From time to time, Other Minds is presented with an opportunity, or finds an excuse, to produce a new music concert or event outside of our normal presentations. We have commissioned new work by major composers like Henry Brant’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ice Field in 2001. We have produced concerts of work better presented outside the usual group of music venues in the Bay Area, like Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose, at the historic Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, CA. We have produced retrospectives of challenging work well outside the mainstream, like our Fluxus Semicentenary in 2011. If the work has value, makes us think, and pushes the boundaries, you’ll find us in the mix.
Other Minds welcomes Conor Hanick for a performance of the complete piano sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) at The Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Monday, October 28, 2024. The performance will be preceded by a talk on Ustvolskaya’s music by musicologist and 20th Century Russian and Soviet music specialist Simon Morrison.
After his father’s unexpected death, pianist Adam Tendler used his inheritance, a wad of cash received in a parking lot, to begin a commissioning project inviting a broad spectrum of sound artists and composers to create new piano works exploring the idea of ‘inheritance’ itself. Woven into one intimate program, these pieces tell a universal story of lineage, loss, and place, and become a meditation on confronting our past while moving forward into the future.
New works by commissioned composers Devonté Hynes, Nico Muhly, Laurie Anderson, inti figgis-vizueta, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Angélica Negrón, Christopher Cerrone, Marcos Balter, Missy Mazzoli, Darian Donovan Thomas, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Scott Wollschleger, Mary Prescott, Timo Andres, and John Glover.
Other Minds presented a live demonstration of composer Brian Baumbusch’s Polytempo Music, a first-of-its-kind interactive and immersive Virtual Reality album. Acclaimed producer Bari Scott interviewed Baumbusch on stage while he took us inside a VR headset, projecting to us what he was seeing and hearing. The event included audience participation and a special give-away of some pre-release copies of the Polytempo Music CD. Audience members also had a chance to try on a VR headset in a post-event reception.
Other Minds welcomed back Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies for a benefit recital of solo and piano four-hands music to celebrate Davies’ 80th birthday at the Bell-McCarthy Studio in San Francisco’s Mission District. The performance was preceded by a reception in honor of Davies’ milestone birthday. For their fifth appearance with Other Minds, the duo performed a set of solo and four-hands pieces by Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and John Cage. Rounding out the program was a piano four-hands arrangement of selections from Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’s monumental work Má vlast (My Fatherland), a set of symphonic poems composed between 1874 and 1879.
Other Minds presented a screening of the work-in-progress documentary film Following Pál. The film tells the story of Pál Hermann, a virtuoso cellist and composer of much promise in the 1920s and 30s. Despite his potential to make a mark on the music scene in Europe, his life, and his work, were cut short when he was deported under the Vichy France regime in 1944 and sent to a concentration camp. His only daughter, who is in her 80s now, recently discovered the sheet music to his unfinished masterwork, a cello concerto. Her son, Paul van Gastel, has been working with the Liszt Franz Academy of Music in Budapest and the Colburn School in Los Angeles to complete Hermann’s concerto and re-present his music to the world.
For Other Minds’s 30th anniversary, pianist Marc-André Hamelin performed Charles Ives’s legendary Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” with commentary by composer Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays after a Sonata. Hosted by Charles Amirkhanian on Saturday, January 21, 2023, at Littlefield Concert Hall, Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland.
Øyvind Torvund’s The Exotica Album re-imagines in collage form the chunky edifice of those Fifties and Sixties popular styles categorized variously as ‘exotica’ or ‘lounge,’ together with a wealth of historical reference points, from early electronic composition to cartoon music. But rather than the flip pastiche or cracking-a-nut-with-a sledgehammer cynicism that often characterizes high culture or avant-garde encounters with popular forms, Torvund’s attitude to his sources appears genuinely knowledgeable and affectionate. The result, rather than being a dry, academic-sounding rehash of pre-existing sources, provides a continuously diverting listening experience where the rate of change never lets up.
One of the few bright spots during the two-year hiatus from live concertizing was the emergence of streaming performances. Among the most inventive in classical music were collaborations by pianists Dennis Russell Davies & Maki Namekawa, with interactive “visualizations” by Cori O’Lan. Their events were transmitted live from the forward-facing Ars Electronica Museum in Linz, Austria, in an aptly-titled series, “Home Delivery.” Other Minds brought this dynamic trio of artists to the Bay Area. The featured item on the program was the American premiere of Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite, arranged for piano four-hands by Davies. And O’Lan’s realtime animations were something to behold.
DILEXI: A Gallery & Beyond is a new coffee table hardback documenting the life and work of Other Minds co-founder Jim Newman. Our special book launch event began with a performance by guitarist Gyan Riley and featured a panel chaired by former SF Chronicle Art Critic Charles Desmarais. He was joined by the book’s author Laura Whitcomb, former Pacific Film Archive curator Steve Seid, and Jim Newman himself. From 1958 to 1969, Newman owned and operated the groundbreaking Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. The Dilexi book is the result of 8 years of research by Label Curatorial’s director Laura Whitcomb and the research director Narin Dickerson.
Kui Dong‘s Hutong is a comic opera in fifteen parts about the whimsical nature of urban coincidence and the white space between vignettes. Set during a late summer in Beijing. Beijing, the capital city of China has over 3,000 years of history. Unfortunately, the quest for modern high-rise apartment buildings, offices and shopping malls has destroyed many authentic hutongs located in prime areas of Beijing’s city center. The opera is a day in the fantasy life of a hutong, peopled by a disparate array of characters: a blind Norwegian sailor, the Beijing police department, assorted international architects, some children, a frog, all presided over by the Fenghuang, or phoenix.
There are many examples of major symphonies having complicated premieres but none are more intriguing than the purgatory to which Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony was sentenced back in 1936. To say his work waas met with official disapproval is an understatement. The stage was set with the grand success that Shostakovich experienced in 1934 with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The work was a proven success until it was denounced by Stalin himself in early 1936. It is generally accepted nowadays that the fear that was implanted in Shostakovich during this episode was the principle reason for the withdrawal of his Fourth Symphony. This kind of grotesquely choreographed dance with the authorities throughout Shostakovich’s life really began with the Pravda condemnation of Lady Macbeth and the charade around the premiere of the Fourth Symphony.
Grammy Award winning pianist Gloria Cheng teams up with the father of minimalism, Terry Riley, for a recital of Riley’s music. Gloria Cheng has a decades long relationship with Terry Riley’s music. In 1995 she gave the west coast premiere of his masterpiece, The Heaven Ladder, Book VII, and made the world premiere recording shortly after. Terry Riley hardly needs an introduction. In his six decade career he has influenced countless musicians in the classical, jazz, rock and electronic music scenes and shifted the paradigm of classical music forever with his 1964 composition, In C. The concert will include some of Riley’s only fully notated works, played by Gloria Cheng, and also his semi-improvised works, preformed by the composer. The end the night they will come together to perform the newly composed work Cheng Tiger Growl Roar, written specifically for the pair.
When conductor/pianist Dennis Russell Davies directed our Lou Harrison concert in February he said, “You know I’m retiring from my regular [conducting] gig in Linz, and now I’d like to do a benefit for Other Minds.” So in December, 2017, he and his partner Maki Namekawa, both of whom work closely with Philip Glass, flew back to the Bay Area from Austria to perform a special concert of Glass’ music for two pianos in a very intimate setting for our fans. The event, honoring Glass’ eightieth birthday, took place Wednesday, December 6, 2017, at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. It featured the suites from Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles and La Belle et la Bête for two pianos and wind octet in its American premiere. In addition, a major work composed for the Davies-Namekawa Duo, which Dennis fondly calls “a real barnburner!”–Four Movements for Two Pianos concluded the program.
In the first West Coast performance of A Secret Rose, written for an orchestra of 100 electric guitars, Rhys Chatham performed and conducted this groundbreaking work at the historic Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, CA on Sunday, November 17th. Immediately after the official call for guitarists, Other Minds received over 150 applicants from all over the world, a great number of which came from surrounding East Bay communities. Chatham’s work is best known for combining the raw aggression of punk with the hypnotic drone minimalism of the sixties and seventies downtown New York scene. A cast of notable musicians from bands such as Guided By Voices, Akron/Family, Tristeza, Hrsta, Sutekh Hexen, and Girls Against Boys will help perform the piece. The work is split into five movements and the players divided into three sections. The piece ranges from thunderous fortissimo passages to soft, eerie chiming.
Conlon Nancarrow was not big on celebrating birthdays. Nevertheless, a centennial is an occasion for paying tribute to his life and music, and a good reason to reunite and reminisce. The ingenious complexity of Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, giving composers a way to activate several melodies at simultaneously different tempi, has been one of the most pivotal achievements in music’s last century. But Nancarrow’s rhythmic prowess would be merely clinical technique in the hands of a lesser mind. Conlon took his mastery of counterpoint from two years of study under Roger Sessions, a deep influence from Bach and Stravinsky along with jazz artists Louis Armstrong and Earl Fatha’ Hines, his experience as a jazz trumpeter, and his studies of the perception of time melded these into one of the most listenable and striking oeuvres in 20th Century music.
Inevitably, the question is asked, “What is Fluxus?” According to Webster’s dictionary, a state of flux is a state of constant and continuous change. Simply stated, a Fluxus performance is one in which attention is paid to something simultaneously both ordinary and extraordinary. In 2011, Other Minds presented a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Fluxus. The three-day series at SOMArts in San Francisco included performances in person by Alison Knowles, film screenings, a special exhibition curated by Other Minds, a radio tribute, and new realizations of groundbreaking Fluxus works by Knowles, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono and George Brecht. Host Charles Amirkhanian delved into the world of Fluxus in interviews with Knowles and her daughter Hannah Higgins, author of Fluxus Experience.
When classical composer Alan Hovhaness died in 2000, he left a legacy that reflected both his prodigious composing abilities as well as his trailblazing interest in music from around the world. Having written over 400 works that included operas, symphonies, concertos, oratorios, chamber works, and orchestral pieces, Hovhaness incorporated Indian, Korean, Japanese, and Armenian influences into his repertoire, forming a canon that is best described as world classical music. Considering his ability to shape the forms of classical music to his diverse inspirations, Hovhaness was not taken seriously by many in the classical world. However, his insistence on writing music that was accessible to both performers and listeners has ensured that his works—many of which have never been performed in public—will continue to influence future generations of classical musicians.
Harold Bloom, the writer and literary critic, would have us believe that great poets necessarily struggle to overcome the influences of their predecessors: that 19th-Century Romantic poets worked under the constant shadow of John Milton, and, perhaps (by interpolation), that mid-20th Century composers had always to deal with the music of Arnold Schoenberg…or that contemporary composers might critique themselves with Pierre Boulez or György Ligeti in mind. Fortunately, for those of us who prefer not to constantly bear the weight of music history upon our shoulders, a spirit of exploration and experiment has come to define a musical tradition in America. For that, we believe we are most indebted to Henry Cowell. There may be no greater tribute to Cowell’s influence than the fact that the list of composers who have been deeply affected by him continues to grow.
Henry Brant, America’s pioneer explorer and practitioner of 20th Century spatial music, was born in Montreal in 1913 of American parents and began to compose at the age of eight. As a teenager, he became the youngest composer to be included in Henry Cowell’s seminal book American Composers on American Music. In 1929 he moved to New York where for the next 20 years he composed and conducted for radio, films, ballet and jazz groups, at the same time composing experimentally for the concert hall. From 1947 to 1955 he taught orchestration at the Juilliard School and Columbia University. At Bennington College, from 1957 to 1980, he taught composition. He received honors from numerous organizations including the Ford Foundation, Fromm Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Koussevitzky awards and the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction.