#5014, With Claire Chase
Claire Chase, the flutist, interdisciplinary artist, educator and advocate for new and experimental music, is the 2025 Music Director of the annual Ojai Festival. She joins us to present works by Filipinx percussionist Susie Ibarra, Australian-Chinese composer Liza Lim, Brazilian composer Marcos Balter, and Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists. She is a Professor of the Practice of Music at Harvard University, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, which is her ongoing project to commission modern flute compositions annually until the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5.
Chase is the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival, and will perform as both soloist and side person in numerous works while at Ojai 2025. Hear some of the works on that 2025 festival program, including some of Susie Ibarra’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Sky Islands, with the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Philippine Northern-style bamboo, gong, and flute music, performed on new sound sculptures of gong metals.
Chase commissions composers who constantly challenge her: whether that is learning how to play new flute-like instruments, or perhaps to turn her contrabass flute (Bertha) into a drum as in the work, “Sex Magic”, for the Density 2036 project by Chinese-Australian composer Liza Lim. Listen to a sample of “Sex Magic” by Liza Lim, where the contrabass flute triggers drum kit noises, kinetic percussion, and electronics, along with an earlier work by Brazilian-born composer Marcos Balter. Balter’s piece for solo flute, live electronics and mass community participation was inspired by the goat-god Pan and “is a meditation on ambiguity and the discomfort it brings”, (program notes.) Both are works from the Density 2036 project.
There’s also some of Anna Thovaldsdottir’s UBIQUE which was commissioned for the tenth cycle of Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project. The music is for flute, two cellos, piano and electronics, and was inspired by “the notion of being everywhere at the same time,” (Bandcamp liner notes). All of the electronics sounds, although transmuted and perhaps unrecognizable, are of the flute, and originate from human breath. - Caryn Havlik
Program #5014, with Claire Chase (First aired 6/02/25)
ARTIST: Claire Chase, Mario Diaz de Leon
WORK: Mario Diaz de Leon: Luciform [1:00]
RECORDING: Density 2036: parts i & ii
SOURCE: Corbett vs. Dempsey
INFO: https://clairechase.bandcamp.com
ARTIST: Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Alex Peh, Levy Lorenzo, Bergamot Quartet
WORK: Susie Ibarra: Sky Islands [3:51]
RECORDING: https://asiasociety.org/video/sky-islands-susie-ibarra-performance-excerpt
SOURCE: This recording not yet commercially available
INFO: https://asiasociety.org/new-york/events/sky-islands-susie-ibarra
ARTIST: Claire Chase
WORK: Marcos Balter: Pan, Pan's Flute [14:13]
RECORDING: Density 2036: Part V
SOURCE: Corbett vs. Dempsey
INFO: https://clairechase.bandcamp.com
ARTIST: Claire Chase, contrabass flute
WORK: Liza Lim: Sex Magic [2:57]
RECORDING: Density 2036: Part VII
SOURCE: Corbett vs. Dempsey
INFO: https://clairechase.bandcamp.com
ARTIST: Claire Chase, flutes; Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, cellos; and Cory Smythe, piano; with Levy Lorenzo, live sound
WORK: Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ubique, Part VI [6:19]
RECORDING: Ubique
SOURCE: Sono Luminus
INFO: https://sonoluminuslabel.bandcamp.com/album/ubique
