A bevy of composers will convene for the 28th Other Minds Festival, an international annual showcase for composers held at San Francisco’s Brava Theater September 25–28, 2024. Concerts on all nights start at 8:00 pm. Nights 1, 3, and 4 will feature panel discussions with the composers at 7:00 pm. Night 2 includes a workshop with Trimpin at 6:00 pm.
Click for detailsThe Festival opens with two world premiere performances of The Cello Quartet by the visionary Seattle-based media artist Trimpin, commissioned by Other Minds with support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. The piece features three autonomous cellos perched atop moving platforms. The word “cello” here hardly describes these sculptures, which will function both as instruments and dancers. A human cellist, Seattle’s Lori Goldston also equipped with her own moving platform, will round out the quartet while a trio of circus artists, choreographed by the Bay Area’s Margaret Fisher, will interact with the moving instruments affecting their course through wireless depth cameras embedded into the instruments.
On Night 3, we celebrate the 85th birthday of the New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood with two collaborative works with trumpeter Nate Wooley and the piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. Becoming Air explores a fascination with a magical sense of disorderliness, while Into the Vanishing Point was composed in response to the collapse of the world’s insect population. These works will be followed by Yarn/Wire’s performance of Both sides. Now by the Norwegian composer Jan Martin Smørdal.
On Night 4, two percussionists, Marshall Trammell and Nava Dunkelman, return to the Bay Area to be reunited with their local counterparts. Trammell, who now lives in Kansas City, MO, will perform We Say NO To Genocide with saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, an improvised set expressing the connections of poetry and music. Dunkelman, now a resident of New York, returns to the Bay to perform with Amma Ateria as IMA. Their electro-percussion duo brings together expressionistic noise music and Japanese poetry in electrifying juxtaposition. The program will be capped off with a performance of Annea Lockwood‘s RCSC performed by pianist and new music champion Sarah Cahill, a dedicatee of the piece, along with the late pioneering American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, from whose music the melodic material was borrowed.
Cost: from $23