Other Minds Festival Celebrates 30th Year of Highlighting Experimental Music

Alexis Madrigal (0:03)

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Charles Amirkhanian (0:18)

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Alexis Madrigal (0:42)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. For 30 years, the Other Minds Festival has been bringing together experimental and otherwise unconventional composers and musicians together here in the Bay Area. This is music that you won't easily stumble across on a Spotify playlist or an AI-programmed commercial music station. It's music that's art in the way that paintings are art, and it's not intended to be listened to by the maximum number of people.

Much of it is beautiful, strange, haunting, wonderful, unexpected. And this morning, we'll talk about individual pieces and composers and the community that they built here in the Bay Area.

We're going to be joined by Charles Amirkhanian, who's co-founder and executive and artistic director of Other Minds. He's actually stepping down as director after 34 years after this festival. Welcome, Charles.

Charles Amirkhanian (1:32)

Nice to be here. Thank you so much.

Alexis Madrigal (1:34)

We've also got Pamela Z, legendary composer and performer and media artist who lives here in San Francisco. Welcome.

Pamela Z (1:42)

Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal (1:44)

We've got Joseph Bohigian, who is associate director of Other Minds. Going to take over as artistic director next year.

Hachador Hachadorian (1:51)

Welcome.

Joseph Bohigian (1:52)

Thanks. Really glad to be here.

Alexis Madrigal (1:53)

And we have Hachador Hachadorian, who is Bay Area wind instrumentalist and vocalist.

Joseph Bohigian (1:59)

Welcome.

Hachador Hachadorian (1:59)

Thank you so much.

Alexis Madrigal (2:01)

So Charles, you've been running this music festival for many years. Simple question based on your experience, what is music?

Charles Amirkhanian (2:10)

What is an interviewer question I should ask you? What is a host of a radio show?

Alexis Madrigal (2:21)

I don't know, a compilation of cells. I don't know.

Charles Amirkhanian (2:25)

Try another one.

Alexis Madrigal (2:27)

No. Okay. Well, how do you think about songs and music relative to how people tend to, when what you're working with isn't just going to be chorus versus bridge? What makes the kind of music you're looking for?

Charles Amirkhanian (2:41)

Well, I remember when I traveled around and I would tell people I'm a composer and they would say, well, do you do your own lyrics too?

As if songs were the only kind of music that we had. And of course, people who do new music are very familiar with song form, popular music and have their likes and dislikes in that area. But sophisticated listeners who have gone beyond that and have looked for something more interesting and with more depth and unpredictability, which is, I think, important, have gravitated toward a field which is roughly called new music. Now, new music has evolved over the years from the classical tradition through modernism to a kind of expression today that incorporates world music, rock, all sorts of other influences, not just the Western European tradition. And in the case of jazz musicians, who have evolved into free improvisation and other forms, anything goes and it starts from the emotional core of the person and builds outwards. So it's very hard to characterize what we do because we do so many different things. It's exemplified by the different composers on this festival.

Alexis Madrigal (4:11)

Well, let's talk about one of them. Joseph, your piece is going to be I Am Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, premiering at the festival tonight, also opening night. We're going to listen to it in just a second little piece of it.

But can you set it up for us a little?

Joseph Bohigian (4:28)

The piece is about the Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, who's most well known for his film The Color of Pomegranates from 1969 And his films are very abstract, and that got him into a lot of trouble with the Soviet government.

So he had a very tumultuous life. And so we're abstractly telling the story of his life, as he would have in his film, using the songs of Syed Nova, who's an 18th century troubadour. And those songs will be sung by Khachador. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal (5:00)

All right. Let's listen to a little bit of it now.

Khachador, that is you singing there. I mean, this piece is so interesting. I mean, just the description of it where you're like, okay, there's Armenian, there's Georgian, there's Azeri. This is a Soviet director. We give ourselves so much credit for being such a globalized world now, but you've got this bard who's working in all these languages. How do you think about the border crossing elements of this piece and even just linguistic elements of it?