OTHER MINDS TIMELINE

Other Minds welcomed Conor Hanick for a performance of the complete piano sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) at The Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. The performance was preceded by a […]

A bevy of composers convene for the 28th Other Minds Festival, an international annual showcase for composers held at San Francisco’s Brava Theater September 25–28, 2024. Music by Trimpin, Annea […]

Strings abound in the 22nd installment of Latitudes! New Haven’s Austin Larkin returned to the series to transmogrify his violin into a tool to amplify the poetics of space. Following […]

After his father’s unexpected death, pianist Adam Tendler used his inheritance, a wad of cash received in a parking lot, to begin a commissioning project inviting a broad spectrum of […]

Other Minds presented a live demonstration of composer Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music, a first-of-its-kind interactive and immersive Virtual Reality album.

Other Minds welcomed back Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies for a benefit recital of solo and piano four-hands music to celebrate Davies’ 80th birthday at the Bell-McCarthy Studio in […]

Other Minds presented a screening of the work-in-progress documentary film Following Pál on Wednesday, March 6, 2024 at 7:30 pm at the Goldman Theater, David Brower Center in Berkeley, California. […]

On the 100th anniversary of the birth of violinist Anahid Ajemian, Other Minds launches the newly designed Other Minds Archives, adding new collections of interviews, musical recordings, photographs, and ephemera […]

Other Minds Festival 27 brought together a cast of composers from locations both near and far for six nights of new music at San Francisco’s Taube Atrium Theater and Gray […]

Acoustic improv trio Sult embraces an other-worldly matrix of scrapes, thrums, and throbs. The charismatic Matt Robidoux invites listeners into a lysergic world oscillating wildly between hysteria and self-possession. Zachary […]

New Haven’s Austin Larkin transmogrifies the violin into a tool to amplify the poetics of space while musical polymorphs Gerald Cleaver and Jean Carla Rodea jettison genre to careen through […]

A triple bill spanning the spectrum of experimental ambient music. Drones ebb and flow while girded by rumbling floor toms in Christopher Robin Duncan‘s SEASONS, Joel St. Julien summons and […]

Since 1980, Wendy Reid has composed an ongoing set of musical processes based on nature, Tree Pieces, ranging from electro-acoustic chamber compositions to larger works for open ensembles in site-specific […]

New York’s Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Ghost Ensemble’s May 18 performance at St John […]

For Other Minds’s 30th anniversary, pianist Marc-André Hamelin performed Charles Ives’s legendary Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” with commentary by composer Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives’s Concord […]

Other Minds Festival 26 brought together a cast of composers from locations both near and far for three nights of new music at San Francisco’s historic Great Star Theater in […]

Charles Hutchins makes a triumphant return to the Bay Area for an algorithmic performance on computer and serpent, the low-pitched Renaissance-era brass instrument. Saxophonist and live electronics performer James Fei […]

The Other Minds Podcast is launched by Joseph Bohigian, featuring interviews with some of today’s leading composers and performers of new and experimental music. Episodes are available on all major […]

A chorus of Disney-fied whistling leads into the synthesized sounds of jungle animals, as impossibly lush, sensual strings transport us to the South Seas setting of some corny Hollywood movie […]

Other Minds was pleased to present the 17th edition of the Nature of Music concert series featuring a performance of Christopher Luna-Mega’s Night Music for reed quintet and electronics performed […]

Bats from Namibia! That’s one of the unique sounds featured at the first Bay Area performance of music by renowned Irish composer and sound artist Karen Power. Karen traveled all […]

Other Minds was pleased to welcome back Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies for a recital of solo and piano four-hands music with real-time interactive projections by Cori O’Lan at […]

A special book launch event for DILEXI: A Gallery & Beyond, a new coffee table hardback documenting the life and work of Other Minds Co-founder Jim Newman. The event began […]

Heralded by NPR as a “Who’s Who of the avant-garde” and The Wire as “a forum for forward-thinking composers and an opportunity to hear performances of a uniformly challenging and […]

With Charles Amirkhanian, Westerkamp discussed how sound impacts the day-to-day of one’s life, the environmental effects of sound, and the role of radio in the proliferation of sound art.

Jim Nollman is a composer of music for theater, a conceptual artist, an environmental activist, an author, and a pioneer of in the field of interspecies music and communication. He has recorded interspecies music with various other animals. He released several albums on Folkways Records, including Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas.

Definition: 1) Hutong (simplified Chinese: 胡同; traditional Chinese: 衚衕 or 胡同; pinyin: hútòng) are a type of narrow lane or alleyway in a traditional residential area of a Chinese city, especially Beijing. 2) Hutong, an opera by Kui Dong, Libretto by Monica Datta and dramaturg Paul Schick, Story by Monica Datta. Hutong is a comic opera in fifteen parts about the whimsical nature of urban coincidence and the white space between vignettes. Set during a late summer in Beijing.

On this installment of Latitudes, Angel Archer indulged us with extended rituals from a dimly lit corner of kosmische psychedelia and ambient soundscape. Henry Birdsey visits from the East Coast to perform microtonal drone hymns for lap steel guitar.

Composer Charles Amirkhanian began incorporating ambient sounds in his music in the 1970s and long has championed others who share his interest. On the 75th anniversary of his birthday (January 19, 1945, 4:37pm, Fresno, California) his music was featured on the 13th installment of our series “The Nature of Music,” in a special benefit concert that doubles as a record release party for his new 2-CD set Loudspeakers on the New World Records label.

Armed with a battery of consumer-grade electronics and an unwholesome passion for sci-fi and AM radio, audio plunderer Joseph Hammer assembles found sound detritus into a palace of labyrinthine referents. Kaori Suzuki rewards endurance with transcendence in a set featuring modified melodica and oscillators.

For Latitudes 13, the duo of Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski combine violin and e-bowed guitar in a thick tranquilizing compound. Like a viscous syrup, the slow-moving drones ooze chromatically across their instruments. John Krausbauer and Kaori Suzuki’s existential and ecstatic free drone music emanates an intense ritualistic vibe—the kind of music that would make a suitably ominous soundtrack to one of Hermann Nitsch’s notorious aktions.

On this installment of Latitudes, Other Minds teamed up with the San Francisco Art Book Fair to present vocalist/composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, sound artist Chris Duncan, and the electronics and percussion duo IMA at Center for New Music.

Utopic folk dreamer Andrew Weathers visits the Bay Area from his hideaway in rural West Texas with a set of guitar-driven ambient folk works that drift seamlessly between rigor and flexibility to deliver a message that’s at turns weary and optimistic. AMMA ATERIA presents a dense sonic menagerie of distant and closely mic’d subjects forming an unsteady equilibrium hovering above a bed of luxuriant drones.

Single-minded and visionary composers are so often the ones most easily ignored by the changing currents of music taste. Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979) led a life characterized by exile and cultural exclusion; he was never part of any school, and the individuality of his work reflects his personal and lifelong determination to honor his deeply idiosyncratic muse. He was a founding father of microtonal composition but never compromised his artistic principles to gain the public ear. A mystical belief in the value of his work sustained him through these decades of neglect, affording his music surety and conviction. Other Minds Festival 24 will include the first ever American retrospective of the works of Ivan Wyschnegradsky and a newly commissioned work, "The Pressure"– a tale of gothic horror, for narrator and ensemble by the California based composer Brain Baumbusch.

What if Captain Beefheart had cut his teeth listening to The Fall instead of Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley? The result might have sounded like Receptacles—a joyfully shambolic deconstructionist collision of rhythms and riffs. Kyle Bruckmann’s DEGRADIENT gleefully collides elements of skronk, fried analog noise and dark prog, adding significant heaviness to his signature polyrhythmic clatter, formal complexity, and black humor.

Guitarist, polymuse, and serial collaborator Alan Licht joins Latitudes to perform his solo electric guitar meanderings while Bay Area local Danny Paul Grody opens with a set of gauzy 12 string guitar works.

The New Haven, CT duo Tongue Depressor perform trance-inducing fiddle music that seethes with beating overtones and a high lonesome sound. The unlikely pairing of lap steel dobro and koto makes up the L.A.-based duo of Caspar Sonnet and Kozue Matsumoto. Together they scrape, bow and pluck their way through an investigation of the versatile sound palette and extended possibilities of their instruments.

Other Minds’ Latitudes series continued with The Master and Enigma: Paul Metzger, a bonafide American folk outsider, performs his entrancing hymnprovisations for modified 23 string banjo. Minneapolis’ mercurial mystery man John Saint Pelvyn makes an ultra-rare Bay Area appearance performing on solo electric guitar—barely harnessed feedback, f-hole howling, mid-jam retunings and whammy bar abuse all-included.

Composer Matthew Burtner makes music with glaciers, a business fraught with the hazards of calving, melting and, on occasion, over-modulating. His recent impressive CD release, Glacier Music, was the subject of his interview concert with OM Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian.

Single-minded and visionary composers are so often the ones most easily ignored by the changing currents of music taste. Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979) led a life characterized by exile and cultural exclusion; the individuality of his work reflects his personal and lifelong determination to honor his deeply idiosyncratic muse. He was a founding father of microtonal composition and theory. He never compromised his artistic principles to gain the public ear. A mystical belief in the value of his work sustained him through these decades of neglect, affording his music surety and conviction.

Gabriel Mindel Saloman, known widely for his work in seminal noise band Yellow Swans, joins Latitudes to present his ongoing investigations into music of the liberated body. Composer and instrument-builder Ashley Bellouin is joined by guitarist Ben Bracken to conjure a sound equal parts spiritual, mental, and physical—minimal by design, maximal in spirit.

William Fowler Collins gives voice to a spectacular chroma of dread with a performance of works from his most recent full-length record Field Music—a seething, pulsing soundtrack in honor of the landscape in which the world’s first atomic bomb was assembled. “Geneva Skeen evokes Californian vistas and the corruption festering behind them with the same uneasiness as Lana Del Rey’s West Coast or Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Her genuinely evocative music fully communicates its ideas and intentions even without accompanying data.” — Wire Magazine

Duo pianists Maki Namakawa and Dennis Russell Davies present an evening of works for two pianos: Shostakovich's arrangement of his Symphony No. 4 and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.

  Arrington de Dionyso conjures utopic zones through ritual trance and the high spirits of electrified rock and roll. The iconoclastic duo DunkelpeK transmits an amalgamated soundworld through percussion and […]

Andy Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player based in San Francisco, CA. They studied music composition at University of Iowa, and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Their music combines processed field recordings and instrumental improvisation while exploiting architectural and psycho-acoustic phenomena to distort and obscure sonic identities. Along with their solo work, they often perform and record with Billy Gomberg as FrauFraulein, and with Gomberg and Richard Kamerman as Delicate Sen.

Pedal steel guitar player Chuck Johnson’s western-tinged ambient works drawl out slow and stately, like disappearing shadows on the desert floor while the sun rises overhead. Again, the light changes with trumpet player and vocalist Leila Abdul-Rauf whose blurred melancholic songs obscure the day’s memories in a mesmeric haze.

Grammy Award winning pianist Gloria Cheng teams up with the father of minimalism, Terry Riley, for a recital of Riley’s music. Gloria Cheng has a decades long relationship with Terry Riley’s music.

Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros.

Linda Bouchard’s works are defined by the importance of color and textures, and the structures of her compositions are intimately linked to the orchestral choices she makes for each composition, be it a solo piece or a composition for full orchestra.

From Tokyo, Japan, guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama brings his motorik “infinite boogie” and graveside blues minimalism to the Center for New Music. Ecstatic music aesthete John Krausbauer opens with a trance-inducing […]

Joshua Churchill and John Davis operate spontaneously to create densely layered organic and atmospheric works, combining Churchill’s dynamic soundscapes with Davis’s handmade, and often hand processed, 16mm and Super 8 films. For Other Minds, Joshua Churchill and John Davis presented a collaborative performance that engaged viewers in meditative and abstract environments, using imagery and sounds rooted in the environment and its natural rhythms.

The records of Other Minds are now processed and available for research in the UCSC Special Collections & Archives reading room. The completed finding aid is available here: Other Minds: […]

Michael Pisaro is a composer, guitarist, and a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. Hi is also a member of the composition faculty at CalArts in Valencia, CA. He has written over 80 works for a wide variety of instrumental combinations, including several pieces for variable instrumentation. Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Curitiba (Brazil), Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, and Cologne.

The new exhibit, Inquiring into Other Minds: The Cultivation of Experimental Music in the Bay Area and Beyond, opened at UC Santa Cruz on the McHenry Third Floor Gallery on Thursday, May 10th.

Other Minds Festival 23 (performances April 9-14, 2018), was devoted to text-sound compositional work utilizing “speech” as a musical medium–text, isolated phonemes, and other vocal utterances as sound material and structural elements. Much of this repertoire also involved aspects of electronic manipulation in live performance.

Internationally-renowned sound artist Bill Fontana uses sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of natural and architectural spaces. He often uses a rich orchestration of […]

When conductor/pianist Dennis Russell Davies directed our Lou Harrison concert in February he said, “And now I’d like to do a benefit for Other Minds.” He and his partner Maki Namekawa flew back from […]

We were thrilled to have one of the world’s leading figures in this genre, New Zealand-born New Yorker Annea Lockwood, with us to present and discuss her music of the world’s […]

The OM website, www.otherminds.org, receives a complete reboot and facelift for improved access and navigation.

Marielle V Jakobsons is a composer and intermedia artist based in Oakland, CA. Her compositions evoke minimalism with melodic drone and enveloping polyrhythmic soundscapes of synthesizers, strings, and voice. She builds installations and instruments which bring focus to visceral experience of sound and light, most recently with her “Macro-Cymatic Visual Music Instrument.”

Andrew Roth, one of America’s most creative and versatile sound designers presented a program and retrospective of his work, in particular his most recent cd, Natural Sounds of Japan. His creative mediums span the gamut from audio cds to creating sound environments for amusement parks, radio, television, film, and video games.

FEBRUARY 18, 19, & MAY 20, 2017. Lou Silver Harrison (1917-2003) was a pioneering environmentalist, early advocate of gay rights, but most of all, one of America’s most original and maverick composers. He has been an inspiration to a generation of younger composers and world musicians, and his works have been celebrated worldwide in honor of his one hundredth birthday. Works by Korean composer Isang Yun (1917-1995) were also featured on the occasion of his centennial.

Alvin Curran has been a leader in many areas of experimental music since the Sixties. In keeping with the theme THE NATURE OF MUSIC, the composer screened some of his private videos of the major environmental performance works he’s created. As a pioneer in this genre (also practiced by John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, Charlie Morrow, Pauline Oliveros, and later John Luther Adams, among many others), Curran’s work is distinguished by a heightened sensitivity to overall formal construction but without reference to mathematics or music theory.

Raven Chacon (born Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, USA) is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, an installation artist, and is recognized as one of the few Native Americans working in these multiple genres. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the American Southwest.

Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments. Leonard is fascinated by the subtle intricacies of sounds.

OM 21’s large roster of composers came from an eclectic range of musical backgrounds and styles, in works ranging from Gavin Bryars' post-Renaissance inspired and labyrinthine harmonies of his Second Book of Madrigals to the eloquent and emotionally direct works of Meredith Monk. The recipient of numerous international awards and honors, she was presented a 2014 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Also on the bill was Michael Gordon, who, in the words of the New Yorker merges “subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power in his music, embodying the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.”

Modern Hits (an anagram for Other Minds), a new series of digital-only recordings of works by under-recognized Bay Area electronic music composers is released. The series features unreleased recordings as well as reissues of previously released material. The series will shed a new light on the oft-lauded and vibrant electronic music community of the Bay Area.

In the words of Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, “As we look back at the nearly 200 composers we’ve brought to San Francisco for these gatherings, it seemed a good time to tip our hat to some of our most surprising discoveries who have gone on to make signal contributions to international concert life.”

Morton Feldman's "For Bunita Marcus" (1985), a special salon concert. Canadian-born pianist Marc-André Hamelin crosses into the twilight zone of modern piano repertoire in a hypnotic 70-minute work by Morton Feldman. In the composer’s words, "For Bunita Marcus" was untypical of my music, but I’ll tell you exactly how I wrote it, formally speaking. Not the notes; the notes didn’t write the piece. I have a talent for notes, the way some people have a talent for catching fish…I just pull them back out of my ear – no problem at all."

In celebration of the Bay Area’s heritage as a pioneering stronghold of arts and culture, for the first time the OM 19 Festival presented an entirely Northern California cast of composers, including Mark Applebaum, John Bischoff, Joseph Byrd, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Myra Melford, Roscoe Mitchell, Wendy Reid, and John Schott. The disparate experimental worlds of jazz, laptops, DJs, and improvisation were gathered together in one place.

Other Minds Gala Concert to celebrate the opening of OM 17 at one of Uptown Oakland’s premiere restaurants, Duende Restaurant and Bodega. World premieres by Donald Buchla, electronics and Craig Taiborn, piano […]

In the first West Coast performance of A Secret Rose, written for an orchestra of 100 electric guitars, Rhys Chatham performed and conducted this groundbreaking work at the historic Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, CA on Sunday, November 17th.

CD release concert for pianist Sara Cahill’s A Sweeter Music on OM Records at Berkeley Festival Storefront, 2133 University Avenue, Berkeley CA. One of the pieces by The Residents was […]

Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio and the Out of Tune Guitar performed under the composer’s direction. Other Minds and The Lab, San Francisco

Calefax Reed Quintet, home of Jim Newman and Jane Ivory, San Francisco. Amsterdam-based wind ensemble performed the world premiere of Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 44 in a new arrangement, along with works by Michelangelo Rossi, and Frederic Rzewski. Calefax films of Nancarrow's Studies 2, 3c, and 18.

World music offerings took center stage at OM 18 including a remarkable array of woodwinds, from the soprano recorder of the world’s most widely-hailed Baroque recorder player, Michala Petri, and Anna Petrini’s rare Paetzold contrabass recorder, to the ultra-long Indian low-registered flute, the bansuri, by the great Indian classical music master, G.S. Sachdev.

Conlon Nancarrow was not big on celebrating birthdays. Nevertheless, a centennial is an occasion for paying tribute to his life and music, and a good reason to reunite and reminisce. The ingenious complexity of Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, giving composers a way to activate several melodies at simultaneously different tempi, has been one of the most pivotal achievements in music’s last century.

John Cage & Friends Film Festival, Roxie Theatre, San Francisco. Day-long centennial celebration of John Cage with rare films and video, curated by Peter Esmonde.

In Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, a distinctive musical style has developed–a rich vein of experimentalism that has a personality and musical vocabulary all its own. Scandinavia was well represented at Other Minds Festival 17 by the composers Øyvind Torvund, Norway; Simon Steen-Andersen, Denmark; and Lotta Wennäkoski, Finland. OM 17 opened with the American debut of the featured Norwegian sextet, palindromically named asamisimasa. Newly invented instruments, aerosol cans and bullhorns, alongside conventional orchestral instruments, mirror the diversity of musical influences and quotations.

Composers Fellowship Concert, The Lab, San Francisco. Works by John Cage, along with competition winners E. Edward Davis, Peter Swendsen, John P. Hastings, and Jen Wang, with the Rootstock Percussion Ensemble.

Other Minds New Music Tour of Iceland, October 1-10, 2011. Attending the opening of the futuristic new concert complex Harpa and the Nordic Music Days Festival in Reykjavik. Charles Amirkhanian and Carol Law led a group of 15 through the natural wonders of rugged Iceland, concluding with the lighting by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, with a last-second emergence of the Northern Lights in the background.

Inevitably, the question is asked, “What is Fluxus?” According to Webster’s dictionary, a state of flux is "a state of constant and continuous change." Simply stated, a Fluxus performance is one in which attention is paid to something simultaneously both ordinary and extraordinary.

House Concert at the home of Margot Golding, San Francisco. Music for piano four-hands, including a revival of Harold Shapero’s Sonata (1941), composed for Leonard Bernstein and Shapero to perform. Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano.

When classical composer Alan Hovhaness died in 2000, he left a legacy that reflected both his prodigious composing abilities as well as his trailblazing interest in music from around the world. Having written over 400 works that included operas, symphonies, concertos, oratorios, chamber works, and orchestral pieces, Hovhaness incorporated Indian, Korean, Japanese, and Armenian influences into his repertoire, forming a canon that is best described as world classical music.

Other Minds Festival 16 cast its nets very broadly and brought together an eclectic group of composers from all over the world: Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. Not only geographically diverse, but style-wise and age-wise; they couldn't have been more widely varied. From Balinese electric guitar, to work developed from Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo Indian musics, to classical string quartet, OM 16 was rich with variety.

Composers Fellowship Concert, Meridian Gallery, San Francisco. Winners of OM's Young Composers Competition. Nicholas Chase, Lisa Coons, Ben Hjertmann, and Zibuokle Martinaityte had their work performed one day prior to OM 16 and spent a day at the Djerassi Program with the featured guest composers.

Trimpin is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle, Washington. Trimpin’s work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, […]

Music by Dane Rudhyar performed by the Ives String Quartet; Sarah Cahill, piano; and David Abel and Julie Steinberg, violin and piano. Panel with Leyla Rudhyar and biographer Deniz Ertan. Exhibits of painting, manuscripts, and correspondence. Rudhyar: "My purpose in composing is to attempt to induce in both performers and listeners the capacity to live more intensely and feel more deeply."

The American premiere of Edgard Varèse: The One Alone, a film by Dutch producer Frank Scheffer, presented by Other Minds. Including interviews with Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Elliott Carter. Kabuki Sundance Theatre, San Francisco; selected for the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

In 2010, to celebrate its crystal anniversary, the Other Minds Festival invited composer/performers from across the musical spectrum, the fifteenth year of the annual series. In retrospect, one might think OM has all along been employing a crystal ball to find our composer participants because so many have gone from scant name recognition to increasing prominence in the music scene. OM 15 presented a number of  genre defying performers. From the world of new jazz, Edward “Kidd” Jordan, to the acclaimed Chinese-American composer Chou Wen Chung, "triple threat" violinist/vocalist/composer Carla Kihlstedt, Lisa Bielawa, winner of the 2010 Rome Prize, to the radically spare post-minimalism of Tom Johnson, and the American premiere of Dutch filmmaker's  documentary on Edgard Varèse, OM 15 had it all (and then some).

Henry Cowell: the Whole World of Music, Presidio Chapel, San Francisco. Panel with John Duffy, Anahid Ajemian, George Avakian, moderated by Charles Amirkhanian. Sandra Soderland, organ; Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, et al. […]

The Lester Bowie Tribute Concert at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, presented by Other Minds. This benefit event for Jazz in Flight was in honor of the late jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie, with performances by Roscoe Mitchell and Famoudou Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, James Carter Quartet, and Fred Ho in a rare solo appearance.

Revenge of the Dead Indians (In Memoriam John Cage), film by Henning Lohner. Kabuki Sundance Cinema, San Francisco, presented by Other Minds. This was a full-length documentary honoring the life and work of American composer and artist John Cage. Cage is considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. This documentary features interviews with various personalities from different fields as they introduce us to the life and work of this great American artist.

For the 14th festival, Other Minds brought together a veritable United Nations of composers—Cambodia, Denmark, Canada, Poland, Brazil/Germany, and the U.S—a most geographically and genre-wise diverse group of artists. In a bit of a departure, we paid tribute to two late monumental composers: the late Argentinian-born Cologne-based Mauricio Kagel, and Estonian Arvo Pärt. In addition to our complement of great instrumentalists and ensembles, this was the first festival in which an octet of cellos and whistling were an integral component.

In contrast to the Other Minds Festival, created for living composers, the New Music Séance events juxtaposed music of the living with the creations of departed composers. The elegant tag line for the events, coined by Molly Mitoma of the OM Staff, said it best: “Summoning the specters of musical forbears, channeling the spirits of their successors.” The historic Swedenborgian Church was the perfect venue to experience the co-mingling of past and present.

Our unusual format, combining four days in residence for nine composers in the isolated scenic beauty of the famed Djerassi Resident Artists Program preceded these public performances and providing a welcome opportunity to commune in depth with colleagues and recharge creative juices. The guest performers ranged from avant-garde jazz composer/improviser/world musician Wadada Leo Smith to the deep-thinking composer/theologian Dieter Schnebel's vocal and silent-visual work, the "extended technique" cello work of Frances-Marie Uitti and Michael Bach, and Morton Subotnick, a pioneer of work with electronic sound.

Early in his career, John Cage turned to Indian thought and philosophy in his search for understanding of his life and the nature of the musical art in which he was engaged.  His adoption in his prepared piano studies of the time divisions of the Indian tala, so different from the 4/4 of Western music based on marching and dancing, led him to create a new world of rhythmic patterns and break the shackles of Western Europe, musically speaking. Other Minds discovered the ideal interpreter of Cage's vision in his raga compositions, Amelia Cuni. Originally from Milan, Cuni studied classical Indian music and dance from renowned masters in North India, following the traditional system based upon oral transmission.

Other Minds favorites Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa in a benefit concert for Other Minds at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. Duo piano works of Philip Glass, Balduin Sulker, Adam Fong, Chen Yi, and arrangements of J.S. Bach by György Kurtág.

Guitarist David Tanenbaum in a premiere of a new work for guitar and electronics by Ronald Bruce Smith, works of Lou Harrison, and transcriptions of lute works by Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687– 1750).

On the 90th anniversary of the birth of composer Lou Harrison, Other Minds launches a completely updated and redesigned RadiOM website, enabling listeners in 165 countries and territories to access thousands of hours of recordings of digitized programs from the KPFA Music Department archives, given to Other Minds in 1999. The files are hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

The New Music Séance series (2005, 2007, 2008) each featured five hours of otherworldly music in San Francisco’s historic Swedenborgian Church, a fitting venue. Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a scientist who became a mystic philosopher after having strange visions and dreams when he was almost sixty. Emerson, Blake, and Coleridge were among his devotees, along with composer Arnold Schoenberg, who derived aspects of his twelve-tone system from Swedenborg’s teachings.

Together, the experience of such renowned composers as Per Nørgård and Peter Sculthorpe represents over 100 years of composing. When we include the time contributed by the other guest composers, performers, and our most dedicated concert-going audience members, literally thousands of years of new music mindfulness animated this community for this special weekend in San Francisco. In addition to “established” new music composers/performers, a slightly younger generation–Maya Rakjke (Norway), Ronald Bruce Smith (Canada), Joëlle Léandre (France), Markus Stockhausen (Germany), Tara Bouman (Netherlands), and Daniel David Feinsmith (U.S.)–were presented.

Full of energy and passion, the spirited Del Sol String Quartet reunite with Daniel Bernard Roumain (whose String Quartet No. 4 they premiered at Other Minds 11 in March 2005) for an evening of cutting edge music-making. Daniel Bernard Roumain is a pioneer in new forms, as he marries the instrumentation of string quartet with electric violin, laptop, and Hip Hop turntablist. This first-ever presentation of all four of his works for the quartet medium celebrates iconic figures of American Civil Rights who are the dedicatees of each piece: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Maya Angelou.

Webster’s Dictionary defines séance as “a meeting of people to receive spiritualistic messages,” and the Other Minds New Music Séance was envisioned to do just that, in the intimate candlelit surroundings of Bernard Maybeck’s 1895 Arts and Crafts-style Swedenborgian Church. The New Music Séances featured hypnotic, spiritual, and rarely-heard musical gems spanning the past 100 years, as noted pianist Sarah Cahill and the violin-piano duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann channeled new music's progenitors alongside composers working today.

April 26–December 28, 2005, Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco. Monthly concerts (9) of selected artists in a club setting, including Vytautus Germanivicius, Tolga, Belvan Blectum, The Blobettes, Crank, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Matt Ingalls, Bonnie Barnett, Brain Sacawa, Dorsey Dunn, and Christopher Willis. Bernard Francis Kyle, curator.

 This CD represents the first-ever complete compilation of George Antheil’s string quartet works, each of which was composed during a different stylistic era in Antheil’s development. The result is a tour through a variety of familiar 20th Century styles now inhabited by the ghosts of five “new” very provocative pieces that comprise a missing link in the repertoire of American 20th Century music.

The annual OM festival is known for featuring unconventional programs that are cross-cultural, multigenerational, and reflect the most creative voices in contemporary music. In addition to four World premieres and other important new works, the 2005 festival offered a centennial tribute to the gifted but nearly forgotten American composer, Marc Blitzstein, best known for his legendary 1937 WPA musical "The Cradle Will Rock." His other major theater works include the opera, "Regina," based upon Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Seán O’Casey’s "Juno and the Paycock."

The radio program, heard weekly, is launched by producer Richard Friedman on KALW-FM Radio, mostly featuring commercial releases of non-commercial new music. Most are available to stream at https://otherminds.org/mfom

The California Symphony and Gamelan Sekar Jaya perform a studio recording of “Bali Symphony,” jointly composed by José Evangelista and I Nyoman Windha, commissioned by Other Minds with funds from […]

A co-presentation of Other Minds and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Festival 10 featured the world premiere of works commissioned by Other Minds from composers Jon Raskin and Joan Jeanrenaud, an afternoon of film with a screening of "My Cinema for the Ears," featuring master of “acousmatics” Francis Dhomont, the new documentary "Khachaturian," a centennial film tribute to Aram Khachaturian, named Best Documentary at the Hollywood Film Festival (2003), and a special performance for Other Minds 10 by composer Stan Shaff at his Audium, “A Theatre of Sound-Sculptured Space.”

Film about acclaimed avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian, definitive interpreter of works of John Cage, Luciano Berio, and others. Presented by Other Minds at the Armenian Film Festival

Launch Party for RadiOM.org at the headquarters of Internet Archive, Presidio, San Francisco

At Other Minds Festival 9 we honored the life and work of Ned Rorem, a composer who dared to go against the current and compose in favor of a style that valued beauty and emotionality. Also appearing was virtuoso solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie, composers Stephan Micus and Jack Body, who’s interest in the music of non-Western cultures results in a powerful cultural musical synthesis, and Chinese born composer Ge Gan-ru, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution. Oakland’s virtuoso singer-composer Amy X Neuburg performed her powerhouse work Six Little Stains, bassist William Parker led his work Spirit Catcher,, Daniel Lentz gave the San Francisco premiere of his Café Desire, and Stephen Scott rounded out the backend of the festival with his Bowed Piano Ensemble.

Eyes & Ears: The Other Minds Film Festival, Castro Theatre, San Francisco. Films by and about Frank Zappa, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, Leon Theremin, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Antheil, Percy Grainger, and others.

The Bay Area’s many hybrid styles reflect the diversity of global cultural innovation. OM 8 saluted Lou Harrison’s 85th birthday with premieres of works for National steel guitar solo and two major new keyboard works. Other ground-breaking figures honored were “Deep Listening” icon Pauline Oliveros and virtuoso jazz pianist-composer Randy Weston. Featured instruments included the Ondes Martenot, the early French electronic instrument, Linda Burman-Hall performing Lou Harrison’s works for tack piano (with thumbtacks inserted into the hammers) and harpsichord, and Seattle composer, and Ellen Fullman’s 90 foot “Long String Instrument.” Others on this international roster included Tania León, Annea Lockwood, Takashi Harada, Ricardo Tacuchian, and Richard Teitelbaum.

Henry Brant, America’s pioneer explorer and practitioner of 20th Century spatial music, was born in Montreal in 1913 of American parents and began to compose at the age of eight. In 1929 he moved to New York where for the next 20 years he composed and conducted for radio, films, ballet and jazz groups, at the same time composing experimentally for the concert hall.

Other Minds brings the latest ideas and trends in new music to the Bay Area. Festival 7 was a rare opportunity to hear works by great musical innovators from around the world and the Bay Area. The 2001 festival program spanned nearly a century of musical invention, highlighting some early roots of new music and presenting four World premieres. In addition to eight featured participant composers, the festival also presented musical works by controversial poet Ezra Pound, based upon the rhythmic patterns and cadences of poetry; a work by the “Bad Boy of Music,” George Antheil, and a memorial birthday tribute to composer Alan Hovhaness, who passed away early in 2001 in Seattle.

American Mavericks Festival, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco. George Antheil concert by the San Francisco Symphony in association with Other Minds. Slide lecture by Charles Amirkhanian and world premiere of Ballet Mécanique in its original version for 16 player pianos, sirens, airplane propellers, doorbells, and percussion. Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor.

Sirens, Doorbells, Propellers: Antheil and the Birth of American Musical Modernism. San Francisco Public Library. Panel with Paul Lehrman, Benjamin Lees, David Raksin, moderated by Charles Amirkhanian.

Other Minds Festival 6 (2000), Project Artaud, San Francisco. Guest composers: Hamza el Din, Peter Garland, Annie Gosfield, Leroy Jenkins, David Lang, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Hyo-Shin Na, Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, Aki Takahashi, Jacob ter Veldhuis/ Jake TV, Christian Wolff. Carl Stone, Guest Artistic Director.

Other Minds Festival 5 (1999), Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco. Guest composers: Linda Bouchard, Mary Ellen Childs, Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, António Pinho Vargas, Julian Priester, Sam Rivers, Margaret Leng Tan, Errollyn Wallen

Stephen Scott directing the Estonian/American Bowed Piano Ensemble (Colorado College and Talinn, Estonia). Works of Stephen Scott and Timo Steiner. Co-presented with KPFA & Theater Artaud, San Francisco.

The first OM Records release is "The Virtuoso Pianist," featuring Rex Lawson performing player piano rolls, including the world premiere recording of Stravinsky's rolls of "Les Noces." In cooperation with the Pianola Institute, London.

26 composers in collaboration with Common Sense Composers Collective. Works by Harold Budd, Henry Brant, Belinda Reynolds, Ingram Marshall, et al. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

The Bang On A Can All-Stars perform Brian Eno's "Music for Airports," and works of Dan Plonsey, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, David Lang, and Pamela Z. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, presented by Other Minds.

Other Minds Festival 4 (1997), Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco. Guest composers: Henry Brant, Paul Dresher, Momoru Fujieda, Hafez Modirzadeh, Laetitia Sonami, Carl Stone, Donald Swearingen, Visual Brains (Sei Kazama and Hatsune Ohtsu), Pamela Z

Other Minds Festival 3 (1996), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. Guest composers: Laurie Anderson, Kui Dong, Henry Kaiser, George Lewis, Lukas Ligeti, Miya Masaoka, Ionel Petroi, David Raksin, Frederic Rzewski, Charles Shere, Olly Wilson, La Monte Young

Eleanor Alberga and Thomas Bowles, duo pianos in works by Eleanor Alberga, Adam Gorb, and John Metcalfe, with the Sausalito Quartet. Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, San Francisco, presented by Other Minds.

Performances by Henry Kaiser, composer/guitarist; Lukas Ligeti, composer/percussionist; and Miya Masaoka, composer/koto-ist, presented by Other Minds. Japonesque, Pier 9, San Francisco

Other Minds Festival 2 (1995). Guest Composers: Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Byron, Lou Harrison, Mari Kimura, Rex Lawson, Ingram Marshall, Terry Riley, Alvin Singleton, Tan Dun, Calliope Tsoupaki, Frances White, Ashot Zograbyan

Co-founder Jim Newman designs and launches the OTHER MINDS website, one of the earliest new music internet resources. www.otherminds.org

Other Minds presents Pandit Pran Nath and Terry Riley in concert, presenting works by Pandit Pran Nath, Terry Riley, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramaniam; featuring the Kronos Quartet. First Unitarian Church, San Francisco.

Other Minds Festival 1 (1993), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Guest composers: Robert Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Philip Glass, Jon Jang, Barbara Monk Feldman, Meredith Monk, Foday Musa Suso, Conlon Nancarrow, Trimpin, Jai Uttal, Julia Wolfe

Pianist Volker Banfield performs the the American premiere of Études for Piano, Books 1 & 2. Hosted by Charles Amirkhanian, with spoken introduction and talk by the composer. Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (in collaboration with Cal Performances).