Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

11th Other Minds Music Festival Opens Thursday

If you�re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear�sorry, channeling the sixties again. What I meant to say is that the City by the Bay is home this week to the 11th Other Minds Music Festival, an annual gathering of avant garde composers and infamous guest performers that has become one of the nation�s top contemporary music events. Other Minds executive and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian has the usual provacative crew of composer and performers, including John Luther Adams, Maria de Alvear, Billy Bang, Fred Frith, Phill Niblock, Michael Nyman, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Evan Ziporyn, and Amirkhanian himself in a special 60th-birthday celebration. The 2005 festival also offers a centennial tribute to gifted but famously forgotten American composer Marc Blitzstein, known for his legendary 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock.

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The birthday tribute to founding artistic director Amirkhanian (b. 19 January 1945), will feature the San Francisco concert premiere of his radiophonic tape piece, Son of Metropolis San Francisco. The work is a part-abstract, part-representational audio snapshot of idiosyncratic Bay Area sounds, ranging from barking elephant seals at A�o Nuevo Beach to a runaway overflow valve next to a hot tub at Harbin Hot Springs. In between, listeners hear Tongan gardeners, a Chinese sitcom, and conga drummers at Ocean Beach, manipulated on a Synclavier digital synthesizer and ultimately offset by a hypnotic and meditative organ chorale. Originally commissioned by Studio 3 H�rspiel of the West German Radio in Cologne and New American Radio for the NPR satellite system, the work has been broadcast internationally. Composed in 1986 in the Oakland studio of Henry Kaiser and with his assistance, the music will be performed over a surround-sound array of state-of-the-art loudspeakers from the noted Berkeley firm Meyer Sound. This condensed 26-minute version of the original 55-minute work (Metropolis San Francisco) was made in 1997.

Performances and artist talks will unfold on Thursday, February 24; Friday, and Saturday, February 26, 2005, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater (700 Howard St. at Third St.) and Forum (701 Mission St. at Third St.) in San Francisco. For OM11 program information, visit www.otherminds.org

posted by Jerry Bowles 2/23/2005