Other Minds News

Critics have compared the San Francisco-based Santomieri-Farhadian Duo’s experimental musical compositions to everyone from modernist Anton Webern to rock icon Frank Zappa. This exciting pair — Thea Farhadian on (electronic) violin and Dean Santomieri on guitar/ electronics — have been collaborating for close to a decade now, creating some of the most compelling work on […]

The Newark native has long been lauded for his brilliant abstractions. Lately he’s writing about something more concrete — and producing his most powerful music yet. By Adam Shatz    Jan. 7, 2021 On March 6, hardly a week before the pandemic lockdown began, close to a hundred people packed into the Jazz Gallery in […]

Prototype, known for presenting visceral, chamber-scale new works, unveils an almost entirely streamed pandemic edition. By Zachary Woolfe   Jan. 11, 2021 The annual Prototype festival of new opera and music theater thrives on intimacy. Its chamber-scale offerings — often politically charged, emotionally brutal and just plain loud — vibrate the viscera. Prototype has become known for […]

“Times3,” a collaboration between Pamela Z (photographed here in San Francisco) and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle, is part of a pandemic edition of the Prototype festival of music theater.Credit…Andres Gonzalez for The New York Times By Seth Colter Walls January 7, 2021 The composer, vocalist and multimedia artist Pamela Z was supposed to have a […]

In one sense, the voc-25 is just a keyboard controller triggering a synthesizer, with some visual yuks thrown in. But when I heard it played, I realized there’s a loud clack every time a note is sounded. I think it’s produced by the solenoid that’s opening the teeth — but since it sounds like the […]

Molly Joyce is among of the most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome. She’s composed spectral, searching works for orchestra, choir, string quartet and percussion ensemble; collaborated with ­virtual-reality artists, dancers and poets; and studied with the likes of Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick and Missy Mazzoli. She also teaches composition […]

The composer John Luther Adams combines immersive sound worlds with environmental activism. By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim New York Times, Nov. 26, 2020 In the early spring of 1989, the composer John Luther Adams set up camp near the confluence of the still-icy Tanana and Yukon rivers in Alaska. For days he held a solitary vigil, […]

OBITUARY BY STEVE SMITH   Noah Creshevsky, a composer of sophisticated, variegated electroacoustic works that mingled scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets and other bits of sound, died on Dec. 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 75. His husband, David Sachs, said the cause was cancer. Mr. Creshevsky […]

As he releases a collection of work that has appeared in films, the English musician talked about making functional art, his most ubiquitous composition and why he dislikes wearing headphones on the street. full New York Times article

Alarm Will Sound used multiple videoconferencing tools to master the ambiguities of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Autoschediasms.” Last month, I did something I used to do often before the pandemic: I watched a rehearsal. But this time it wasn’t a matter of sitting in a concert hall and watching a group work onstage. Sixteen instrumentalists from the […]