SAN DIEGO — Many great athletes helped lay the foundation for their Major League Baseball careers when they were kids playing in Little League. San Diego native Claire Chase is surely the first internationally acclaimed flutist who credits being the only girl on her Little League team for laying the foundation for her career as a music innovator who has spearheaded an expansive body of work for her instrument.

“Baseball was my life — the Encinitas Little League was my life — I was obsessed!” said Chase, who grew up in Leucadia and in 2012 became the first flutist to earn a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” fellowship.

Previous MacArthur recipients range from Twyla Tharp and Lin Manuel-Miranda to Colson Whitehead and former San Diegans George E. Lewis and Chris Thile. Lewis is now the artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — the nation’s foremost new-music group — which Chase co-founded in 2001. She led it until stepping down in 2017 to devote more time to her performing career and to pursue new projects.

Now 47, Chase teaches music at Harvard and Juilliard. She is also the 2025 music director of the prestigious Ojai Music Festival, which celebrates its 79th anniversary Thursday through next Sunday in the picturesque Central California mountain valley town.

She will perform in no fewer than 11 of the 16 concerts at the festival, which showcases her creative vision and dizzyingly eclectic artistic approach, The league-of-their-own performers and composers for this year’s Ojai edition include 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winner Susie Ibarra, 2024 Kennedy Center honoree Tania Leon, JACK Quartet, and percussion master, conductor and UCSD professor Steven Schick. He was Ojai’s music director in 2015, the year Chase first performed — at his invitation — at the festival.

“Claire has one of the most inventive and eager minds, the most deeply rooted musical souls, and the most generous hearts of any musician I know,” Schick said.

“She is a ferocious advocate for new art and young artists, and a flexible and generous collaborator. I know this will sound hyperbolic — but let’s remember that we’re talking about Claire Chase here — if I had to choose one person into whose hands I would entrust the future of music as I know it, it would be Claire Chase. I am sorry that I can’t attest to her skills on the baseball diamond.”

Whether playing shortstop or outfield, Chase approached her Little League practices and games with the same passion, tenacity and unwavering dedication she brings to her music.

Batter up!

“When I was 8 and 9, I was roughly the same size and had the same strength as the boys on the team, and I trained very hard,” said Chase, who by 13 made a lifelong pivot to music and flute, the instrument she began playing when she was 8.

“I basically took all of that focus and energy and devotion that went into baseball and studying the sport, and redirected that to the flute and studying the flute,” she continued. “That’s around the time that I started to get extremely serious about it. So I think of baseball, and the devotional practice of baseball, and the devotional practice of the flute, as being of a piece. You know, one thing just led to the next.”

Chase’s extraordinary talent and drive were evident early on, including to flutist Beth Ross Buckley, the artistic director and co-founder of the chamber-music nonprofit Camarada.

“I was Claire’s flute teacher when she was in junior high and you could already see the genius in her,” Ross Buckley said. “She was born to perform and was way ahead of her time. It may take another 100 years before someone else like Claire comes along.”

Those sentiments are shared by Dana Burnett, the associate artistic director of Camarada. She was Chase’s piano accompanist nearly a quarter century ago.

“Claire is a force of nature,” Burnett said. “She’s exceptionally energetic and that comes out in her musical virtuosity. But it’s not virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. It’s energy going out to her audience. You can feel that energy even when she’s not playing flute, just standing next to her.”

Chase’s father, David, chuckled as he recalled his daughter’s endless drive as a teenager and young adult who was constantly playing her flute and studying.

“Claire always had straight As, so I offered her $100 to get a B,” recalled David Chase, the retired choral director of La Jolla Symphony & Chorus. “It didn’t work.”

Her remarkable number of artistic achievements and awards are so numerous it would take multiple paragraphs to list them here. They include Lincoln Center’s 2017 Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music (which had never before been won by a flutist), two honorary doctorates, eight solo albums of world premiere recordings, commissioning and performing hundreds of new flutes works.

Chase’s decision to devote herself to the flute and to championing vital new composers and performers did not surprise her parents, both of whom are veteran professional musicians. But Claire’s decision to pursue baseball as a pre-teen did surprise them.

“When she told us she wanted to play in Little League with the boys, we were a little astounded,” recalled her mother, Ann, a noted voice teacher and opera and cabaret singer.

“Because next door to us was a family with girls who were softball champions. But Claire didn’t want to play softball. Then, she became obsessed with basketball and was the point guard on her junior high school team.”

A lack of height didn’t deter the younger Chase, although her basketball team days were decidedly brief. A key lesson she learned shooting hoops struck a major chord with her when she later studied at Ohio’s Oberlin College and collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, the daring, proudly iconoclastic composer and performer who co-founded UCSD’s music department in 1967.

“I was the shortest girl on the team and I got totally clobbered!” Chase recalled of the basketball team. “This coincided with the time I got very interested in the flute. The prospect of breaking all my fingers playing basketball didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“I have this vivid memory of one of my junior high school coaches talking about shooting free throws and the feeling of shooting the free throw from the bottoms of your feet. And Pauline said something very similar to groups of musicians when she was having them walk around the room while they were doing deep listening exercises. She said: ‘Walk so softly that the bottoms of your feet become ears.’

“That kind of imagery is tremendously useful to a performer. You stop thinking about your upper body and your hands. You connect with the ground and with the softness of your feet. You connect with the stage, or the basketball court or whatever it is, and you can get into a different kind of flow state because of that.”

Embracing density

Connecting with people is one of Chase’s many skills. So is creating a vast new repertoire for the flute, expanding the instrument’s parameters as a fearless performer of seemingly limitless imagination and transforming her International Contemporary Ensemble from a grassroots startup to a national new music powerhouse.

Equally notable is her championing of many bold composers, including Liza Lim, Craig Taborn, Anna Lockwood and Bahar Royaee. Their respective works represent just some of the music that will be showcased this week in Ojai.

A fair amount of that music is contained in compositions that Chase commissioned for Density 2036, a 24-year project she launched in 2013. Its goal is to dramatically expand the repertoire for flute through new compositions, live performances, recordings, education and community outreach.

To date, more than 15 hours of music has been created by dozens of composers for Density 2036. Its title is an homage to Density 21.5, the revolutionary 1936 solo flute work by French composer Edgar Varèse.

“This piece was totally life changing for me,” recalled Chase, who was 12 when she first heard it. It’s 4½ minutes long and it absolutely blew the roof off of my imagination. It changed everything I thought about the flute and music, everything I knew about this little tube of metal. Everything expanded and changed when I heard it.”

In addition to Oliveros and Pamela Z, some of the composers commissioned to write pieces for Density 2036 include Tyshawn Sorey, Vijay Iyer and former UCSD professor George E. Lewis. “Afterword,” Lewis’ wildly ambitious opera, debuted at Ojai in 2017. Iyer was the music director at the festival that year, and the lineup featured both Sorey and Chase.

“What I love about the different Ojai festivals from year to year is how they talk to each other,” she said.

“The artistic musical direction is different each year, but these artists are deeply influenced by each other. So, I love these cross-connections and the effortlessly cross-pollinating way that one festival talks to the next, and the way that we keep influencing each other’s work.”

This will be the fourth time since 2015 that Chase has been featured in the Ojai lineup and her first as music director. Speaking from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and their nearly 3-year-old daughter, Chase radiated excitement as she spoke about the festival.

So did Ara Guzelimian, Ojai’s artistic and executive director since 2020. He was also the festival’s artistic director from 1992 to 1997 and the former senior director and artistic advisor to Carnegie Hall.

“Claire is unique as an instrumentalist who has sparked the creation of so much repertoire and expanded what’s possible for the instrument,” Guzelimian said.

“There’s this wonderful New York Times quote that said Claire is ‘the North star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,’ and it’s true. So much of the music that we’re doing this year at Ojai she directly inspired the creation of… It is rare that a music director at the festival is the reason why so much of the music that will be performed at Ojai even exists.”

Chase laughed with delight when asked if spearheading Density 2036 and heading up the 2025 festival in Ojai made her feel like a kid in a musical candy store. Or, to be more specific, a multidimensional aural candy store she is helping bring to life with some of her favorite collaborators from an array of different musical realms.

“I totally feel like a kid in a candy store!” said Chase, who then happily sang the praises of virtually every one of this year’s Ojai performers and composers with a combination of awe and glee.

“I wanted the Density pieces we will perform to be thematically connected to all of the non-Density pieces. And I realized that the creative constraint was actually very simple: to shine a light on the Density pieces that have been collaboratively made and that are being collaboratively remade and performed. And there are more and more of them and we’re featuring five of them at Ojai ….”

‘Running on fumes!’

Chase’s nonstop schedule at the festival will prevent her from spending even a few minutes on one of Ojai’s baseball fields (“I’ll be running on fumes!” she said). But Chase will be connected to the game she still loves, figuratively if not literally, during her marathon series of 11 concert performances over four days.

“I don’t think I’ve ever zoned out at a concert because I was thinking about baseball,” she said. “But the love of baseball and the physicality of it — and the need to be intensely grounded, no matter what position you’re playing — has helped me and continues to help me so much with flute playing and with performance anxiety of all kinds.

“You know, professional musicians still struggle with performance anxiety. It can sometimes creep up in the middle of a performance, when you least expect it. I do sometimes imagine myself at the plate (during concerts). I imagine shifting my weight and the satisfaction, the intense satisfaction when you connect with the ball. And you know just by the very sound of that, and by the tactile feeling of the vibration in your arms, you know that the ball is gone. You know that it’s a home run. And I do tap into that on stage, and it helps. I talk to students about that, too.”

Chase laughed.

“It’s more useful to students who have a heavy history with baseball,” she added, “but a lot of people do.”

Being a parent to a toddler has given Chase a new focus on her life and priorities. With less time to practice her flute, she values the time she now can spend with the instrument even more.

“I’m a very happy workaholic. I really, really love what I do, and I cherish the time that I get to do it with people. And Ojai is an intensely creative endeavor,” she said.

“I also cherish the time I have alone with the flute. I have less and less of that time as a new parent, and also just considering the density of my schedule and traveling, touring and teaching. But I cherish that time, even if it’s an hour a day, that I get to be alone with the instrument. It’s a happy place, and it’s a happy place even — and perhaps especially — when nothing is working.

“When I feel like everything sounds like sh– and I don’t know how to play, it’s so interesting to me to find a way through that, not around it, but through that. I really love the work. And then, of course, when I get to do it with other people, as I’ll get to do it at Ojai, it’s the greatest joy.”

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If you go

79th annual Ojai Music Festival

When: Thursday through Sunday

Where: Libbey Bowl, 210 S. Signal Street, Ojai, California

Tickets: $25-$165

Phone: 805-646-2053

Online: ojaifestival.org

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