Upcoming Events

Since 1993, Other Minds has brought the Bay Area revelationary new music with our annual Other Minds Festival and our environmental concert series The Nature of Music. We also produce Special Events focusing on a variety of unique musical presentations, including Latitudes, focusing on improv, rock & other experimental forms. On this page you’ll find a chronological list of our upcoming extravaganzas, along with ticket links plus audio and video links so you can preview our artists. Join us as to discover more about fine innovative composers spanning the globe.

Other Minds welcomes pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera to present a piano duo recital of the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny (1945–2020) and Robert Ashley (1930–2014) on Sunday, September 7, 2025, at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland. Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny collaborated for decades, and both were iconic and beloved teachers at the Mills College Music Department. This concert celebrates their work with Tyranny’s two-piano gems Decertified Highway of Dreams and Letters from Home and Ashley’s Viva’s Boy and Details (2b), along with solo compositions by both composers. Kubera and Cahill worked on these scores with both composers, and will perform pieces that Tyranny dedicated to each of them, including The Drifter and Spirit. This concert is part of Other Minds’s PastForward series, presented in cooperation with the Center for Contemporary Music, Northeastern University and Mills Performing Arts.

A panoply of composers will assemble for the 29th Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, an international annual showcase for composers held at the Brava Theater Thursday–Sunday, October 16–19, 2025. Join us for multi-generational musical connections, multimedia masterpieces, and contrasting takes on the fusion of gamelan and American musical traditions. The festival opens with with a performance by composer/performer/media artist Pamela Z of her Simultaneous, an intermedia composition for voice, electronic processing, chamber ensemble, speech samples, gesture control, and projected video, and Peter Garland’s Songs of Exile and Wine, a beguiling song written while the composer was living in self-imposed exile in Tlacotalpan, Mexico. Composer Samuel Adams presents a set of solo and chamber pieces, including the world premiere of a piece commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill dedicated to Adams’ mentor Ingram Marshall, whose Dark Waters will also be performed. Nancy Karp choreographs a new work set to James Tenney‘s Three Pieces for Drum Quartet; Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen presents Piano Piece, a work for piano, electronics, and live camera using recordings of a spruce forest on the south coast of Norway; and composer/harpist Zeena Parkins and percussionist William Winant perform Parkins’ Modesty of the Magic Thing, based on the drawings of Jay DeFeo and Lou Harrison’s American Gamelan tuning. To close the festival, Balinese gamelan musicians Putu Septa and I Kadek Janurangga of Nata Swara performs an intercultural set with the piano duo ZOFO.

Other Minds welcomes Singaporean avant-garde pianist and toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan to present And No Birds Sing, her “personal endeavor to call attention to climate change and the dire consequences of remaining passive in the face of an unfolding universal catastrophe.” Named for the refrain of a John Keats poem, And No Birds Sing features Tan playing works by John Luther Adams, Lois V Vierk, Somei Satoh, Annie Gosfield, Michael Wookey, Eric Griswold, and John Cage.