Music From Other Minds

On this Music from Other Minds, Liam Herb presents a conversation with the late “Blue” Gene Tyranny, who passed away at the age of 75 on Saturday, December 12, 2020. Compiled for an oral history of Tyranny in 2019, the interview topics span the composer’s life from early childhood, his work with the ONCE Group, his collaborations with composer Robert Ashley, his recordings, and his struggles with Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

This is a rebroadcast from December 18, 2020. 

This week on Music from Other Minds: Strings, Drums, and Electrons. Highlights of this program include Bay Area native Scot Gresham-Lancaster’s electronic treatment of Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick; Myths of Origin, a conduction-style piece for improvising string orchestra and drum set by Jason Kao Hwang; String Quartet No. 8 by Gloria Coates; and Sandbox Percussion performing Bloom by Michael Torke.

There’s no cure like travel! This late-summer vacation edition of Music from Other Minds features field recordings, songs, and poems related to cars, trains, and trams. Three long form pieces center the program: Amber Meulenijzer’s SAAB Fanfare has the sound artist driving her SAAB 900 through Pelt, a town in East Belgium, while a local brass band marches and plays along with a drone emanating from speaker-horns installed on the SAAB’s roof. Artist Sandra Cross MMs Bar Recordings find her traveling weekly from Leicester to London and recording the buffet car announcements. And Other Minds founder and Executive and Artistic Director’s Charles Amirkhanian’s Seatbelt Seatbelt is a modern classic of sound poetry. Poems from Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, and Julie Patton are also featured, as well as field recordings of the San Francisco cable car barn and Disney Land tram car announcer. Rounding everything out is Hiroshi “Hiro” Kawaguchi’s soundtrack to the 1986 arcade game Out Run.

The first half of this edition of Music from Other Minds features an interview with the vocalist, composer, and improviser Kristin Norderval. Norderval combines her operatic lineage with electronic experimentation in her compositions, placing special emphasis on small-scale opera, cross-disciplinary work, and interactive technology. The program features live recordings of her music, including Back to Square One, From the North, and her opera The Trials of Patricia Isasa. In the second half of the program, you’ll hear a recording from the Other Minds Archives of a live concert and interview by the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble, recorded at the KPFK studio in Los Angeles in 1980 and hosted by Carl Stone. The ensemble; soprano Deborah Kavasch, alto Linda Vickerman, tenor Ed Harkins, and bass-baritone Philip Larson; was formed in 1972, and the archival recording includes their performances of music by Kavasch and Robert Erickson.

On this sleepy edition of Music from Other Minds, the elusive American Dream takes on a humorously literal meaning as host Ian Mahanpour guides listeners through 30 years of American experimental music concerning sleep, dreams, lullabies, bedtime stories, and everything in between. Featured on the program are the nocturnal drones of Charlemagne Palestine’s Holy 1 & Holy 2 (1967), originally composed as a compliment to New York City’s nighttime soundscape; a short excerpt from RIP Hayman’s Dreamsound (1976) event, an all-night concert where the audience was expected to sleep during the performance; selections from Doris Hays’s rare Sleepers (1985) LP, a compendium of experimental lullabies; as well as pieces by Pauline Oliveros, Alison Knowles, La Monte Young, and Tom Johnson.

If you think inviting listeners to offer their music for broadcast would result in a wildly varied, even incoherent, program, you are correct. Ed Herrmann sorted through industrial noise, gamelan, computer modified flutes, toy pianos, field recordings, manic laughter, robots, ancestor rituals, inscrutable electronics, and more (even some almost conventional chamber music) to make this program like no other you’ve heard. Don’t blame him for how it sounds—it’s your music!

In memory of composer-accordionist Guy Klucevsek (February 26, 1947–May 22, 2025), Adrienne Cardwell presents a special batch of archival recordings ca. the 1980s focused on live performances by Klucevsek, and some of collaborators performing his works. Guy Klucevsek championed new music for the accordion and bridged a natural relativity between experimental and traditional musics with the instrument. Like Pauline Oliveros, he has also influenced how the accordion (and accordion player) are perceived and played, making room for new thought and sound. We’ll hear Klucevsek play his own works and others by Henry Cowell, Ramón Sender, William Duckworth, William Obrecht, Jim Hiscott, Arne Nordheim, William Schimmel, and Carl Finch.

In celebration of Riley’s birthday, our KALW 91.7 radio program Music from Other Minds broadcast a special Terry Riley program. Host Liam Herb will give listeners a brief survey of this visionary composer’s 60-plus-year inspiring career in which he has combined his interest in classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and the spirituality of Indian classical music to fashion music that is universally hailed.

This program features the music of Danish composer Per Nørgård, who died on May 28, 2025, at the age of 92. Nørgård was among the most influential 20th century composers in Denmark, known for his infinity series, a serial method of composition using a sequence of integers which he developed in the 1960s. The program features a range of Nørgård’s compositions from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, including his Trifoglio, Op. 7, Canon for organ, and Symphony No. 6 “At The End Of The Day.” Also included is an excerpt of a 1970 interview with Nørgård on KPFA from the Other Minds Archives.

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.