Other Minds Festival 29 Annoucement

OTHER MINDS FESTIVAL 29
BRAVA THEATER FOR WOMEN IN THE ARTS
Thursday, October 16–Sunday, October 19, 2025
2781 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Panel Discussions @ 7pm / 3pm (Sunday)
Concerts @ 8pm / 4pm (Sunday)
Tickets on Sale Now
at otherminds.org

 

A panoply of composers will assemble for the 29th Other Minds Festival, an international annual showcase for composers whose innovative work ranges widely across styles and practices.

Multi-generational musical connections, multimedia masterpieces, and two takes on the fusion of gamelan and American musical traditions will be on display at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District for the four-day event Thursday October 16, Friday October 17th, Saturday October 18th, and Sunday October 19th, 2025.

This year’s festival features three generations of composers with connections to California. Berkeley-native Samuel Adams (b. 1985) presents a series of chamber music performed by an array of new music talents, including Conor Hanick, Helen Kim, Haruka Fujii, and Friction Quartet. Adams’ set will be topped off by the world premiere of a new work dedicated to his late godfather, the composer Ingram Marshall, commissioned and performed by pianist Sarah Cahill. Marshall (1942–2022) will be represented by a performance of his Dark Waters by oboist Libby Van Cleve. Ingram Marshall studied at CalArts in southern California in the 1970s, where he was a classmate Peter Garland (b. 1952), who brings to San Francisco his magnificent Songs of Exile and Wine, a song cycle with texts by multiple authors written in 2000 while the composer was living in self-imposed exile in Tlacotalpan, Mexico. James Tenney (1934–2006), who taught Marshall and Garland at CalArts, will be represented by his Three Pieces for Drum Quartet with the world premiere of new choreography by Nancy Karp.

Audio: Samuel Adams’ Current on Other Minds Records

This year, two composers will present multimedia works bringing together acoustic instruments, electronics, and video. Pamela Z will present Simultaneous, for voice, electronic processing, chamber ensemble, speech samples, gesture control, and projected video. The piece is partially composed of speech fragments taken from recorded interviews with friends and collaborators and is woven together with Z’s own vocalizations and found sounds. Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen will travel to San Francisco with pianist Ellen Ugelvik and visual artist Evelina Dembacke to perform Piano Piece, a work for piano, electronics, and live camera using recordings of a spruce forest on the south coast of Norway.

Video: Kristine Tjøgersen’s Piano Piece performed by Ellen Ugelvik

Nights 3 and 4 contain two contrasting takes on the fusion of gamelan and American musical traditions. On Night 3, composer and harpist Zeena Parkins is joined by percussionist William Winant to perform Parkins’ work Modesty of the Magic Thing, based on Lou Harrison’s American Gamelan tuning and the drawings of Jay DeFeo. Balinese gamelan composer and performer Putu Septa, leader of the ensemble Nata Swara, will perform an intercultural set of music for gamelan instruments and piano with fellow Balinese musician I Kadek Janurangga and ZOFO, the Bay Area piano duo of Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi.

Video: Putu Septa solo performance

 

CALENDAR EDITORS PLEASE NOTE:

Other Minds Festival 29
Thursday, October 16–Sunday, October 19, 2025
Brava Theater (2781 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110)
Thursday–Saturday Panel Discussions @ 7pm | Concerts @ 8pm
Sunday Panel Discussion @ 3pm | Concert @ 4pm
Tickets on Sale Now
Single night tickets from $23, festival passes from $71

Festival Schedule:

Thursday, October 16, 2025
Panel: Pamela Z, Peter Garland
Pamela Z – Simultaneous (2020), for voice, electronics, and quartet (oboe/English horn, viola, cello, and percussion)
Peter Garland – Songs of Exile and Wine (2000), Maria Tegzes, soprano and Geoffrey Burleson, piano

Friday, October 17, 2025
Panel: Samuel Adams, Libby Van Cleve, Peter Garland
Samuel Adams – Sundial (2021), Friction Quartet and Haruka Fujii, percussion; Violin Diptych (2020), Helen Kim, violin and Conor Hanick, piano; Études (2023), Conor Hanick, piano; new work (2025), Sarah Cahill, piano
Ingram Marshall – Dark Waters (1993), Libby Van Cleve, English horn

Saturday, October 18, 2025
Panel: Zeena Parkins, William Winant, Kristine Tjøgersen, Nancy Karp
James Tenney, music; Nancy Karp, choreography – Three Pieces for Drum Quartet (1975), Other Minds Ensemble
Kristine Tjøgersen – Piano Piece (2019–20), Ellen Ugelvik, piano and Evelina Dembacke, video
Zeena Parkins – Modesty of the Magic Thing (2025), Zeena Parkins, harp and William Winant, percussion

Sunday, October 19, 2025
Panel: Putu Septa, I Kadek Janurangga, Eva-Maria Zimmermann, Keisuke Nakagoshi, Brian Baumbusch
Nata Swara and ZOFO – Putu Septa and I Kadek Janurangga, gamelan and Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano

 

Artist Bios

Samuel Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer. Gramophone Magazine praised Adams as “among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives: between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.” His work resists the traditional tensions of classical music, blending acoustic and digital sounds in inventive, texturally rich compositions. Adams’s music has been hailed as “mesmerizing” by The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” by The Chicago Tribune, and “beguiling” by The Strad magazine. He has been commissioned by a number of major ensembles, including the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, and Dallas Symphony.

Born in 1952, Peter Garland grew up on the East Coast, spent the 1970s mostly in California and Mexico, and lived in New Mexico in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he worked and traveled in 12 countries on 5 continents—the so-called Gone Walkabout years. From 1997–2005, he lived in Mexico, where he did intensive fieldwork and research on regional musical traditions. Since 2005, he has been living on the coast of Maine. In addition to his composing, he has been a prolific essayist and writer, though most of his work remains unpublished, especially his 2-volume Gone Walkabout journals and the 4-volume Mexican fieldwork journals. From 1971 to 1991, he was the editor and publisher of SOUNDINGS Press, and he played a prominent role in the rediscovery and re-evaluation of America’s pioneer modernist composers, such as Nancarrow, Revueltas, Bowles, Harrison, Rudhyar, and Partch, among others. He has recordings on the New Albion, Mode, Tzadik, and Cold Blue labels. All the while he has managed to eke out an occasionally precarious survival outside of academia and the mainstream musical-political support system.

Choreographer Nancy Karp has been making work in San Francisco for four decades. She has created more than 80 dance works for her San Francisco Bay Area company Nancy Karp + Dancers founded in 1980. Karp and the company have toured throughout the U.S. and abroad, including extended artist residencies in Germany, Croatia, Serbia, India, and Japan. She has been awarded commissions by the Für Augen und Ohren and the Sprachen der Künste Festivals in Berlin, the Cabrillo Music Festival, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, among others. As an artist-in-residence at the Kyoto College of Art in Japan, she choreographed Terrace Canon, a site-specific work for 32 performers as part of the Kyoto International Contemporary Music Forum. Site-specific performance work has been an important part of Nancy Karp + Dancers’ programming.

New York-based electroacoustic composer/improviser Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices. Using expanded techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing, she has redefined the instrument’s capacities. Concurrently, Parkins self-designed a series of one-of-a-kind electric instruments. She leans into the harp’s physical limitations pushing its boundaries and impossibilities. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, recombination, historic proximities, geography, tactility, spatial configurations, and movement. Sonic presence and personality is revealed in explorations of subtle frequency shifts, feedback, over and under tones, melodic fragments, timbral and gestural intervals, perception, and residues.

I Putu Adi Septa Suweca Putra (Putu Septa) (b. 1992) is a composer and musician from the village of Padangtegal, Ubud, Bali. His natural talent as a gamelan musician descends from his grandfather, a great gamelan musician, and his ability with the instrument has been recognized since childhood. Septa has worked with Dafra Kura Band (Africa), Filastine (Barcelona), Bloco (Singapore), Akim Funk Buddha (US), Jonas Stampe (Denmark), Rima (US), and others. In 2022, he first collaborated with composer Brian Baumbush. To contribute to new music on Balinese gamelan, Septa initiated a new gamelan ensemble–Nata Swara–which performs with, among others, Gamelan Sada Sancaya, an orchestra of extended range bronze instruments designed by Septa, and Kendang Briuk, an instrument set consisting of a varied collection of Balinese kendang drums.

Kristine Tjøgersen’s (b. 1982, Oslo, Norway) compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor, and precision, and through her work she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other. Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas, incorporating organic forms into the music. She holds a MA in composition from Anton Bruckner Universität in Linz, Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt, and a MA in clarinet from the Norwegian Academy of Music where she studied with Hans Christian Bræin.

Grammy-nominated percussionist William Winant has collaborated with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including Joëlle Léandre, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Frank Zappa, Keith Jarrett, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, James Tenney, Terry Riley, John Zorn, Cecil Taylor, Gerry Hemingway, Mark Dresser, Barry Guy, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Steve Reich and Musicians, Frederic Rzewski, Ursula Oppens, Joan LaBarbara, Annea Lockwood, Danny Elfman/Oingo Boingo, and the Kronos Quartet. In 2016, Winant was awarded a large, unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in recognition for his groundbreaking work as a contemporary percussionist. In 2014, he received a Grammy nomination for his recording of John Cage’s historic solo work 27′ 10.554″ for percussionist on MicroFest Records.

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses Max/MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performances, she has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.

Since joining forces as a professional duo in 2009, internationally acclaimed solo pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi—ZOFO—have electrified audiences from Carnegie Hall to Tokyo, Japan with their dazzling artistry and outside-the-box thematic programming for piano-four-hands. This GRAMMY-nominated, prize-winning Steinway Artist Ensemble—one of only a handful of duos worldwide devoted exclusively to piano duets—is blazing a bold new path for four-hands groups by focusing on 20th and 21st century repertoire and by commissioning new works from noted composers each year.