Growing New Music With Other Minds (SF Classical Voice)

Encounter anyone involved with the experimental contemporary and new-music organization Other Minds and you will begin to suspect that some human brains have three — not just two — hemispheres. How else to explain artists like multilingual vocalist, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and dancer Jen Shyu, who speaks 10 languages and says in an interview her current goal is to learn a new language every year.

Or consider Minneapolis-based composer Mary Ellen Childs, whose blend of music, dance, and theater most uniquely arrives in kinetic, body-percussion-produced works set in motion — on office chairs with wheels, human legs, or other locomotion. The compelling, dynamic works for 30 years have earned for Childs worldwide commissions, fellowships, awards, and acclaim.

A third example? New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood, whose scores layer electronic and acoustic sound with source material from the natural world that might include recorded earthquake tremors, river sounds captured with hydrophonic microphones, bat calls, tigers mating, people breathing, geese braying like donkeys, and more.

And then there is founder, executive and artistic director, and composer Charles Amirkhanian who, with Jim Newman in 1993, launched the multichannel organization to support — according to the Other Minds website — “the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices in contemporary music, with an emphasis on composers of the American Experimental Tradition.” —Lou Fancher

Click here to read complete article in San Francisco Classical Voice.