Music From Other Minds

This program features music coming from pop musicians that is to some degree experimental, and music from experimental musicians that contains elements of pop. We’ll play tracks by Scott Walker, Laurie Anderson, Lucrecia Dalt, David Sylvian, Colin Stetson, György Ligeti, Negativland, Cathy Berberian, and Bing Crosby.

On the this Music from Other Minds, Randall Wong celebrates composer Daniel Lentz‘s 80th birthday with musical selections and plays Rosśa Crean‘s one-act opera The Priestess of Morphine: A Forensic Study of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of the Nazis.

This program explores work by composers Morton Feldman and Tyshawn Sorey. Morton Feldman is one of the 20th Century’s most influential composers, a pioneer of indeterminate music and notational innovations. Tyshawn Sorey is a virtuosic drummer and a composer whose prolific work ranges from classical to jazz to experimental. This quiet, slowly evolving music, has a few sonic surprises.

On this broadcast of Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb introduces works of concert music, sound poetry, tape music, and radio art by Anthony Gnazzo in honor of his 85th birthday. Featured on the program are his compositions Not So (1971), Did I wake you? (1981), An Orchestra is Born (1972), The Art of Canning Music (1978), early works of concert music, and more.

On this Music from Other Minds, Randall Wong introduced stunning new works from Okinawa and mainland Japan by Aragaki Mutsumi, Michiyo Yagi, Ken Sugai, Cockroach Eater, and more.

This week we look at the intersection between pop and experimental music. We’ll play Joseph Byrd, a composer and academic who studied under John Cage and Morton Feldman, formed a rock band in the late ’60s called The United States of America. We’ll play some classic 1960s weirdness by Frank Zappa. And we’ll also hear from John Zorn, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and Patti Smith.

On this Music From Other Minds:
Re-compositions, re-orchestrations, realizations, and deconstructions;
Re-imaginings by Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Zender, Marius Constant, and others

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb presents a conversation with the Swedish composer and organist Ellen Arkbro recorded at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2019) and a remote interview with Baltimore based electronic musician and bassist Max Eilbacher (of Horse Lords fame).

This week, we’ll start with Anthony Braxton – compositions, improvisations, and works that combine the two. We’ll listen to some of the first chapter in Matana Roberts‘ Coin Coin series, a mix of abstract compositional techniques with emotional storytelling. We’ll hear from the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, an album that uses Beethoven‘s String Quartet No. 15 as a frame of reference for commissioned works by new composers. And we’ll end our evening with one last work by Reena Esmail for solo violin.