Music From Other Minds

This program features two extended works composed by Anthony Braxton, who celebrated his 80th birthday on June 4, 2025.

One of many solar centers for the universe of Other Minds, Braxton’s compositional output extends from his pursuit of “trans-idiomatic creativity,” Braxton’s term for the way his work—and the work of his best collaborators—cross genre and media in pursuit of expression. Most often introduced with reference to his membership in Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the detail that he recorded the first solo saxophone album (1969’s For Alto), these facts bookend only Braxton’s first half-decade of what is now a nearly sixty-year career as a musician and composer. We celebrate Braxton’s 80th with two works recorded in the last 20 years: 1) a live recording of a sextet from a 2005 concert in the basement of Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art and 2) Act One of Trillium J, one of Braxton’s cycle of twelve operas.

This program offers a brief survey of Artifact Recordings, an artist-run, non-profit organization supporting experimental and electronic music from the Bay Area for 35 years. Music by Chris Brown, John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Philip Perkins, William Winant, Ron Heglin, Lorin Benedict, Tom Djll, Steve Adams, The HUB, and more.

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb provides a respite from all the chaos with a 1990 conversation between Sound Aritst Bill Fontana and Charles Amirkhanian, where they discuss his work with nature sounds. Also on the program, beautiful new recordings of vocal works by Jürg Frey and Chuck Johnson‘s longform Cyprus Suite for organ, reeds, pedal steel, and voice.

This program features music made by composers associated with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)—a French composition and research organization founded in the late 1950s by Pierre Schaeffer. Composers at GRM explore the compositional strategy of musique concrète, a proto-form of sampling wherein the composer, rather than writing notation for musicians to play, records so-called “concrete” sounds onto tape and then edits these sounds. This program features Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien, n° 1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970), Beatriz Ferreyra’s Un fil invisible (2009), Christian Zanési’s Stop! L’horizon (1983), and both parts of Bernard Parmegiani’s De Natura Sonorum (1975).

This program features a diverse sampling of new music, including Raven Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Voiceless Mass and Biyán performed by Present Music, Alvin Curran’s For Cornelius performed by pianist Eve Egoyan, Yi-Ting Lu’s Half Decorations performed by harpist Ben Melsky, Hannah Kendall’s this is but an oration of loss and Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 36 performed by Ekmeles, and selections from Understories by Julia Úlehla and Dálava. Guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian joins the program to talk about his work with Úlehla on Understories.

This program features Defiant Life, a new release by trumpet master Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer, keyboards and electronics. The music is thoughtful and penetrating, reflecting life’s suffering and resilience. Iyer writes, “This recording session was conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.” Also on the program, Terry Riley’s string quartet, Salome Dances for Peace, an excerpt from Thea Farhadian’s Tattoos and Other Markings, and Somei Satoh’s Birds in Warped Time II.

On this edition of Music from Other Minds, Blaine Todd presents Melville’s Marginalia by Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Roxy Gordon‘s An Open Letter to Illegal Aliens, Terry Allen‘s Dugout, and Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg’s Hydrogen Jukebox. Each piece is a testament to the power of place, the complexities of identity, and the ways in which borders and margins shape our understanding of history and culture.

This program features the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, who died March 13, 2025 at her home in Appen, Germany. Gubaidulina was born October 24, 1931 in Chistopol, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her works, which concern mysticism, spirituality, and religious themes, were disfavoured by the Soviet authorities, and she moved to Appen, Germany in 1992. This program is composed of five pieces by Gubaidulina written between 1965 and 1987: her Sonata for piano, De profundis for accordion, the violin concerto Offertorium, String Quartet No. 2, and Hommage à T. S. Eliot.

This program begins and ends with references to Percy Grainger. Australian composer Cat Hope uses pitch tracking and spectral processing to realize Grainger’s concept of Free Music, an idea inspired by watching waves on a lake. British writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair, whose work is associated with psychogeography, reads his story “Dark Before Dark,” about a mysterious box that appears on the beach, and should never be opened, while accompanied by the London Experimental Ensemble. The show opens with Hazel Scott’s jazzy improvisation on Grainger’s “Country Gardens.”

This program features mid-20th century American piano works and recordings by pianist Geoffrey Burleson in anticipation of Burleson’s From Antheil to Zappa recital in Oakland on Saturday, April 5, 2025. The program opens with an archival Ode to Gravity program from 1970 in which host Charles Amirkhanian plays keyboard works by Norman Dello Joio, Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinsky, and Harold Shapero. In the second half, we’ll hear Geoffrey Burleson’s recordings of solo piano works by Vincent Persichetti and Roy Harris, along with Nathan Williamson’s recording of Leonard Bernstein’s 1938 Piano Sonata.