Music From Other Minds

On this program, we’ll listen to recently released music by Øyvind Torvund, Soosan Lolavar, Wendy Eisenberg, and Nadah El Shazly, as well as selections from Movses Pogossian’s monumental new 4-disc set of Armenian chamber music by Artur Avanesov, Tigran Mansurian, Vache Sharafyan, and Koharik Gazarossian.

Bay Area native Loren Rush had a long and varied career. Spanning over 50 years, his compositions explored aleatoric procedures, minimalism, serialism, just intonation, and the search for beauty. He was chairman of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and director of the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. As a co-founder of the Good Sound Foundation, he pioneered the digital enhancement of acoustic sounds. This program presents music from the few commercial recordings of Loren Rush’s music, as well as historical recordings from the Other Minds Archives.

2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Benjamin Lees (January 8, 1924–May 31, 2010). To celebrate, we’re broadcasting some archival interviews with Lees from the Other Minds Archives. Lees was born in Harbin, Manchuria to Jewish parents who had fled pogroms in Ukraine. His family moved to the United States the next year, settling in San Francisco. He was a student of George Antheil and came into public attention as a composer in the 1950s, receiving commissions from major American orchestras.

Dennis Russell Davies was born April 16, 1944, in Toledo, Ohio, studied piano and conducting at New York’s Juilliard School, and developed a wide-ranging repertoire from Baroque to modern.

On Friday, March 22, 2024, Other Minds will celebrate Dennis Russell Davies’ 80th birthday in San Francisco with a sold out concert of piano music by Bedřich Smetana, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and John Cage.

Tune in to this program to hear past performances by Davies, both solo and with Maki Namekawa.

The Polish composer Henryk Górecki (1933–2010) is most well known for his third symphony, composed in 1976, which became a rare commercial success in 1992 via a recording released that year by Nonesuch Records with the London Sinfonietta and soprano Dawn Upshaw. Górecki also wrote three other symphonies, all much less known than the third, and these works form the bulk of this program. Closing out the program is Symphony No. 4 by Alexandre Tansman, the 20th century Polish composer and dedicatee of Górecki’s fourth symphony.

In 2016, Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition In For A Penny, In For A Pound, joining Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis as the only jazz artists to receive the award. Threadgill’s recent compositions are based on sets of intervals and metric patterns, often unique to each player. Along with a movement from In For A Penny, In For A Pound, this program features And More Dirt, excerpts from Old Locks and Irregular Verbs, plus a 2022 concert performance, Of Valence.

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb broadcasts Charles Amirkhanian’s conversation with pianist Robin Rubenstein (1980). Tune in to hear in studio performances and tapes of Rubenstein performing Brahms, Gershwin, Grainger, and more.

On this broadcast of Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb plays works of sound art in memory of Phill Niblock (1933-2024) and Steve Roden (1965-2023). Tune in to hear Niblock’s composition Sweet Potatoes (2002), and Roden’s teacup composition winter couplet (2002). Also on the program, Annea Lockwood‘s Glass World (1970) and Francisco López‘ luggage travel from the airplane to baggage claim in his 2023 piece San Francisco (OAK).

This program begins and ends with two modern takes on the madrigal by Peggy Glanville-Hicks and James Weeks, moving inward, drone pieces by Noah Jenkins and Mattie Barbier, further inward, percussion and piano pieces by Tyondai Braxton and Joan Tower, all centered around a vibraphone piece by Matt Sargent.

Another dive into the recently opened Other Minds Archives brings this program featuring Jin Hi Kim discussing Korean court music and playing the komungo; Lou Harrison and William Colvig demonstrating the instruments of their American gamelan; pianist Marilyn Crispell and violinist Leroy Jenkins playing together for the first time in public; and, in the final Speaking of Music program in 1992, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan performing with Swapan Chaudhuri.