New on OM Records: Charles Amirkhanian’s Ratchet Attach It is a rollicking miasma of drum cadences, fractured player piano rolls of manipulated Rachmaninoff, Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” and Armenian folk music, along with interludes for multiple ratchets and cowbells, tastefully crafted into an 11-movement suite sure to delight the most jaded new music ears.

How does one play music with animals in a way that respects their nature and agency? On Thursday, April 16, 2026, Other Minds welcomed musician and philosopher David Rothenberg to answer this question in the West Coast premiere of his work Eleven Paths to Animal Music (2025). Based on one section of his 2019 book Nightingales in Berlin, Eleven Paths to Animal Music is a composition that contains vignettes of natural environments recorded on his travels—from frogs in the Amazon, nightingales and wind in the Camargue, leafcutter ants in Costa Rica, and a lake in Brandenburg, among others. The remainder of the event contained shorter pieces where Rothenberg plays with whales and insects, along with a discussion of how and why he embarked on this more-than-human musical quest.

A panoply of composers assembled for the 29th Other Minds Festival in San Francisco at the Brava Theater, October 16–19, 2025. Our latest festival featured music by Pamela Z, Peter Garland, Samuel Adams, Ingram Marshall, Kristine Tjøgersen, Zeena Parkins. James Tenney, Putu Septa, and Brian Baumbusch and choreography by Nancy Karp.

Other Minds welcomed pianist Amy Williams to perform Morton Feldman’s monumental—and rarely performed—Triadic Memories on Thursday, January 8, 2026, at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, in celebration of the composer’s centennial. This concert was part of Other Minds’s PastForward series, presented in cooperation with the Center for Contemporary Music, Northeastern University and Mills Performing Arts.

New in the Other Minds Archives: the Dorothy Renzi Collection. Soprano Dorothy Ohannesian Renzi (1924–2014) pursued a burgeoning career in New York City during the late 1950s, recording many premieres of music by contemporary composers for MGM Records. In the early 1960s, she moved to her hometown of Fresno, California, where she became a professor of voice in the Music Department at California State University, Fresno. This personal collection of her tapes, discs, and other ephemera documents her long career and includes many live performance recordings otherwise unavailable.

Music from Other Minds is a weekly two-hour radio program of new and unusual music by innovative composers and performers around the world. Produced and presented by Other Minds staff members and associates Liam Herb, Joseph Bohigian, Ed Herrmann, Devin King, Rachel Schonfeld, and Charles Amirkhanian. Air time is 8pm Sunday evenings on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area.