The Nature of Music 14

The Nature of Music: Jim Nollman

Jim Nollman has spent a lifetime performing live with super-human improvisers—musicians that never stepped foot inside of Juilliard.

Other Minds is excited to announce the 14th edition of the Nature of Music concert series which will take place Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 5pm PST as a livestream on the Other Minds website, Facebook, Twitch, and Youtube. The event will feature Other Minds Executive Director Charles Amirkhanian in conversation with our featured composer Jim Nollman, who has dedicated his life to the art and science of “interspecies” communication and music.

The virtual interview will feature selected recordings of live performances with Orcas, White-Sided Dolphins, and Turkeys as well as never-before-heard electroacoustic and contra dance music by Nollman. Amirkhanian and Nollman will also discuss the composer’s role in the U.S. Navy’s efforts to combat whale deaths through sonar, his work as an activist against Dolphin drive fisheries in Japan, and the intersection of technology and intuition involved in collaborating musically with animals.

Help us celebrate this milestone by tuning in! We will have a short Q&A at the end of the event, if you’d like to ask a question, you can do so during the virtual concert via the comments section on facebook, youtube, or twitch (although you must be logged into the website you’re commenting from, so if you’d like to watch on a platform you’ve never used before, make an account now to save yourself the time!).

The event will be free of charge and archived on this webpage.

Jim Nollman (born January 1947 in Boston) is a composer of music for theater, a conceptual artist, and an environmental activist. He graduated from Tufts University in 1969. In 1973, he composed a Thanksgiving Day radio piece and recorded himself singing children’s songs with three hundred turkeys. 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. Nollman directed one of Greenpeace’s first overseas projects, at Iki Island, Japan, where fishermen were slaughtering dolphins to compensate for human overfishing. In 1978, Nollman founded Interspecies, which sponsors artists’ efforts to communicate with animals through music and art. Its best-known project is a twenty-five-year study using live music to interact with wild orcas off the west coast of Canada.

This concert was made possible through the generosity of Barbara Bessey and the Earthways Foundation. It took place on December 3, 2020 as a livestreamed virtual event.

The Nature of Music: Jim Nollman

The Nature of Music: Jim Nollman

Concert Video

Concert Video

An Interview with Jim Nollman

An Interview with Jim Nollman