Percussionist Steve Schick directed the Ojai Music Festival, which featured many composers new to the event.

The hills of Ojai were alive with the sound of music from June 10-14 during the 69th annual Ojai Music Festival. Held under the stars in downtown Ojai's beautiful Libbey Bowl, the ever popular festival is well-known for combining classical and experimental music, introducing audiences to new composers, and featuring world-class musicians from around the globe.

Harrison Industries, a corporate sponsor and longtime Whisenhunt Communications client, looks forward to the popular festival each June knowing that hundreds of top-notch musicians and thousands of music lovers will come together for four jam-packed days of music and celebration. This year's festival spotlighted the works of 49 composers, 34 of whom live in the Ojai Valley.

The 2015 festival director, Steven Schick, is a percussionist, conductor, author and champion of contemporary music who has previously performed at the festival numerous times. Schick's impressive resume includes premiering or commissioning more than 150 new works for percussion; teaching music as a professor at UC San Diego; serving as the music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players; and founding and directing the percussion group, red fish blue fish. Schick's talents were showcased in a solo concert on June 12 and as part of a trio that performed for a marathon four-and-a-half hours at sunrise on Sunday, June 14.

The festival opened Wednesday, June 10 with a multimedia tribute to the French composer, conductor and pianist Pierre Boulez. Boulez, who has previously served as the Ojai festival's music director a record-breaking seven times, was honored for his music as well as for the fact that he celebrated his 90th birthday last March. His music was also prominently featured in a series of three additional programs. The following afternoon, 80 musicians were stationed around the park as the audience members roamed the grounds listening to them play.

ALSO: Harrison's regular quarterly newsletter, Trash Flash, was mailed out in mid-June to residential customers in the following cities served by Harrison: Carpinteria, Ventura, Fillmore, Ojai and the Channel Islands Beach Community Services District. If you missed the Trash Flash, visit www.ejharrison.com and look for the online version in the coming weeks. Whisenhunt Communications assists Harrison with the creation of Trash Flash.