Charles Amirkhanian to become Director Emeritus
CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN
TO BECOME DIRECTOR EMERITUS
EFFECTIVE JANUARY 1, 2027, AMIRKHANIAN CONTINUES HIS WORK AT OTHER MINDS IN AN ADVISORY POSITION
BOARD OF DIRECTORS TO LAUNCH SEARCH
FOR NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
SAN FRANCISCO—July 8, 2026—Other Minds announces today that Charles Amirkhanian, co-founder and current Executive & Artistic Director of Other Minds, will be transitioning to the role of Director Emeritus on January 1, 2027. For 34 years—30 Festivals and countless one-off events—Amirkhanian, like his forebears and mentors Lou Harrison and John Cage, has embodied the spirit of the American Maverick Composer through indefatigable work in service of music, musicians, and, perhaps most importantly, their audiences.
Transitioning at the end of what—with twelve events—will be Other Minds’s busiest season in its 34 years of existence, Amirkhanian has grown the organization to include a record label, a weekly radio program, and an online archive with over 10,000 hours of free music and interviews. All of the public concerts, lectures, and conversations that Other Minds presents also are available after-the-fact as streaming videos. The Board of Directors supports Amirkhanian’s transition and continued involvement in the organization as Director Emeritus, and looks forward to announcing a search for a new Executive Director in the coming weeks. Board President Mitch Yawitz writes, “As a fan of Other Minds since the beginning, and a board member for decades, I am grateful for the tireless dedication of Charles, and the extraordinary organization he has built. I am excited for the future of the organization going forward, and am confident that his influence will be felt for years to come.”
Amirkhanian has been presenting music in the Bay Area since 1969, when he was hired as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley, a position he held through 1992. He has guided generations on how to listen to all kinds of music. A few milestones among many: Amirkhanian was the first radio producer to broadcast minimal music, starting in 1969 with Come Out by Steve Reich; he had a hand in introducing and explaining the music of Conlon Nancarrow on the radio before recording Nancarrow’s work in 1977 in Mexico City for 1750 Arch Records; and he produced the first broadcasts of music by Laurie Anderson and her first commercially-released recording on an album featuring women composers—another focus of his attention on the radio and at OM concerts. A stately and relaxed presence in his on-stage and over-the-air introductions and interviews, Amirkhanian has spent decades kindly asserting that perceived notions of musical difficulty (or un-listenability!) are very often cleared away by listening to explanations in person from the voices of the composers themselves.
Composer and critic Kyle Gann writes, “Charles Amirkhanian has had a career paralleling Franz Liszt or Henry Cowell in terms of the vast numbers of composers he’s assisted, publicized, connected with each other, and presented. No other recent figure has proved so catholic in his tastes, so willing to take risks, so aware of every musical experiment going on in the far-flung corners of the earth, so fertile in creating ways to bring innovative musicians together. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of composers owe him, as I do myself, a debt of gratitude, as do the thousands of radio listeners and audience members whose cultural lives he’s enlivened through his tirelessly enthusiastic wheeling and dealing. It’s impossible to imagine anyone else having the energy, connections, and insight to replace him.”
Charles Amirkhanian looks forward to his final Other Minds Festival as Executive & Artistic Director. Featuring Charlemagne Palestine, Sylvie Courvoisier, King Britt, Joseph Bohigian, Khatchadour Khatchadourian, Mahsa Vahdat, Juri Seo, Kristin Norderval, Zachary James Watkins + John Diaz, the 30th Other Minds Festival takes place at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District from October 8–11, 2026.
Charles Amirkhanian, co-founder with Jim Newman in 1992 of Other Minds, is its Executive & Artistic Director. As a composer, he is renowned for his text-sound compositions that employ speech sounds in rhythmic patterns resembling percussion music, with influences from Ernst Toch, Gertrude Stein, Steve Reich, and Clark Coolidge. He also composes electroacoustic essays incorporating acoustic ambient sounds alongside more traditional instrumental music sources to create disjunct, trance-like dreamscapes and hörspiels.
In addition to programming and directing the Other Minds Festival since 1993, Amirkhanian has led the organization in producing many additional concerts devoted to the work of the American experimental tradition (Cage, Cowell, Rudhyar, Nancarrow, Hovhaness, Antheil, and others), establishing a record label, a weekly radio program, and commissioning new work annually from composers around the world.
Amirkhanian also established the ambitious Other Minds Archives of audio recordings as well as scanned photos and rare documents that provides access to new music information for listeners in 165 countries and territories. Beginning with a collection of 4000 reel-to-reel studio and aircheck tapes from the KPFA archives transferred in 1999 to Other Minds, an ongoing project of digitizing unique analog audio files has blossomed into one of the most impressive online reference libraries of experimental classical music. This rich preservation site, with universal free streaming access, may be found at archives.otherminds.org.
Amirkhanian served as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley (1969–1992) andExecutive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (1993–1997). From 1977–1980 he was a full-time instructor in the Interdisciplinary Creative Arts Department at San Francisco State University. In San Francisco, Amirkhanian hosted and programmed the Exploratorium’s highly regarded Speaking of Music series (1983–1991), bringing live audiences together for intimate conversations in person with pathbreaking composers. And from 1988–1991 he co-directed, with John Lifton, the Composer-to-Composer Festival in Telluride, Colorado, which served as a model for the Other Minds Festival.
In addition to his work as a composer, percussionist, and poet, Amirkhanian has produced several pivotal commercial recordings, including the complete works for player piano of Conlon Nancarrow, the first compilation of American text-sound composition, the first compilation of electronic music by American women composers, the only compilation of George Antheil performing his own piano music, and first recordings of unpublished music by Marc Blitzstein.
As a radio producer, Amirkhanian pioneered the broadcasting of minimalist music, sound poetry, radio happenings, and, with Richard Friedman, the World Ear Project, bringing continuous recordings of ambient sounds to the airwaves, beginning in 1970. Many of his hundreds of interviews with composers, performers, poets, and intermedia artists are available for listening free at the Other Minds Archives, the second website of Other Minds, designed to preserve the voices and work of cutting edge artists.
For his work at KPFA, Amirkhanian received the Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center in 1984 and the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 1989. At Other Minds, he received the 2005 Letter of Distinction from the AMC, the 2009 ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and the 2017 Champion of New Music Award from the American Composers Forum. In 1999 he was awarded the first Ella Holbrook Walker Fellowship for a year-long residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in Northern Italy, where he established an electronic music facility for the foundation and composed a ten-movement tape work, Pianola (Pas de mains, 1997–2000) for WDR Cologne. He was featured in a lengthy interview with Mark Alburger in the May 1997 edition of 20th Century Music.The interview covers Amirkhanian’s early musical influences in Fresno, California,
his move to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967, his experiences working at KPFA and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and his co-founding of Other Minds.
Other Minds enjoyed two significant collaborations with the San Francisco Symphony during the tenure of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. In June 2000 Other Minds and Amirkhanian participated in the pathbreaking American Mavericks Festival, helping organize a performance of the original version of George Antheil’s 1925 work Ballet Mécanique for 16 player pianos, 2 concert grands, 3 xylophones, 7 electric bells, 3 propellers, siren, 4 bass drums and one tam-tam. He also delivered an illustrated slide lecture on Antheil’s life, incorporating rare photos from the composer’s own personal collection. In 2001, Other Minds commissioned Henry Brant to write a symphonic piece of “spatial music,” that Maestro Thomas agreed to premiere with the Symphony. Remarkably, it deployed 108 musicians throughout every crevice of the interior architecture of Davies Symphony Hall, creating a kaleidoscopic musical experience, heard differently by each patron depending on location of their seat in the hall. A year later, Mr. Brant was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in music composition for that piece Ice Field.
Amirkhanian resides in El Cerrito, California with his wife, visual artist Carol Law.
