Music From Other Minds

On this week’s episode of Music from Other Minds, Rachel Schonfeld concludes their program series on the composers of the OM 30th Festival with the improvisor/composer Charlemagne Palestine and Iranian vocalist/composer Mahsa Vahdat. The 30th Other Minds Festival is October 8th through the 11th at the Brava Theater in the Mission District of San Francisco. See you then!

To prepare our ears for the visit of Marina Peterson at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at the David Brower Center, Berkeley, CA, this program presents sound art made from unusual, non-musical sources, and sounds that pretend to be something they’re not. Kate Carr records the sound of cabbage being transformed by salt and bacteria. Angus Carlyle records power lines in Norway. Lasse-Marc Riek uses microphones both inside and above trees in Finland. Lee Patterson amplifies the sound of chestnuts burning. As for deceptive sounds, Kate Carr uses electronics to emulate birdsong and a bubbling stream, Paul Winstanley creates faux field recordings with effects processors, and we’ll hear the Xenakis classic “Concret PH,” which for years was erroneously described as the amplified sound of charcoal burning.

On this Music from Other Minds Program, Rachel Schonfeld continues showing off composers and performers at the 30th Other Minds Festival, October 8th–11th at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. For the first hour of tonight’s program, you will hear music by OM’s very own Associate Director and soon-to-be Artistic Director, Joseph Bohigian, in preparation for his newest piece’s debut I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment which will premiere Night 1 of the festival. The second hour you will hear improvisation duo Foreign/Domestic, with composer and technologist Zachary James Watkins and percussionist John Diaz. 

This Music from Other Minds is a fun one—it’s our yearly show that features Listener Submissions. Devin King plays works by listeners Geoffrey Gordon, Kerrith Livengood, Andreja Andric, Aster, S. Glass, Zach Lannes, Carlotta Ferrari, Chihchun Chi-Sun Lee, and Phil Pierick. If you’d like to submit your own piece to be played on our Listener Submission edition of Music from Other Minds next year, make sure to sign up for our mailing list at otherminds.org.

On this Music from Other Minds Program, Rachel Schonfeld continues showing off composers and performers at the 30th Other Minds Festival, October 8th–11th at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. For the first hour of tonight’s program, you will hear music by Norwegian-American composer and vocalist Kristin Norderval, and our second hour will feature Sylvie Courvoisier, a Swiss-born, New York City-based composer and pianist. 

Terry Riley’s Holy Liftoff is the latest contribution to Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project, in which she commissions new works for flute. Written over a two year period, Holy Liftoff includes through composed material, graphic notation, artwork, and open forms that can be interpreted with various durations and instrumentation. This performance features the JACK Quartet with Chase playing multiple flute parts. Linda Catlin Smith’s music is often introspective, gradually unfolding with quiet lyricism. This program features several selections from pianist Cheryl Duvall’s newly released second volume of Smith’s complete piano works. Filling out the program is given 1, by Eva-Maria Houben, organ, and Harmjan Roeles, bass.

On this Music from Other Minds, we listen to two works that engage with the intense reality of the dream-world as well as the Buddhist idea that the material world follows a cycle of birth and rebirth. For the first hour of this program that we’re calling Surreal Samsara, we’ll hear selections from the 2007 opera Wagner Dream, by British composer Jonathan Harvey. Wagner Dream is a reimagining of the last day of Wagner’s life; Harvey envisions the work that Wagner died attempting—an opera based on the life of the Buddha—as a long dream or vision that Wagner has as he moves toward death. Then, for the second hour, we’ll listen to guitarist Henry Kaiser’s 45-minute solo that forms part of Bill Laswell’s 2026 project Mt. Analogue, based on René Daumel’s posthumously-published 1952 surrealist novel, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing.

Lebanese composer Sami Seif joins the program to talk about his work inspired by the aesthetics, philosophies, paradigms, and poetry of his Middle Eastern heritage, including his pieces Orientalism, Ode Phénicienne, and Harp Concerto. Also included are the recent releases …in the dreams of another… and I Hear the Sound of Trees by composer Kay Rhie and Always and Never the Same by the Norwegian group Ensemble neoN and composer and Hardanger fiddler Benedicte Maurseth.

On this broadcast, Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian takes us on a quixotic journey through a selection of rarely-heard pieces composed in the USA dating back nearly to the First Constitutional Convention of 1787. Featured Composers include Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, Daniel Gregory Mason, Ernst Krenek, Ned Rorem, and George Antheil. Also included is the piano sonatas of Alexander Reinagle, who will be featured on the Mavericks 250 concert series at Mills College in Oakland on July 20, 2026.

This program features solo performances, both composed and improvised, and includes music by Ornette Coleman, Rhodri Davies, Jason Kao Hwang, Jennifer Koh, Bun-Ching Lam, Alvin Lucier, Cass Meurig, Roscoe Mitchell, Katia Pesti, Elliot Sharp, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Theresa Wong. The program opens with the delightful Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin, composed in 1936 by 19-year-old Lou Harrison.