical experimentation.
"In my view, they're all different," he said. "But they represent the most creative voices today writing music."
Morris is interested in bring a multi-year view to the Ojai Music Festival, but plans to shy away from particular themes. "One of the greatest things about music is contrast and juxtaposition," he said, and so structuring a festival around a theme might be limiting. "One tends to find music that fits the theme ... The program comes first."
An example was the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra's "Great Disappearing Orchestra" production, with Pierre Boulez conducting, in which 105 piece played Stravinsky's "Song of the Nightingale," then reduced to 65 for a Messiaen composition, further reduced to 35 pieces for another Messiaen composition, then concluded the performance with Stravinsky's "Soldiers Tale" with a mere seven musicians remaining.
After each piece, the seats were removed and the spotlight focused in on the remaining performers, until the huge stage was reduced to those seven final musicians. "The effect it had, was it focused concentration so strongly the audience erupted at the end," he said.
These level of expertly-played, innovative performances are key to perpetuating the appeal of symphonies, and ushering in a new generation of fans, he said. "By keeping programs fresh and exciting, and doing it at an extremely high level, is the best thing for ensuring future audiences," he said. "Our audiences (in Cleveland) are not going down, and not getting older."
And so, for the Ojai Music Festival, patrons can continue to expect "music that pushes the envelope in some way," Morris said. "The moral creed is to lead taste and not follow.
"The great purpose of art is to provoke, and not to entertain," he said. "That's not to say it can't be enjoyable. And people, in their grand design, follow that."

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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