Music From Other Minds

A survey of recent releases from Rural Situationism, a series devoted to works based on field recordings. Cheryl Leonard uses sounds from Point Reyes, Marin Headlands, and MacKerricher State Park to make Littoral. Norman Long’s Re-Membering/Re-Presencing was recorded at various locations around Chicago. Angus Carlyle, a professor at the University of the Arts in London, made Powerlines with recordings from northern Norway. From Scotland, Clare Archibald, Mike Bullock, and Anthony Cowie combine field recordings with instruments in Smooring the Fire. Kate Carr recorded on cabbages, salt, bacteria, and transformations in her London kitchen. In Sage, Suddenly, Andrew Weathers combines the dry soundscape of western Colorado with gentle instruments.

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb plays the entirety of Laurie Anderson’s 2024 masterwork Amelia, which chronicles the last flight of Amelia Earhart in 1937.

Tune in for that and works by Linda Catlin Smith, Charlemagne Palestine, Ken Ueno, and Tyshawn Sorey.

This program features two protest pieces with different religious contexts. Plague Mass, by American singer Diamanda Galás, was recorded live in October 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Known for her AIDS activism, Galás performed the piece in protest of the treatment of people with AIDS, which from 1981 through 1990 had killed more than 100,000 people in the United States. The Polish composer Henryk Górecki wrote Miserere, meaning “have mercy” in Latin, for a cappella mixed choir in 1981 in response to the Polish government’s violent crackdown against activists from the trade union Solidarity earlier that year in Bydgoszcz. The piece was not allowed to be performed until 1987.

After Erland Cooper’s Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence was recorded, the master tape was buried in the soil near his childhood home in Orkney, Scotland. Two years later, it was made into a CD, distortions and all. Emelie Cecilia Lebel uses an EBow to make piano strings drone in Pale Forms in Uncommon Light. She says the idea for the piece comes from seeing light patterns filter through a forest. Bart Hopkin’s new release, Audiorium showcases dozens of his invented string, wind, and percussive instruments. The program also features music by other Bay Area instrument makers, including Tom Nunn, Cheryl Leonard, and Brian Day.

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb plays John Luther Adams‘ study of geological time An Atlas of Deep Time, Flora Yin Wong’s musical exploration of Taoist Geomancy Trigram for Earth, and Wadada Leo Smith’s experimentation based on the Sufi philosophy, Masnavi: A Sonic Meditation and Reflections on Light.

Also on the program, Takuma Itoh’s A Melody for an Unknown Place performed by Patrick Yim and Microtub’s Thin Peaks for just intonation tuba trio.

This program features the music of the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya and like-minded maverick piano composers, Leo Ornstein and George Antheil. The program concludes with an interview with American composer Brian Baumbusch about his recent release with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players on Other Minds Records, Polytempo Music.

It’s not the instruments that are uncommon, it’s their creative use in new music that’s unusual. British improvisor Rhodri Davies takes the Celtic harp on new adventures. Multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart breathes new life into the ancient didgeridoo. Composer Catherine Lamb adds the arciorgano, a 16th century microtonal organ, to a dreamy chamber work. Cindy Webster plays the musical saw with a group of waterphones. Guitarist Elliott Sharp plays solos on the mandocello, an instrument more often used in folk music. Jin Hi Kim brings a new approach to the Korean komungo. And Julia Wolfe calls for mountain dulcimer and clogging in her Appalachian flavored oratorio, Steel Hammer.

This program features recent releases on the World Edition label based in Cologne, Germany. World Edition has been presenting the music of the global avant-garde for over two decades. It is a platform for the avant-garde arts, publishing not only CDs but books, videos, and events as well. We begin with Spanish composer Maria de Alvear‘s MAGNA MATER for voices, ensemble and video installation from 2013. This is a ritualistic invocation of Mother Nature through sounds, words, and images evoking, “her power and wisdom, the destructiveness of earthquake, asteroid impact, drought and firestorm, and the life-giving elements of soil, sun, water, air, sky, clouds, rain.” In the second hour we feature a World Edition recent release by German composer and jazz musician Frank Gratkowski. It’s called Mature Hybrid Talking, a project he worked on with the Frankfurt am Main-based Ensemble Modern in 2022. And finally we hear two pieces by one of Europe’s foremost composers, Walter Zimmermann, Chantbook of Modified Melodies, from 2021, and Paraklet, from 1995.

On this edition of Music from Other Minds, we’ll be dedicating the entire program to accordion works found in the Other Minds Archives. Composer/accordionist Guy Klucevsek plays Polka from the Fringe live from the 1987 New Music America Festival; 21 unexpected polkas from composers Bobby Previte, Fred Frith, Tom Cora, William Duckworth, Christian Marclay, Guy De Bievre, Mary Jane Leach, Carl Finch, and many others. In the last half of the program we’ll hear some special picks including vintage performances by Pauline Oliveros and Stefan Hussong.

On this Music from Other Minds, Joseph Bohigian shares a sampling of his interviews on the Other Minds Podcast with the composers visiting San Francisco for Other Minds Festival 28, September 25–28, 2024, at the Brava Theater. The program includes excerpts of interviews with Annea Lockwood, Marshall Trammell, Hafez Modirzadeh, Jan Martin Smørdal, Amma Ateria, Nava Dunkelman, and Trimpin. At the end of the program, we’ll hear from the composer and author Soosan Lolavar about her recently published book Embodied Research Through Music Composition and Evocative Life-Writing: Disrupting Diaspora. The full interviews can be found at here or on any podcasting app.