Samuel Adams at Other Minds

The Other Minds Festival describes itself in its beautifuly designed program as follows: "Founded in 1992, Other Minds is a leading organization of new and experimental music in all its forms, devoted to championing the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices in contemporary music." Though that mission statement makes for some uneven, hit-and-miss programs, last Friday's concert devoted to the 39-year-old composer Samuel Adams was very much a hit. (Pictured above at a panel discussion before Friday's concert are festival co-founder and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian and composer Samuel Adams.)

This year's festival took place over four evenings at the Brava Theater in the Mission District for the first time, and the 24th Street location felt warm, cozy and perfect. The concert began with Adams's 2020 Violin Diptych. The first half is a long, lyrical solo for the violin in an enchanting performance by Helen Kim, and in the second half pianist Conor Hanick joins in with a raucous accompaniment.

Pianist Hanick was back performing the 2023 Études, seven short studies played without pause. The piece was originally written for six different pianists at the Music Academy of the West and also designed to be played in one continuous swoop. I would rather have heard the pieces with pauses in between because it was easy to get lost and at first hearing, about halfway through, I thought, "Is this still the first Étude?"

At intermission, the audience was advised to climb the stairs to an installation by Pamela Z with layers of music and spoken word layered onto 30 different speakers. Pictured is R. Wood Massi blissing out in the middle.

The concert continued with the 2021 Sundial for string quartet and percussion. The strings were played by the fabulous Friction Quartet (Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel on violins, Mitso Floor on viola, Doug Machiz on cello) and the metallic marimba percussion was played by Haruka Fujii. The sound of the piece was gorgeous and the Friction Quartet Plus gave a passionate performance.

Samuel Adams came onstage to reminisce about his recently deceased godfather, composer Ingram Marshall. He was a buddy of Samuel's famous composer father John Adams when the two were teaching at the old SF Conservatory of Music on 19th Avenue, two East Coasters plunging headlong into the California hippie experimentalism of the 1970s. Samuel talked about his earliest gobsmacking cultural moment at age nine when he was taken to some "small black box theater" by his parents where there was a multimedia performance of Alcatraz, an hour-long conglomeration of minimalist music, speaking, and sound effects by Ingram Marshall accompanied by slides from photographer Jim Bengston.

Woodwind legend Libby Cleve performed Ingram Marshall's 1995 Dark Waters, an English horn solo played in tandem with a fragmented, sampled old 78rpm recording of Sibelius's The Swan of Tuonela. The Finnish version of the River Styx is Tuonela, where the dead cross the water from the land of the living to the shore of the dead, and its evocation of spirits moving on was a perfect preamble for the final piece of the evening.

This was the world premiere of Adams's memorial piece for Marshall, Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright. Written as a commission from pianist Sarah Cahill, the eight-minute piece started as a simple, minimalist hammering on the keys that morphed into something more mysterious and evocative, with sampled sounds of foghorns and bay emanating somehow throughout the piano.

Twenty years ago, at a fundraiser for Other Minds at the Swedenborgian Church, Sarah Cahill played Henry Cowell's The Banshee, which also involved strange sounds coming from the inside of a piano, and I actually saw the spirit of a friend who had died the night before leaving the mortal plane. Something similar happened at the Brava Theater on Friday.

Though Samuel Adams lives in Seattle with his wife and young kids, his San Francisco Bay Area roots are deep, and the concert felt very much a friends and family affair among performers and audience. It could not have been lovelier.

Sarah Cahill Plays James Cleghorn

Old First Concerts opened their 2025 season with a fascinating piano recital by Sarah Cahill, playing the music of a forgotten San Francisco composer, James Cleghorn (1913-1987).

Cahill was introduced by Matthew Wolka, who is not only the director of the Old First Concerts organization, but was working as the A/V tech and stage manager. He also mentioned that the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts program had unaccountably rejected their application for funds this year after supporting them for decades. The venerable church on the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento has hosted the concert series since 1970, and the wide range of musical performances by mostly local artists is unmatched anywhere else in San Francisco. If you would like to get in touch with SF Grants for the Arts to support Old First Concerts, you can write a letter to this address: 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 321, San Francisco, CA 94102. Or send them an email at gfta@sfgov.org.

James Cleghorn, pictured above with his first wife Fern, was born and raised in the Bay Area. According to Bill Alves, who co-wrote the great 2017 biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, "What we knew of Jim Cleghorn was mostly through interviews with Lou and with John Dobson, who was also a roommate with them. Lou met Cleghorn in the SF State choir, where Lou sang bass and Cleghorn tenor. They were also both in the ancient music ensemble. Dobson remembered Cleghorn as a brilliant man (“an IQ of 170”) who exchanged poetry and music with Lou. Lou remembered him as plugged into the arts community in San Francisco, alerting Lou to things like Cowell’s performances and the New Music Society. At some point while they were living there, Dobson remembered Cleghorn coming downstairs and announcing that they needed to take him “to the booby hatch.” Dobson took him to a doctor. The doctor asked Cleghorn where he was born, and Cleghorn the intellectual replied with the original Indian language name for the area. The doctor took the answer for gibberish and agreed to recommend that he be committed to a sanitarium."

Alves continues: "After Lou Harrison moved away from San Francisco, they lost touch. We asked the reference desk at the SF public library, and they told us that Cleghorn was hired as a librarian in August 1946, became senior librarian in Feb. 1948, and was appointed principal librarian in Art, Music, and Recreation until his retirement in 1971. Lou and Cleghorn were back in touch by 1957, as there’s a letter from him in Lou’s archive. Cleghorn arranged to commission a fanfare from Lou for the opening of their new fine arts division. Lou composed Majestic Fanfare in 1963 while in residence at the East West Center in Hawaii. It was never performed as planned for the library but was performed in Hawaii."

That Art, Music, and Recreation department that Cleghorn developed in the old Main Branch of the SF Public Library was a marvel, with masses of musical scores, opera libretti, and LP recordings. Best of all, you could reserve a stereo and headphones to listen, which is how I did my homework in the 1970s before rushing across Civic Center Plaza to buy a $3 standing room ticket at the SF Opera in the years before Supertitles. I still have vivid memories of hearing Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes for the first time in that library. Sadly, most of the collection was thrown out along with hundreds of thousands of books when the new Main Branch opened next door in 1996, an indignity that author Nicholson Baker wrote about in The New Yorker magazine and a book called Double Fold.

CORRECTION: The Art, Music, and Recreation Department left the following comment: "While Nicholas Baker accurately reported the rampant removal of books for the Library's collection, the Art, Music and Recreation Center did not take part in this act. We preserved our book and score collections during the transition to the new building. We were told by the Chief of the Main Library discard our LP collection, but we retained it and retain it to this day."

Cahill's Cleghorn concert on Sunday afternoon was spurred by contact with his son, Peter Cleghorn, who brought her piles of unpublished scores in manuscript form.

Peter Cleghorn was in the audience and was invited by Sarah to offer some context to a few of the pieces, most of which were receiving their world premieres. One of my favorite works on the program was actually written for Peter on his seventh birthday, a brilliant, amusing riff on piano instructor John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play: A Book for the Earliest Beginner. The actual title of the 1945 Cleghorn piece is An Apotheosis of John Thompson: A Sonatina on Tunes from Teaching Tiny Fingers to Play (to Peter in his seventh year).

Though most of Cleghorn's music remains unpublished, Henry Cowell did print the 1937 How Do You Like This? Three Ironies for Piano in his groundbreaking New Music magazine. The performance by Cahill was wonderful, craggy and lyrical simultaneously.

Cahill performed 13 separate works on the program, many of them undated miscellaneous works in a series Cleghorn called Cyclus. There was also a Sonatina in memory of Bartok, a 1980 work called The Fear and The Trembling from Ludus Arbitralis, and a gorgeous, extremely sophisticated 1935 work, Six Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme. The entire concert was historical music excavation at its most rewarding.

Even better, the music is going to be recorded later this month by Cahill for the Other Minds music organization. In the photo above, Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian was congratulating Peter Cleghorn at the end of the concert for helping to rescue his father's music.

Adam Tendler's Inheritances

Charles Amirkhanian is moving his Other Minds music festival to the Brava Theater in the Mission District this September. On Wednesday he introduced a pre-festival tryout of the space with a new music concert by pianist Adam Tendler.

Amirkhanian, looking out at a nearly sold out Brava Theater audience, marveled that "Adam Tendler doesn't even have a publicist but he's gotten an amazing amount of publicity for this concert." It's true. There were three extensive, entertaining articles online by Marke B. at 48 Hills (click here), Andrew Gilbert at Mission Local (click here), and Jim Provenzano at the Bay Area Reporter (click here).

Briefly, the story is that Adam Tendler had a disengaged relationship with his father who had divorced his mother, the man died five years ago, and he left his son a small bundle of cash that his stepmother delived to Adam in a Denny's parking lot. Wondering whether to pay bills, go on a vacation, or something else, Adam decided to commission composers he admired for new piano pieces with the instruction that the theme should be "Inheritances." In the helpful program book, beautifully designed by Dom Cooper, either Adam or one of the 16 composers provided some context for each piece.

The happy news is that the hour-long result was wonderful. Like any omnibus program, there were highs and lows, with some pieces blurring together in memory, but it was nicely structured, starting with an AI-assisted piece by Laurie Anderson called Remember, I Created You. The work included the follwing instructions: "For one minute, play something you've never played before" and "For one minute, play something your father would hate" and finally, "For one minute, play something your father would love."

Other highlights for me in the first half were Missy Mazzoli's pulsing Forgiveness Machine, Angélica Negrón's rhythmically Latin You Were My Age, Timo Andres's sweet An Open Book, and Ted Hearne's halting, quiet and jagged Inheritance.

The program became more intense with inti figgis-vizueta's hushing, where Adam pounded angrily on the piano while childhood home movies played on the screen behind him, even standing up occasionally and cocking his arm as if he wanted to punch the keyboard. Pamela Z collected samples of Tendler's voice in interviews throughout the internet and created an amusing piano and looping found sound composition called Thank You So Much. Darian Donavan Thomas's We don't need to tend this garden. They're wildflowers is framed as a therapy session with musical underpinnings, the closest to the confessional that the program came, and very successful on its own terms with Tendler at times crooning some of the responses in a lovely baritone. The finale was Devonté Hynes's Morning Piece, one of the longest and most gorgeous of the new works, fading the program out perfectly.

It was impossible not to think about one's own father-child relationships while meditating through this music. I was also reminded of another kind of inheritances taking place at the concert. Most of the classical new music audiences and composers are older, and it was interesting to watch a tradition being passed on to a new generation of performers like Tendler and his composing colleagues.

"The Pressure" at Other Minds

An utterly original work of musical theater, The Pressure, was given its world premiere by the Other Minds Music Festival last Saturday at Yerba Buena Center.

Composed and narrated by Brian Baumbusch (above left) to a poetic horror narrative written by his brother Paul Baumbusch (above right), the 90-minute work was a strange amalgam that was somewhere between an opera and a German Expressionist silent film such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Charles Amirkhanian, the founder of Other Minds, introduced the work in the program as follows: "This year's Other Minds Festival concentrates on the work of two hyper-creative individuals [the other being Ivan Wyschnegradsky] whose performance requirements, like those of other mavericks, including Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, and Lou Harrison, pose challenges that limit opportunities for wide exposure. There is no doubt that Brian Baumbusch is a rare young composer with abundant talent, energy, intellect and charisma to make an exceptional mark in music. His work largely is composed for instruments of his own design, in remarkable tunings and with exacting notational detail...Bringing onto the stage an ensemble of 23 players is, in and of itself, unusual in new music. But to integrate elements of visual art, projections, and movement as well is a daunting challenge."

The performing forces were an unusual combination, with the Lightbulb Ensemble playing gamelan instruments built by the composer himself along with more traditional percussion, the Friction Quartet playing as a string quartet and as soloists, a vocal quartet singing everything from faux Bach chorales to Ligeti-like soundscapes, and Margaret Halbig playing an electric Casio organ along with Brett Campbell on a second organ and toy piano.

The entire work was anchored by Brian Baumbusch (above) narrating the tale into a microphone over a demented disklavier (player piano). The music throughout was eclectic, haunting, sometimes very beautiful. The libretto was an interesting foray into gothic fairy tales like The Pied Piper, except in this case the traveling Stranger destroys a village through a sinister promise to the inhabitants through gizmos that will protect their apple orchards from monstrously sized hailstorms.

My only serious criticism is that the composer should not have taken on the role of Narrator, mostly because he's not an assured enough actor to pull it off and the overloud amplification of his voice was annoying. A Narrator as good as the surrounding musical performers would have made a huge difference.

Among the most interesting sections of the work were the instrumental "Night" interludes for various forces, including the always brilliant Friction Quartet that even included a few solo stretches for the individual players. Above is cellist Doug Machiz and violist Tajia Warbelow, who is leaving the quartet after these performances. (Actually, you can catch her and the rest of the performers at the Garden of Memory Solstice concert at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland this Friday where excerpts from the work will be performed.

The quartet of vocalists, singing mostly in German for some reason, were soprano Shauna Fallihee, alto Melinda Becker, tenor Ryan Matos, and bass Sidney Chen. They were fabulous in a wide range of musical styles, and so was Nathaniel Berman, the conductor of this huge conglomeration.

The "multimedia" turned out to be lots of projected black-and-white illustrations by Spanish illustrator Fede Yankelevich that looked a bit like German woodblocks, both specific to the narration rather like a graphic novel while also being abstract. They were evocative without being distracting, a tricky balance. Congratulations to everyone on the ambitious project, especially for passing the new music test of whether I would like to hear it again. The answer is yes.

Shostakovich Two-Piano Jam with Other Minds

The Other Minds Festival has spread out with performances over the course of the year in various Bay Area locations, including a few ancillary events such as a two-piano recital in San Francisco's Taube Atrium Theater a couple of Sundays ago. The organization's founder, Charles Amirkhanian (above), gave his usual wry and intelligent introduction, noting that the festival's next event would be in the same theater on March 23rd when the Arditti Quartet plays the "complete microtonal pieces for strings" by Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979). "This will be your first chance to hear this music in the United States...and probably the last."

He then introduced the two pianists playing music written or adapted by Shostakovich for two pianos, Maki Namekawa and her husband Dennis Russell Davies. Namekawa is best known for her work with composer Philip Glass, while Davies has had a fascinating career in Europe conducting everything from Bruckner to Lou Harrison. In both the recent Lou Harrison biography and Philip Glass's memoirs, Davies is a major figure. "We're starting the concert with the encores," Davies explained, "because you really don't want to hear anything else after Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony on the second half of the program."

After a pair of dances that Shostakovich wrote for films, they played a two-piano reduction of Stravinsky's 1930 Symphony of Psalms written by Shostakovich for students at the Leningrad Conservatory. According to the program notes by Randall Wong, "Shostakovich thought well enough of his transcription that he personally presented the manuscript to Stravinsky during his historic 1962 visit to the Soviet Union. Shostakovich's arrangement reflects his admiration for the work in that it succeeds in preserving both the ecclesiastic ambiance and choral textures or the original. Stravinsky's reception of the score was tepid at best." Though it was beautifully played by Namekawa and Davies, I'm siding with Stravinsky on this one because the two pianos could not make up for the loss of human voices in this piece, particularly in the ethereal finale, one of Stravinsky's most strikingly beautiful stretches of music.

At intermission, it was fun drinking coffee with a celebrity, singer-composer Laurie Anderson, who was an early "discovery" of the Other Minds Festival.

Also attending were true music lovers Terence Shek and Charlie Tiee looking perfectly imperturbable as usual.

My friend James Parr and I started the afternoon with a trip to the Kimono Refashioned exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, so Ms. Namekawa's procession of gorgeous concert wear felt serendipitous. She and Davies gave a fascinating, arduous tour of Shostakovich's 1936 Fourth Symphony which the composer put in a drawer after being attacked by Stalin for his wild, modernist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The original score of the symphony was lost and all that remained was a two-piano reduction by the composer and it wasn't until 1961 that the full piece was reconstructed from orchestral rehearsal parts and this two-piano version. In the week leading up to this concert I listened obsessively to a recording led by Vasily Petrenko of the 70+ minute symphony, and enjoyed it tremendously though it was hard to encompass the entire, sprawling work mentally. It was even more difficult absorbing the two-piano version, particularly the long first movement.

Davies introduced the work by saying that he had been part of a poll of conductors asked for their favorite three symphonies and he had picked the Shostakovich Fourth. "I was the only one who selected it, but I do feel that strongly about the work. You should really hear the whole thing." Did you hear that, SF Symphony programmers? Anne Midgette, the Washington Post music critic, wrote a rave review of Namekawa and Davies playing different two-piano repertory in 2017, and ended with this wonderful appreciation: "The performers, smiling at each other and at the music, emphasized “playing” rather than “performing,” with all the artificial earnestness that the latter entails. It was a performance given by people who cared more about the music than about what you, or I, or anybody thinks of it — a performance at once intimate and uncompromising, a concert given by two working musicians, at work." It was a pleasure to witness.

Lou Harrison Centennial Concert at the Mission Dolores Basilica

The Other Minds Festival's 22nd annual edition offered a pair of concerts devoted to the music of Lou Harrison (1917-2003) on what would have been his centenary year. Executive Director Charles Amirkhanian wrote in the program notes that Lou was not only a composer, but a "poet, dancer, dance and music critic, playwright, Esperantist, builder of instruments, painter, calligrapher, essayist and teacher." He was also a shining prototype of a West Coast, gay, leftist, pacifist, multicultural hippie artist, and his music is aging well. (Pictured above is Amirkhanian in front of portraits of Harrison and his lover/partner Bill Colvig which were part of a silent auction benefiting the festival.)

The concerts were given at the Mission Dolores Basilica, a perfect location as it allowed for a large audience at a venue with surprisingly good acoustics, and it turns out that Harrison studied Gregorian Chant at the Basilica when he was a San Francisco teenager. Amirkhanian asked the audience to raise their hands if they had ever met Lou Harrison and half the crowd did so. This was probably the hippest crowd of old artists and their supporters I have encountered in one place.

Amirkhanian collaborated with Harrison on multiple projects, beginning in the late 1960s when Amirkhanian became musical programming director of Berkeley's KPFA radio during its glory decades. They continued as friends and admirers over the years at Harrison's Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz and Amirkhanian's Other Minds Festival in San Francisco.

I missed the first concert this winter but managed to catch the second on Saturday, May 20th. The program ranged from a pair of wild organ pieces, continued with delicate chamber music, and culminated in a huge mixed chorus singing in Esperanto over a gamelan percussion orchestra. Jerome Lenk, the Music Director and principal organist of the Basilica, started the concert with the 1946-47 Praises for Michael the Archangel for organ with a style derived from Schoenberg who was Harrison's teacher for a couple of years, and finished with the 1987-89 Pedal Sonata for Organ where no keyboards are harmed and all the sound is created with footwork on the pedals. Having a personal aversion to solo organ music, this wasn't my favorite part of the concert, but Lenk gave a virtuosic performance on a splendid sounding instrument. In between, Meredith Clark above played the 1990 Threnody for Oliver Daniel for Harp.

Clark was joined by cellist Emil Miland for the five movement, 1948 Suite for Harp and Cello in a lovely performance that underlined what is so special about Harrison's music: its distinct mixture of complexity and simplicity with a sheen of rigorous beauty.

The second half offered a performance of the 1974 Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, co-composed with Richard Dee who was in the audience. With his lover William Colvig, Harrison assembled an American Gamelan nicknamed "Old Granddad" in the late 1960s. According to the program, it was "based partly on traditional Indonesian designs and partly using found objects. Aluminum slabs, tin cans, electrical conduit and empty oxygen tanks, cut to various sizes and struck with sawed-off baseball bats, replacing the gongs of the Asian gamelan." The Original Granddad is still housed at UC Santa Cruz, and was reassembled on the Basilica pulpit where it looked right at home. Violinist Shalini Vijayan above was the soloist and the William Winant Percussion Group (with Winant pictured above) played the amazing instrument. Just when you think the five-movement suite can't get any more lyrically gorgeous, the final Chaconne takes you to another realm. It was a wonderful performance by percussionists and soloist alike, and when Michael Tilson Thomas reprises it later this month at one of his American Maverick concerts, I hope they play the whole thing instead of excerpts as was done at a SoundBox concert earlier this year. The piece deserves it.

The finale was the 1972 La Koro Sutro (The Heart Sutra), written for the Old Granddad gamelan, harp, organ, and a huge mixed chorus. From a prayer in the Bhagavad Gita, the text has been translated into Esperanto, the "constructed" language from the late 19th century which was meant to usher in world peace once everyone could speak to each other. At least half the words in the language end in an "o" or "a" which makes it perfect for vocal settings, and the live performance by the combined forces of the Mission Dolores Choir, the Resound Choir, and a few assorted guests exceeded all expectations.

William Winant recorded the 30-minute work in 1988 and I have been listening to that CD as meditative morning music for decades. It was a rare treat to have him leading his percussion ensemble on the original instruments.

The wonderful young percussionists playing with Winant all deserve recognition: Sarong Kim, Ed Garcia, Jon Meyers, Sean Josey, and Henry Wilson.

Imagine the combination of a Balinese gamelan orchestra mixed with a 100-person Gregorian Chant chorus and you will have some idea of what this magical piece sounds like. There have been a number of attempts at synthesizing Western classical music traditions and Eastern classical music traditions, but none quite as perfectly integrated as this strange masterpiece. The pop-up chorus was also unexpectedly great in very exposed music.

Credit for that should probably go to conductor Nicole Paiement, who I had seen earlier in the day rehearsing her Opera Parallele company in the Philip Glass opera Les Enfants Terrible. Where she gets her energy is anybody's guess, but there could not have been a better leader for these two gamelan pieces. She was a friend and mutual admirer of Harrison in Santa Cruz, and though she is always a great conductor, I think even she was surprised at how well this performance of La Koro Sutro turned out. Everybody on the pulpit looked rather dazed at the end, where the extremely delicate, trancelike music finished with an uproarious blast of cacophonous energy from everyone. There was an air of, "What did we just do? That was amazing." And it was.