Music From Other Minds

Electronics pervade the performance of music in the 21st century. The use of electronic elements are common across many genres of music, and composers today are searching for new and interactive ways to incorporate them into live performance. The composers on this program take a variety of approaches to the use of interactive electronics, from the combination of acoustic instruments and voices and electronic processing to the creation of new electronic instruments using motion sensors and game controllers. Included is music by Mari Kimura, Paul Leary, Kate Soper and Sam Pluta, Thea Farhadian, Pamela Z and Paula Matthusen, Anne Hege, Lei Liang, Bora Yoon, and Caroline Polachek.

Music played by animals, for animals, with animals, and music inspired by plants. Pianist Sarah Cahill plays Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants. Jim Nollman plays guitar along with dolphins and whales. Doug Carroll plays cello to accompany shore birds. The Thai Elephant Orchestra displays an uncanny sense of rhythm while playing percussion and strings. Plus a bird song inspired excerpt from Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, music made from insect sounds by David Dunn, Ivan Tcherepnin’s Flores Musicales for oboe, violin, and psaltery; and a tribute to Serge Tcherepnin for the 50th anniversary of the invention of his “people’s synthesizer.”

Over the past 50 or more years, Per Nørgård has been considered the one of the most prominent and influential Nordic composers since Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius. To date, he has composed over 400 works in nearly all genres, including operas, music for children, chamber music, solo works, and for the theater. Nørgård was a featured composer at Other Minds Festival 12 in 2006. In this program we’ll hear four of his large orchestral works and a bit of one of his ten string quartets.

On this program, Music from Other Minds celebrates Anthony J. Gnazzo‘s 87th birthday with a broadcast of two segments from his Good Food from India (1971) a program where Gnazzo offers recipes for cold-mixers and tondla leaves, bendi, buthi, moong-ambat, muluk, allu-vadi, and other Indian culinary delights.

Also on the program, a live concert of bansuri flute music performed by G.S. Sachdev at KPFA in 1971 and Gnazzo’s Radio Event No. 5: X-Change (1969), an adventurous lampoon of advertising culture of the time.

On this program, we’ll hear music by composers from the Nordic region. Included are Norwegian composers Jan Martin Smørdal, Kristine Tjøgersen, Øyvind Torvund, and Tone Åse; Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen; Sten Sandell and Hanna Hartman from Sweden, and Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir. Host Joseph Bohigian is joined by American violinist and writer Jennifer Gersten, who is living in Norway researching music by several of these composers.

On this edition of Music from Other Minds, Charles Amirkhanian visits some STASIS PLACES—those special zones where composers explore the tension between stillness and movement—displaying them through beautifully original sounds and forms.

Tune in to hear Ingram Marshall‘s Fog Tropes and Gradual Requiem plus the Living Earth Show’s recording of Samuel Adams‘ Lyra.

A profusion of improvisors, mostly from the Bay Area, combining and recombining in overlapping groups. Forget the Venn diagram, just enjoy the magic as Gino Robair, Tania Chen, Henry Kaiser, Tom Djll, Wadada Leo Smith, François Wong, William Winant, Cheryl Leonard, Kyle Bruckmann, Theresa Wong, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Harrison Bankhead, Andrew Raffo Dewar, John Butcher, John Shiurba, Fabrizio Bozzi Fenu, and Bryan Day spin their ephemeral creations. Plus, in celebration of Poetry Month, some spoken word, invented languages, and poetry by Sterling Plumpp, Michael Rothenberg, David Mahler, Beth Anderson, Ron Heglin, Lorin Benedict, and Phil Minton.

Richard Friedman presents a second program with the music of the Austrian/American composer Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). Born in Vienna, by the time he was 28 Krenek was infamous as part of the modernist avant-garde in Weimar Germany. Coming to the US in 1937 and settling in Los Angeles and eventually Palm Springs, Krenek composed over 240 works, including 5 symphonies, 8 string quartets, and 22 operas. In this program we’ll hear one of his most radical yet rarely performed works, Horizon Circled, from 1967, which demonstrates his unique mastery of serialism and complex structures and procedures. The second hour features his nearly hour-long Second Symphony, composed when he was 23 and a masterpiece of exuberance and originality.

On this Music from Other Minds, field recordings from around the world. Tune in to hear sound documents originally captured for KPFA’s World Ear Project (1970-1987) by Charles Amirkhanian, Pauline Oliveros, Martin Koenig, and Randy Magnus. Also on the program, two recordings by Formant (Henry Birdsey and Austin Larkin) that utilize multiple high powered microphones placed in large PVC tubes pointed at sound sources, leading to abstracted phonographic impressions of the locations in which they were taken.

This program features music written for non-traditional instruments invented by the composer or performer. These invented instruments range from adaptations of familiar instruments to large contraptions that take up an entire room. The program includes Daphne of the Dunes by Harry Partch written for an array of his invented instruments, 342 by Paul Dresher for Quadrachord, Hurdy Grande, and Marimba Lumina, an interview with sound-sculptor and composer Trimpin, and Elemental View by Ellen Fullman, inventor of the Long String Instrument.