Thursday, April 26, 2012 8:00 pm
Berkeley Symphony concludes the season with a look towards the future by unveiling the first installment of a newly commissioned work by award-winning composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Inspired by women of the past and present, the work features text by celebrated Portuguese poet José Tolentino de Mendonça, and is enlivened by the luminous soprano Jessica Rivera (pictured here) in an exciting collaboration with the San Francisco Girls Chorus.
SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS
Monday, April 30 8pm
Join the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in their final concert of the 2011-12 season. This will be a chance to hear composer Aaron Gervais before he premieres his new work on OM 18 with Amy X Neuberg (OM9) and William Winant (OM7). SFCMP will perform Gervais'
Culture No. 1 for harp and works by Mark Applebaum, Lou Harrison, Brett Dean, Nathan Davis, and Edmund Campion.
ROVA QUARTET: ART OF THE IMPROVISOR
Saturday, May 12 8:00 PM
If you enjoyed computer-electronics maven Ikue Mori (OM17,) you can hear her again with the Rova Quartet in an improv extravaganza. The all-star line up also includes: Electro-acoustic vocalist, Pamela Z (OM4); electronics and sound percussionist, Gino Robair; and contrabassist, composer and bandleader, Lisa Mezzacappa.
VOLTI AND KEN UENO
Fri May 4, 2012 8:00pm
Composer Ken Ueno (OM17) returns with another world premiere. He has written the enigmatic and evocative "a lettrist bottle, a fountain of everything I've ever wanted to say, may it reach you on your desert island, that we might start anew." Performed by Volti, possibly “the finest collection of chamber singers in the country” (SF Classical Voice,) the group's program will also include a premiere by composer Francisco Cortés-Álvarez.
OM BOOKSTORE
Check out two new additions from UC Berkeley Press!
EXPERIMENTAL OTHERWISE by Benjamin Piekut
In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time--New York City, 1964--Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt's demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.
Other Minds Webstore
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LUIGI RUSSOLO, FUTURIST: NOISE, VISUAL ARTS, AND THE OCCULT by Luigi Chessa
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)--painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement--was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.
Other Minds Webstore
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OM LABEL
THE COMPLETE MUSIC OF CARL RUGGLES
Our Ruggles reissue has been making news with Alex Ross in the New Yorker (April 16, 2012 issue) in his review of the San Francisco Symphony "Mavericks" tour. Ross writes on his blog, Rest is Noise, "Happily, a two-CD set of the complete works of Carl Ruggles -- recordings originally made for CBS, under MTT's aegis, back in 1980 -- just arrived in the post from Other Minds. The official release date is April 24. Collectors have been clamoring for a CD reissue of these LPs more or less since the CD was invented, to no avail."
Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was an innovative American composer who used "dissonant counterpoint" to fashion a body of work both finely crafted and wrought with emotional power. This reissue includes world-renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas with the Buffalo Philharmonic, the original liner notes plus a rare essay on Ruggles by Lou Harrison and historic photos of the composer.
Get your copy now!
Purchase Complete Works of Ruggles
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CONLON NANCARROW: LOST WORKS, LAST WORKS
Other Minds fans, please recall that Other Minds Records has published two indispensable recordings of Nancarrow's music: A sonically spectacular four-CD set of the studies for player piano as originally issued on 1750 Arch LPs (OM 1012-15) and Lost Works, Last
Works (OM 1002), containing the only recordings of Study No. 30 for prepared piano and Contraption No. 1 (with Trimpin). Both are available from our webstore while supplies last. (Retailers note: Other Minds Records are distributed internationally by Naxos and
Naxos Global.)
Purchase Lost Works, Last Works
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radiOM
BUTTERFLY WING EXPLOSIONS & AND OM17 NOW AVAILABLE!
If you don't know about the Oakland Chamber Youth Orchestra performing Robert Moran's Jewel Encrusted Butterfly Wing Explosions (1968), you should. Adrienne Cardwell, Other Minds' archive mistress, has designated this video as her FAVORITE. You will know why when you see it. The little youth orchestra shocked audiences and caused a huge uproar when they performed this multi-media work by Moran.
Many generous thanks to Mr. Moran for adding this to Other Mind's archive.
Go to Robert Moran's Jewel Encrusted Butterfly Wing Explosions
Also, OM 17 recordings are now available, including the 2012 Fellowship Program.
Programs recently uploaded:
Audio
OM 17
ChamberBridge: Messiaen Illuminated - Concerts I-III from 2008
(donated by Eva-Maria Zimmermann)
(Music from Lapland?) An Early Electronic Work by Heikki Latinen -
Video
The last 2 Improv:21 sessions from ROVA:Arts (John Lindberg, and Wayne Horvitz)
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It's not too late to book your tour to Spoleto USA with Other Minds from May 31-June 4. Embark upon a musical adventure tour with director Charles Amirkhanian as your host to American premiere performances of two operas, Feng Yi Ting by Guo Wenjing (singer Shen Teimei on right) and Kepler by Philip Glass, and a concert Orchestra Uncaged, featuring Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and a US premiere of John Cage's orchestral trilogy, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Eight, and Twenty-Nine.
