Friday's MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program on KALW (11pm PT) will feature four one-movement quartets by Cristobal Halffter, Jorge Lederman, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Toshiro Mayuzumi.

I was hard pressed to come up with something interesting this week, and 50 minutes for music is a bit of a constraint. Not everything I want to play will fit.

But I found myself listening to some Arditti recordings on Disques Montaigne over the weekend and a program started taking shape.

What I like about these quartets is they could form the four movements of a single, over-arching, collective quartet. Not that the styles are that similar, but they do seem to fit together. Judge for yourself.

The program will be available for streaming all week after broadcast Friday night.

This will be the 93rd program I've produced in this series. Yikes! Getting close to one hundred.

Lets, see... program 100 will be on March 23. I should probably do something special....

Introducing new technology always brings problems. But thankfully there's always customer support:

So? What's going on? Why nothing new here in weeks?

Ah, the standard excuse: too busy. That's mostly true. Well, there's work, then there's the music I'm trying to complete for Kate Mitchell's dance performance in March.
And then there's everything else.

Very little energy left for blogging. And very little that's interesting enough to spread around.

I think I'm mostly in an input mode. Absorbing a lot, with very little left to say.

That should change soon.

On tonight's Music From Other Minds broadcast we'll sample a new recording from New World of the piano and cello music by the early 20th C composer Leo Ornstein. And we preview tomorrow's marathon Other Minds Séance of New Music with a couple of pieces that will be performed during Saturday's 3 concerts.

Leo Ornstein: Six Preludes for Cello and Piano (1929-30);
Composition 1 for cello and piano
Joshua Gordon, cello, Randall Hodgkinson, pno
New World Records 80655 (2007)

George Antheil: Sonata #2 for Violin and Piano
Vera Beths, vn; Reinbert de Leeuw, pno
Disques Montaigne 1995 (out of print)

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen: Double (1994)
Signe Madsen, vn; Erik Kaltoft, pno - DaCapo 8.224225

Tonight, 11pm on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco. And the program will be available all week on our Music from Other Minds website after broadcast.

Information about the Séance concert, at the Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon at Washington, San Francisco, is here

Saturday's Other Minds New Music Séance was a total success. We filled the hall for all three concerts. And everything worked!

The performances Sarah Cahill, Kate Stenberg, and Eva-Maria Zimmermann were awesome. Sarah's playing of Hans Otte's #10 from Das Buch der Klänge , a work I'd never heard before, was mesmerizing... very intricate arpeggios and counter-arpeggios that seemed to go on forever (...and very well could have, without complaints). Kate and Eva-Maria did a spectacular job with Webern's Four Pieces from 1910, and the two wild ones from George Antheil, his "Woman Sonata" and "2nd Sonata", both from 1923. And the world-premiere of Ron Bruce Smith's "Tombeau" was especially well received.

What an amazing concert marathon!

And thanks to the staff at the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco!


Stay tuned, more pictures to come. And soon we'll have the recordings up on the RadiOM.org website.

The Common Sense Composer's Collective has a new CD on Albany Records featuring music by most of their members, Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Dan Becker, Ed Harsh, Randall Woolf, Carolyn Yarnell, and John Halle. It was recorded in 2002 (why does it take so long to get a CD out?). Some very exciting and fresh music here, and we'll be serving some of the pieces on next Friday's MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program (#97) on KALW San Francisco.

Also featured will be Dan Joseph's Percussion and Strings which appeared last year on a MutableMusic release.

This Friday (March 2nd) 11pm on KALW 91.7 San Francisco and real time stream.

After broadcast, it will be available as an on-demand "listen again" stream from our website, http://rchrd.com/mfom/.

SFMike covers last Saturday's Séance concert on his website. Lots of great pictures and background information. Thanks, Mike! In the picture above, left to right, are Eva-Maria Zimmermann, Ron Smith, Phil Collins, Dan Becker, Sarah Cahill, Carl Stone, Kate Stenberg, and Charles Amirkhanian.