Other Minds Festival 30

Joseph Bohigian – I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment (2026), Khatchadour Khatchadourian, voice and duduk; Ensemble Decipher, electronics; Tara Baghdassarian, art director; Karo Yagjian, costume designer

This performance is supported by grants from the MAP Fund, Zellerbach Family Foundation, American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, Creative Armenia-AGBU, and New Music USA Creator Fund 2025–26.

Sylvie Courvoisier – solo piano
Mahsa Vahdat – voice; Atabak Elyasi, setar
Juri Seo – Just Intonation Etudes (2023), Wildflowers (2025), and Bad Decision (2026); Friction Quartet

Kristin Norderval – voice and electronics; Elizabeth Gaver, Hardanger fiddle and rebec
Foreign/Domestic (Zachary James Watkins, guitar and electronics and John Diaz, drums)
King Britt, electronics

Kristin Norderval’s performance is supported by grants from the Norway House Foundation and American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Charlemagne Palestine – solo piano

Kristin Norderval is a performer, composer, and improviser whose career has been two-fold; split between vocal performance and composition. Her performance repertoire spans the renaissance to the avant-garde, and her credits as a soprano soloist include performances with the Oslo Sinfonietta, Philip Glass Ensemble, Pomerium, the Netherlands Dance Theater, and the San Francisco Symphony. She has improvised in a wide range of styles—from free improvisations with luminaries such as Pauline Oliveros and Peter Van Bergen to jazz improvisations with composer-vibraphonist Kevin Norton—and she has recorded vocal works by numerous prominent American composers, among them Eve Beglarian, David Lang, Tania León, and Annea Lockwood. As a composer, Norderval focuses primarily on exploring the nuances of the human voice. Combining her operatic lineage with electronic experimentation, Norderval places special emphasis on small-scale opera, cross-disciplinary work, and compositions utilizing interactive technology. In addition to her work as a solo composer-performer, Norderval was a co-founder and vocalist/laptop performer in the electro-acoustic chamber music duo ZANANA, was a vocalist in Pauline Oliveros’ free improvisation quintet The New Circle Five, and has been a long-standing member of the New York based new music group Ensemble Pi.

Charlemagne Palestine was born in Brooklyn, NYC in 1947. He is a sound artist, composer, performer, video artist, and installation artist. A contemporary of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Phill Niblock, and Tony Conrad; Palestine creates intense, ritualistic, continuum music for electronic sound sources, bell carillons, pipe organs, pianos, voice, and other keyboard instruments since the sixties. A composer-performer originally trained to be a cantor, and then a carillonneur; he always performs his own works as soloist. His continuum form “Strumming” for amplified pianos develops harmonies, dissonances, and clusters with a visceral physical force that pushes the sonic limits of a piano till it no longer resembles one, even often naturally detunes from the force and becomes a new kind of multi spectrum electro-acoustic sound emitting machine. Palestine stopped performing from the early-eighties till the mid-nineties and devoted himself entirely to his forms of plush animal divinity altars as multi-media sculptures and installations. These altars are always an integral ingredient in Palestine’s performances. Charlemagne lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Juri Seo is a Korean-American composer and pianist. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious and the humorous, the lyrical and the violent, the tranquil and the obsessive. She hopes to create music that loves, that makes a positive change in the world—however small—through the people who are willing to listen. Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress. She has received commissions from Fromm Foundation, Barlow Endowment, the Goethe Institut, and Tanglewood. She holds a doctorate in music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently Professor of Music at Princeton University.

Mahsa Vahdat is an internationally acclaimed Iranian singer and composer. She is an iconic figure in the struggle of Iranian women for artistic freedom in the complex socio-political landscape after the Islamic Revolution. For more than three decades, she has carried the silenced voice of Iranian women onto the world stage, transforming restriction into resilience and silence into song. Deeply rooted in the rich tradition of Persian classical music, her artistry transcends borders through an innovative blend of classical and regional Iranian music, poetic lyricism, and contemporary expression. Her musical partnerships span a wide range of genres and cultures, including projects with Kronos Quartet, Tord Gustavsen, Mighty Sam McClain, Bridget Kibbey, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Pacific Symphony, the Skruk Choir, Zar Theatre, and the Grotowski Institute. A central part of her artistic journey is her long-standing collaboration with her sister, vocalist Marjan Vahdat, with whom she has developed a deeply personal and poetic musical dialogue that has received global attention. Mahsa’s long-term collaboration with the Norwegian label Kirkelig Kulturverksted and producer-poet Erik Hillestad, along with her extensive work with composer and arranger Atabak Elyasi, have resulted in numerous acclaimed and award-winning albums praised worldwide for their depth, emotional power, and rare ability to connect audiences across languages and cultures.

Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb, and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from The Empyrean Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, The Switch Ensemble, Density512, sfsound, The Living Earth Show, Kronos Quartet, and the Seattle Chamber Players, among others. His composition Exciting Sites of Opposition III received a NEA grant and premiered at The Lab in 2025 featuring vocalist Lisa E. Harris and bassoonist Jamael Smith. His composition Peace Be Till commissioned by Kronos Quartet, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2018 and was released in 2026 by Smithsonian Folkways on the Kronos record Glorious Mahalia. Zachary releases music on the labels Smithsonian Folkways, Red Hot, Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm, and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine (DE), ITCH (ZA), Walrus Press, and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores.