Other Minds Podcast

Pianist and musicologist Ralph van Raat performs as a recitalist and orchestra soloist at the BBC Proms, Holland Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and Tanglewood Summer Festival. He has worked closely with many composers on the interpretation of their piano works, with John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Tan Dun, György Kurtág, Magnus Lindberg, Arvo Pärt, Frederic Rzewski, and Sir John...

King Britt is a composer, producer, and performer who integrates contemporary electronic music practices with an industry-informed perspective. Britt has performed around the world at SummerStage, Berghain, and Big Ears Festival and collaborated with artists including De La Soul, Madlib, John Legend, and Tyshawn Sorey. As a Professor in Computer Music at UC San Diego, Britt developed and teaches t...

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. Deeply rooted in the rich tradition of Persian classical music, her work blends classical and regional Iranian music, poetic lyricism, and contemporary idioms. Now based in the...

Joseph Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments...

Charlamagne Palestine is an enigma to say the least. Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, he cut his teeth as a sacred singer of Jewish music, a bell ringer for the Episcopal Church, and accompanist to figures as disparate Kenneth Anger, Tiny Tim, and Allen Ginsberg. He is considered to be a founding member of the New York School of Minimalism alongside La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and others; he a...

Juri Seo is a Korean-born American composer and Professor of Music at Princeton University. She merges many 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...

Foreign/Domestic is the improvisational duo of composer, guitarist, and sound artist Zachary James Watkins and drummer John Diaz. Zachary James Watkins studied composition at Cornish College and received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College. He has received commissions from documenta 14, the Kronos Quartet, and the Seattle Chamber Players, and releases music on the lab...

Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier is a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland and winner of the Swiss Grand Prix and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award. She has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the avant-jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decad...

Performer, composer, and improviser Kristin Norderval’s repertoire spans the renaissance to the avant-garde, and her credits as a soprano soloist include performances with the Oslo Sinfonietta, Philip Glass Ensemble, and the San Francisco Symphony. As a composer, she combines her operatic lineage with electronic experimentation, placing emphasis on small-scale opera, cross-disciplinary work, and i...

Marina Peterson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has an emphasis on sound and urbanism, and she is the author of the 2021 book Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles , which examines ways in which environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter cohere through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise from the 1960...

Theodore Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work connects experimental music, critical organology, and science and technology studies. He has performed with viola and Buchla instruments at venues including Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, and Roulette. Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, and serves on the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His firs...

Pianist Stephen Siek served as a professor of music at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where he taught piano, music history, American music, the aesthetics of music, and film music. He is currently Director of the Emeritus College Academy for Continued Learning at Arizona State University. He has performed and lectured at piano conferences for organizations such as the Historical Keybo...

Composers Inside Electronics is a group of composer/performers dedicated to the composition and live collaborative performance of electronic and electro-acoustic music. The group was formed in 1973 with David Tudor and is known for its pioneering use of original live electronics, including custom-built software instruments, resonant sculptural instruments, rotating and focused loudspeaker systems,...

David Rothenberg is a composer, clarinetist, philosopher, and author of several books on animal songs, including Why Birds Sing , which was turned into a documentary by the BBC in 2006. He has more than forty albums under his own name, and has worked with scientists to decode the mockingbird’s song and written stories on cicada music for the New York Times and whale music for National Geographic ....

The “fresh, daring and incisive” ( Fanfare ) compositions of Amy Williams have been presented by leading international performers, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Bent Frequency, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Junction Trio, Orpheus, pianist Ursula Oppens, soprano Tony Arnold, and bassist Robert Black....

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, sampled sounds, and custom MIDI controllers that allow...

Choreographer Nancy Karp grew up in Los Angeles, where she was an early student at CalArts. She embraces elaborate structures working with units of pure movement, investigating their potential through combination and variation. From these “structural investigations” emerge patterns and phrases that become her dances. In 1980, she founded her dance company, Nancy Karp + Dancers. On Night 3 of this...

Other Minds’s own Devin King joins us to read an excerpt from our first ever OM book, Peter Garland’s Ingram Marshall: A Personal and Musical Appreciation . Born in 1952 in Portland, Maine, Peter Garland was one of the original students at CalArts in 1970, where his principal teachers were Harold Budd and James Tenney. From 1971 to 1991 he edited and published Soundings magazine and press, where h...

Electroacoustic composer, improviser, and harpist Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices, making use of extended techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, recombination, historic proximities, geography, and movement. On Night 3 of this year’s Other Minds Festival, Parkins will perform her new work Modesty of th...

Putu Septa is a composer and musician from the village of Padangtegal, Ubud, Bali. To contribute to new music on Balinese gamelan, Septa initiated a new gamelan ensemble–Nata Swara–which performs with, among others, Gamelan Sada Sancaya, an orchestra of extended range bronze instruments designed by Septa, and Kendang Briuk, an instrument set consisting of a varied collection of Balinese kendang dr...

Kristine Tjøgersen’s compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor, and precision. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory as well as the natural world. Her collaboration with researchers and biologists is a source of new sound and scenic ideas, incorporating organic forms into the music. On Night 3 of this year’s Other Minds Festi...

Samuel Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer. Gramophone Magazine praised Adams as “among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives: between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.” His work resists the traditional tensions of classical music, blending acoustic...

SPECIAL BONUS EPISODE: On Sunday, September 7, 2025, Other Minds will present a two piano recital of the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Robert Ashley with pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland.  Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny were both iconic and beloved teachers at the Mills College Music Department. They were opposites in many way...

We have another special episode for our subscribers, a recording of the pre-concert talk by musicologist Simon Morrison at our concert of the complete piano sonatas of 20th century Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya, performed by Conor Hanick. Born in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1919, Galina Ustvolskaya’s expressive and vigorous music was deemed problematic in the USSR early in her career a...

A Year of Deep Listening was a 365-day online celebration of Pauline Oliveros’ legacy, coinciding with what would have been her 90th birthday. The Center for Deep Listening, established at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2014, posted one text score per day, totaling 365 pieces, which will be published in book form on January 28, 2025, as A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Ol...