Other Minds News

Programming works involving improvisation would be one way to encourage ensembles to make classical music more inclusive. Why won’t big American orchestras improvise? The answer might have something to do with a tough night for Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic back in 1964.The great conductor wanted his audience to give serious consideration to […]

Listen to how artists have explored what it means — and could mean — to be American. A cone of silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its diaspora. It is not that Black men and women have not written music, but too often it has been ignored — and thus […]

La Monte Young, the composer who quietly shaped much of contemporary Western music, reaches his last act. THE COMPOSER LA MONTE YOUNG held his 84th birthday party on a drab, rainy Sunday afternoon last October inside the Church Street building where he has lived with his wife, the 80-year-old artist Marian Zazeela, since 1963. That […]

Charles Amirkhanian participated in Ars Electronica’s Home Delivery series with longtime OM friends Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies on Friday May 29, 2020. Together they discussed the upcoming Beth Anderson release Namely from Other Minds records, Davies and Anderson’s time at the Cabrillo festival in 1974, and Davies and Amirkhanian’s shared musical history. Check […]

Like most people these days, the sound artist Ellen Fullman is sheltering in place. But she has an unusual roommate: a massive installation she calls the Long String Instrument. “The Long String Instrument is an installation that I really have been working on my entire adult life,” Ms. Fullman said by phone recently. “Starting from […]

In the midst of a pandemic, those of us who are healthy, safe and able to work from home are of course lucky. Still, time can pass slowly when you’re cooped up in a Manhattan apartment… During our present moment of crisis, Bach provides solace, Beethoven stirs us with resolve and Brahms probes aching emotional […]

Richard Teitelbaum, an electronic artist, keyboardist and composer who combined an interest in non-western musical languages with a focus on experimental practice, died on Thursday at HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston, N.Y. His wife, the classical pianist Hiroko Sakurazawa, said the cause was a major stroke. He was 80. Click for full obituary on NPR

Krzysztof Penderecki, a Polish composer and conductor whose modernist works jumped from the concert hall to popular culture, turning up in soundtracks for films like “The Exorcist” and “The Shining” and influencing a generation of edgy rock musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Krakow. He was 86. His death was confirmed by Andrzej […]

Charles Wuorinen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and formidable advocate for modernist music, high culture and the composer’s worth, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 81. His publicist, Aleba Gartner, said the cause was complications of a fall sustained in September. Mr. Wuorinen, who won the Pulitzer in music in 1970 at age 31, composed […]

Check out Joshua Kosman’s write up on Other Minds Executive Director Charles Amirkhanian ahead of his 75th birthday bash and album release party for his New World Records 2 CD set Loudspeakers. “Whatever the venue, these are pieces that repay careful attention, for both the creator — who worked patiently and painstakingly to give his […]