Other Minds News

For half a century, she has taken the things we know best— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown us how strange they really are. By Sam Anderson Oct. 6, 2021Updated 10:30 a.m. ET When the Hirshhorn Museum told Laurie Anderson that it wanted to put on a big, lavish retrospective of her […]

“Once you get over-the-hill, you really pick up some speed.” Quincy Jones has adopted that aphorism and spread it around — and it most certainly applies to Wadada Leo Smith, who is enjoying perhaps the most prolific Indian summer of any jazzman of any era…. And if that wasn’t enough, with his 80th birthday looming […]

R. Murray Schafer, the eminent Canadian composer, writer, and acoustic ecologist who popularized the term “soundscape,” died on Aug. 14 following a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 88. The news was confirmed in an email to friends and colleagues from Schafer’s wife, Eleanor James. “The loss of Schafer represents the loss of our greatest […]

The saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton has been a galvanizing figure in American music for more than 50 years – and at 76, he’s definitely not slowing down. Braxton has two new box sets out this month, totaling more than 20 hours of music. Anthony Braxton has always done things his own way; he’s famous […]

Louis Andriessen, the most widely acclaimed Dutch composer of his generation, died on Thursday, July 1, in a care home in Weesp, North Holland. His death was confirmed by Boosey & Hawkes, his publisher. He was 82 years old. No cause of death was given, but as reported in The Guardian in Dec., 2019, Andriessen […]

Jon Hassell, the influential American avant garde composer who invented the global-minded “fourth world” musical aesthetic, has died aged 84. In a statement, his family said the “iconic trumpet player, author and composer” died in the early hours of 26 June, after just over a year of health complications. For the complete Guardian article click […]

Frederic Rzewski, an American-born composer and pianist who worked in manifold musical genres throughout a career that spanned 60 years, died June 26 in Montiano, Italy. He was 83. For the complete Washington Post article click here

Guitarist, improviser, composer, and Other Minds 25 artist Mary Halvorson was interviewed in the May 2021 edition of Stereophile Magazine. Click here to read a scanned PDF version of the interview.

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life. “I like to make things,” the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill told an interviewer from the Smithsonian in 1994, a year before his death from diabetes. “It might not equate to the great American novel…but I can […]

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year, Terry Riley decided to stay right where he was, which just so happened to be in Japan. The composer had arrived in the country in February 2020 to do preliminary work for a piece commissioned by an arts festival held on Sado Island in the Sea of Japan. […]