This month, there’s no need for adventurous music lovers to travel outside the Bay Area. With the Other Minds Festival of New Music about to convene, a world of contemporary sound is coming our way.
Now in its 16th season, the annual new music extravaganza is a one-of-a-kind event. Each year under Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, Other Minds assembles a diverse group of musical innovators in San Francisco. Four days of residency and three nights of performance ensue, and the results are often unpredictable, frequently revelatory and always eclectic.
This year’s installment is March 3-5 in Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and a glance at the program confirms Amirkhanian’s wide-ranging musical interests. In addition to world premieres by David A. Jaffe and Jason Moran, audiences will hear six works by esteemed Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, three works by American composer Kyle Gann and two works by Polish composer-vocalist Agata Zubel. Other highlights include the first U.S. appearance of Indonesian guitarist I Wayan Balawan; Ishi, Janice Giteck’s multimedia tribute to the last surviving member of the Yahi Tribe; a performance by Dutch percussionist Han Bennick, and an homage to 75-year-old Oakland poet-composer Anthony Gnazzo. Performers include the Seattle Chamber Players, the Del Sol String Quartet, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Bandwagon, guitarist Fred Frith, pianist Sarah Cahill, and vocalists Monica Germino and Cristina Zavalloni. Each night’s concert begins at 8 p.m., with a panel discussion at 7.
Serving as host and facilitator is Amirkhanian, the Fresno-born composer who runs the festival as a forum for artists whose music resists trends and defies categorization. In a recent interview in Other Minds’ compact Mission District offices, he said those artists often have a hard time getting their music heard.
“There are so many people who are marginalized by the music scene and don’t get a chance to come to San Francisco,” he explained. “What we always hope is that other people in San Francisco who present concerts will like what they hear and invite some of them back. Sometimes that happens. But, in general, these are people who are sort of on the margins of contemporary music. They’re not academics; they’re not writing in conventional ways.”
From Sideshow to Center Stage
photo by James Fago
Still, looking at past seasons, one might think that Amirkhanian can see the future. He’s demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify the influential composers of tomorrow: Philip Glass, Conlon Nancarrow, Henry Brant, Meredith Monk, Terry Riley, Tan Dun and Laurie Anderson are just a few of the top names he’s presented on past Other Minds programs.
Amirkhanian has an encyclopedic knowledge of new music, built over the course of his career. From 1969 to 1992, he was music director of Berkeley’s KPFA-FM, where he interviewed scores of composers and musicians on the air. (Many of those interviews are archived on Other Minds’ Radio OM Web site.) After leaving KPFA, he cofounded the Composer-to-Composer Music Festival in Telluride, Colorado, and served as executive director of the Djerassi Artists Residence Program in Woodside, near Stanford University. Those experiences come together elegantly in Other Minds, named for a line from a New Yorker magazine obituary for John Cage: “His epitaph might be that he composed music in others’ minds.”
No two Other Minds festivals are alike; each composer appears only once (the sole exception was Lou Harrison: Amirkhanian invited him twice). “Each year is a completely different roster, and we’ve got 200 people waiting,” says Amirkhanian. “We have enough ideas to go on for some time.” He’s currently scheduling Other Minds 18, for 2013.
With the personnel changing year to year, the possibilities are endless. Electronic music shares programs with vocal works, jazz with multimedia, guitar music with gamelan; young artists take their places next to seasoned composers. “It’s a real mix — older people, younger people — and that’s intentional,” says Amirkhanian. “We want to have younger composers become familiar with these older master composers and be able to talk about them when they’re gone.”
Brant's Brain: Saluting an Alternative Music Pioneer
One of this year’s works brings tradition forward in an unusual way. David Jaffe’s The Space Between Us, an Other Minds commission, pays tribute to Henry Brant’s pioneering use of spatial music. It makes its world premiere March 4 featuring percussionist Andrew Schloss, the Del Sol String Quartet and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, with a special installation designed by new music composer-inventor Trimpin.
Brant was already known in new music circles when he appeared on an Other Minds program in 1997. But the festival helped develop a wider interest in the Montreal-born, California-based composer. By the time he died in 2008, at his home in Santa Barbara, Brant had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. (The San Francisco Symphony recently released Brant’s Concord Symphony, an orchestration of Charles Ives' piano sonata, to great acclaim.)
I visited Jaffe at his Berkeley studio recently, where he played excerpts from The Space Between Us and talked about Brant. “He was a huge influence for me,” says Jaffe. “I studied with him in the '70s at Bennington College, and we stayed friends. I often visited him in Santa Barbara, and we would talk about the pieces we were working on.”
According to Jaffe (who maintains Brant’s official Internet home page), spatial music was one of Brant’s most significant innovations. Throughout music history, audiences were accustomed to hearing music emanating from the orchestra pit; Brant composed works that placed instruments around the hall.
Scored for piano, strings and various percussion instruments, Jaffe’s new work follows suit, using some of Brant’s own instruments. It’s designed to be performed from various points (that’s where Trimpin’s installation comes in). At Friday’s premiere, two string quartets will be positioned along the aisles; chimes will be suspended above the audience, while Schloss, onstage, will control the other instruments via the radio drum, an electronic instrument that looks like a drum pad.
“The audience will be surrounded,” says Jaffe, “and, of course, it will sound different wherever you’re sitting.” He’s still not sure how it will sound, he admits. But Jaffe says that’s one of the beauties of Other Minds: it’s one of the only organizations affording composers the opportunity to experiment.
Making Connections, the Old-Fashioned Way
Jaffe’s looking forward to the performance, and he’s also excited about the residency: The week begins with composers gathering at Djerassi, where they get acquainted and talk about their work.
“It’s amazing,” says Jaffe. “Composers tend to be individualists, and writing music is a very solitary activity. Here, you get together with other composers. It’s a rare opportunity, and Charles always picks very interesting composers. It’s a broad umbrella.”
Amirkhanian believes the Djerassi component is essential to the festival’s success. “A lot of interesting things happen there,” he says. “People explain their work to each other. They get to talk about what they love and are often afraid to talk about in social situations. So often when we have our music played at festivals, we fly in, we fly out, we miss the whole festival. I always thought that was a shame, and I wanted to design a festival where that wouldn’t happen — where you were required to not only go to all the concerts, but you also had to sit with the other composers, meet them in this place.”
Deep and lasting connections have been formed in those sessions, and Amirkhanian delights in recounting them. In the festival’s first year, Glass and Julia Wolfe — who lived two blocks apart in New York but had never met — became fast friends at Djerassi. “The next thing I knew, he’d put out a record of her music,” says Amirkhanian.
Although the festival is the main event, Amirkhanian works year round on Other Minds. There are adjunct concerts and special events — this month, there’s a Composer Fellowship Concert (March 2 at the Meridian Gallery), and a concert marking the Alan Hovhaness centennial, with pianist Sahan Arzruni (March 13, First Congregational Church of Berkeley). The work of archiving music history continues at Radio OM. And there are always new voices to bring to San Francisco .
“I feel very lucky to live in the Bay Area, where there’s fertile ground for this kind of music,” says Amirkhanian. “I don’t think this would be easy to do anywhere else, but here in San Francisco it seems to fit just right.”