Photo by Michael Macor
Over here, we have the composers, making worthy music mostly unheard by American ears because the creators are too young or are working in nations or genres often ignored by tastemakers. Over there await adventurous audiences craving new and exploratory sounds. And down the way, we have a few arts-loving institutions with a smidgen of funding available to facilitate the creation and dissemination of new music. What’s needed is a way to connect all three.
Enter the Other Minds Festival. For 17 years, its director, Charles Amirkhanian, the well-known composer and assiduous advocate for contemporary music, has provided that point of connection at OM’s annual festival, which gathers composers for a four-day residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, plus three days of concerts, panel discussions, and symposia in San Francisco.
Amirkhanian’s years (1969–1992) as the esteemed music director of Berkeley’s KPFA radio station put him in touch with composers and musicians, many of whom have students who also became composers. This led to an informal network that makes him uniquely positioned to find vanguard music and present it to West Coast audiences.
“The field is expanding exponentially, and the trick is sifting through all that music and finding people ready to be on our stage,” he says. OM seeks a balance of “precocious young composers, mid-career composers not as well known as they should be, and senior composers with a lifetime of work behind them.” That range, combined with Amirkhanian’s broad tastes and diligent listening to recordings from composers around the world, makes OM one of the most diverse and fascinating gatherings of music makers. Because the festival includes a conference as well as opportunities for public interaction with the composers, Amirkhanian also places a premium on composers who “have the ability to communicate what it is they’re doing in lay terms, not just theoretical terms,” he explains. “Openness to other people is part of the process.”
Last year, the festival introduced a fellowship for emerging composers chosen by an open call for scores for a resident performing ensemble, which this year is Rootstock Percussion, who’ll perform the winning compositions on Feb. 29. OM is seeking funding to make the fellowship a permanent part of the festival.
Amirkhanian literally travels the world in search of new sounds — example countries being Russia, China, and Iceland. This year’s opening concert brings music from a recent Scandinavian music trek performed by the Norwegian ensemble asamisimasa, which employs instruments and other soundmakers’ “bullhorns, electric milk steamers, bird whistles — all the things you don’t want to put a union musician through!” he remarks. They’ll play music by 30-something composers Øyvind Torvund and Simon Steen-Andersen. You can sample their sounds at Other Minds’ valuable internet radio station. Amirkhanian secured funding for this component from a foundation that supports Scandinavian musicians.
The second concert, on March 2, features the veterans, the best-known being the great California composer/pianist Harold Budd, whom Amirkhanian has known since his college days and who was chiefly responsible for bringing sonic beauty back into the world of avant-garde music with dreamy, consonant, often ambient works from the 1970s onward. Budd’s appearance at OM17 in a piano-bass combo with Keith Lowe continues his welcome return from a brief retirement.
The concert (sound samples here) also features the Del Sol Quartet performing the yearning fifth string quartet by expatriate American composer Gloria Coates (sound sample), who’s lived in Europe since 1969, and Japanese electronic musician Ikue Mori (sound sample), who creates dazzling improvised sound worlds from her laptop computer. She’ll also perform with avant-jazz drummer Tyshawn Sorey and prize-winning composer/singer Ken Ueno. Their music (samples here), along with that of American composer John Kennedy (sample) and Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski (sample), will also highlight the third concert, which features San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra, the Del Sol Quartet, and OM-commissioned premieres by Ueno and Kennedy. Other Minds is more than a connector for new music — it’s also a generator.