Other Minds Presents

a New Music

Summoning the specters of musical forbears,

channeling the spirits of their successors

Ruth Crawford, 1924

Saturday, the sixth of December

T wo thousand and eight
at one o’clock, four o’clock, and eight o’clock
Swedenborgian Church of San Fr ancisco
A Message from the
Artistic Director

Welcome to our third New Music Séance. We’ve created

this unusual day-long event in the historic Swedenborgian
Church to resurrect the sources of new music and place
them side by side with recent compositions. A particular
focus is the American maverick tradition of Charles Ives,
Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison,
and other pathbreakers courageous enough to withstand a
barrage of skepticism early in their careers but who lived to
find wider acceptance late in life.

In contrast to our annual Other Minds Festival featuring

music of living composers who are in attendance, the
Séance affords us the opportunity to delve into the past
century for composer predecessors and for selections
of music that are rarely played. Researching with our
dedicated performers, Sarah Cahill, Kate Stenberg, and
Eva-Maria Zimmermann, we have gathered an array of
music we hope you find revelationary, and in this spiritual
setting we have tried to include some works that are
contemplative, meditative and unjustly neglected. We
trust that the roaring fireplace and candlelit interior of
this magnificent 1895 church will provide a conducive
environment as we channel these innovative composers for
you.

We’re pleased to have the world premieres of works by

Steed Cowart, Ingram Marshall and Mamoru Fujieda, the
latter two commissioned and presented by Sarah Cahill.
Eva-Maria Zimmermann will introduce obscure works for
piano solo by Per Nørgård and Tan Dun. And Kate Stenberg
will essay music by violinist-composer Grazyna Bacewicz,
along with hauntingly beautiful works by Somei Satoh and
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Ruth Crawford’s powerful
Violin Sonata.
2
 Charles Amirkhanian
Executive & Artistic Director

This year we will touch on the work of

seven women composers and arrangers,
including a full concert devoted to the
an impressive American music icon, Carol Law

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953).

Crawford was a composer whose work was both prophetic
and brilliant. She met the love of her life in musicologist
Charles Seeger, who had taught Henry Cowell in Berkeley,
from 1914–16. (The bronze bust of Cowell by Gertrude
Boyle Kanno, on view tonight, was made in 1917 when
Cowell was 20.) It’s our pleasure to have with us from
Boston Crawford’s biographer Judith Tick, who will speak
about Crawford’s life preceding our third and final concert.

Thank you for attending this event and we hope to see

you again at our 14th Other Minds Festival (March 5–7,
2009) in San Francisco. Composers this year include
Ben Johnston (Wisconsin), Pawel Szymanski and Pawel
Mykietyn (both from Poland), Chico Mello (b. Brazil,
living in Berlin), Linda Catlin Smith (b. USA, living in
Toronto), Catherine Lamb (Los Angeles), John Schneider
(Los Angeles), Michael Harrison (New York), and Bent
Sørensen (Denmark). Our performers include Trio con
Brio (Denmark), Del Sol String Quartet (San Francisco),
and just-intonation guitarist John Schneider. And we’ll
also have the American premiere of a new work by Arvo
Pärt and a tribute to the late Mauricio Kagel, played by the
Amsterdam Cello Octet.

The candles are lit, and now it’s time for our Séance. Happy
holidays to one and all.

3
Birds in Warped Time
Concert One, 1:00 PM
Percy Gr ainger
Shepherd’s Hey (1908)
Irish Tune from County Derry (1902)
Sarah Cahill, piano

Gr azyna Bacewicz
Stained Glass Window (1932)
Melodia (1946)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

Meredith Monk
St. Petersburg Waltz (1993)
Sarah Cahill, piano

Somei Satoh
Birds in Warped Time II (1980)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Sarah Cahill, piano
§§§
Tan Dun
Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978-9)
I. Missing Moon, II. Staccato Beans,
III. Herdboy’s Song, VII. Floating Clouds,
VIII. Sunrain
Per Nørgård
Animals in Concert (1988)
I. Esperanza, A Hermit Crab Tango
II. Tortoise Tango: Without Jealousy
Eva-Maria Zimmerman, piano

Dylan Mattingly
Night #3 (2008)
Luciano Berio
Wasserklavier (1964)
Lois V Vierk
To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)
Steed Cowart
Blackberry Winter (2007)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano

Olivier Messiaen
Fantaisie for Violin & Piano (1933)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Deep River Dreams
Concert Two, 4:00 PM

Samuel Barber
Excursions, Op. 20 (1944)
I. Un poco allegro
II. In slow blues tempo
III. Allegretto
VII. Allegro molto

Olivier Messiaen
Eight Préludes (1929)
V. Les sons impalpables du rêve
VI. Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu
Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

MORTON FELDMAN
Piano Piece 1955
Piano Piece 1956, A & B
Sarah Cahill, piano

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Deep River, Op. 59, No. 10 (arr. ca. 1904)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

Ingr am Marshall
Movement (Deep in My Heart) (2008)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano

Gabriela Lena Fr ank

Sueños de Chambi: Snapshots for an
Andean Album (2002)
V. Adoración para Angelitos
VI. Harawi de Chambi
VII. Marinera: “Folkloric Musicians, Cuzco, Peru 1934
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

Mamoru Fujieda
The Olive Branch Speaks (2008)
+world premiere Sarah Cahill, piano
Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu
Lecture (Prof. Judith Tick), 7:00 PM Concert Three, 8:00 PM
This project has been made possible by the National Endowment for the
Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.

Alexander Scriabin
Five Preludes, Op. 74 (1914)
I. Douloreaux, déchirant, II. Très lent, contemplatif,
III. Allegro drammatico, IV. Lent, vague, indécis,
V. Fier, belliqueux

Dane Rudhyar
Pentagram No. 4 (The Human Way) (1926)
I. Pomp, II. Yearning

Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 4: Grave, No. 5: Lento

Henry Cowell
Tiger (1927)
Lou Harrison
Largo Ostinato to John Dobson (1937)
Sarah Cahill, piano

Johanna Beyer
Suite for Violin and Piano (1937)
I., II., III.

Henry Cowell
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945)
III. Ballade, IV. Jig
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

§§§
Johanna Beyer
Bees (date unknown)
Dissonant Counterpoint II (ca. 1934)
Gebrauchs-Musik III (1936)
Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 7: Intensivo, No. 9: Tranquillo
Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930)
Sarah Cahill, piano

Sonata for Violin & Piano (1926)

I. Vibrante, agitato, II. Buoyant,
III. Mistico, intenso, IV. Allegro (attacca)
Kate Stenberg, violin; Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu
by Judith Tick

Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) came of age as a composer in the

1920s. It was a surprise to her, as well as to anyone who knew her before
she arrived in Chicago in 1921 to attend the American Conservatory of
Music. She intended to stay one year and then go back home to her mother
in Jacksonville, Florida, and establish a piano studio forthwith. A career
as a “lady pianist,” to use her mother’s language, awaited her. Eight
years later she had composed about half of her surviving works and had
established a career as an “ultra modern” composer.
How this happened had many familiar components: self discovery
through musical training with outstanding professionals; a new group
of competitive peers; a great orchestra to hear one season after another
led by a conductor (Frederick Stock) who played lots of modern music.
But it also involved a particular milieu that Crawford stumbled upon and
particular ideas that once exposed to she adopted and developed as her
own artistic core.
At the center of Crawford’s transformation was a new piano
teacher she engaged in 1924—a French Canadian woman named Djane
(pronounced Diane) Lavoie Herz. Herz counted among her other pupils
a young teenager Vivian Fine, who would later study composition with
Crawford as well. At a time when little American avant-garde music was
performed in Chicago, the Herz home served as an informal salon, and
as Fine later recalled, it was a haven of avant-garde music for “the six
and a half people interested in it. [It was] a kind of Mecca for visiting
contemporary musicians, of which there weren’t many in those days.”
In 1925 Crawford met one of Herz’s close friends, the “ethereal”
Dane Rudhyar. Not much older than Ruth, Rudhyar (1895–1985) already
had twice her experience. A French émigré, intellectually reborn through
his discovery of Hindu philosophy, the composer came to the United States
in 1914. By 1921 Rudhyar claimed support from such composers as Carl
Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and even Charles Ives.
Both Herz and Rudhyar exposed Crawford to the music of the
Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and to his mystical aesthetics.
Like Herz, Rudhyar hailed Scriabin’s music as a “magical force used by
the spiritual Will to produce ecstasy, that is, communion with the Soul!”
Crawford fell under Scriabin’s spell; Rudhyar’s music seemed revelatory as
well. In 1925 she heard some of his piano preludes (Moments later revised
as Tetragrams). According to Rudhyar, these preludes helped Crawford
compose “the first interesting music she wrote.” In fact two of her preludes
had been written before they met.
To Crawford, Rudhyar was a messianic figure, whose passionate
espousal of utopian modernism affected her deeply. She installed Rudhyar
as a second “idol” in her private temple of art; she was “immersed” in him.
Listening to him espouse Theosophy, she was “dazzled by his erudition.”
As the kind of person who pushed herself to epiphanies, Crawford was
frequently “beginning to see” this or that idea or concept, or “preparing
for a discovery.” In 1927 she “suddenly realized” what in fact she had been
writing poems about for two years: “the close relation of the artistic and
the religious emotion,” and like Rudhyar and Djane Herz, she embraced

7
the prototype of the artist/priest/mystic. Along with this came their
version of emancipated dissonance.
In Rudhyar’s creationist myth of the origins of harmonic practice,
consonance was “tribal”—and therefore inferior—because it represented
the primitive expression of provincial habits. Dissonance, on the other
hand, was “universal” because it symbolized the inclusiveness of the
theosophical “Universal Brotherhood.” In effect, he equated social
emancipation with the emancipation of the total chromatic. Crawford
found that “contact with Rudhyar has given me quite a bit of freedom.” She
exercised that freedom by embracing harmonic dissonance, passionate
lyricism, and dark low-register chords that evoke Scriabin’s prototypical
famous “mystic chord” based on fourths. In November 1928 she praised
Rudhyar’s vision of the brotherhood of man, which “blends all as human
beings, despite slight exteriors which are discordant. To bring together in
harmony far-related objects is a glorious achievement.” By that time she
had embraced spirituality as a crucial component of her own aesthetic.
The following year she wrote of herself:
I like to wonder about things rather than know about
them. Do I really want peace? My tendency is toward
spiritual concept. I ‘feel’ it, my thought bends that way,
yet I see great beauty in other concepts.” (Diary, July 26, 1929)
The “wonder” and the “spiritual concept” found fuller expression in
sources beyond Theosophy. In her diaries from the late 1920s Crawford
quoted passages from Lao Tse’s Tao, sections of writings by the
transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau and poetry by Walt Whitman.
(This eclectic combination of ideas may seem odd, but they had in fact
been linked in American intellectual life since the turn of the century.)
Henry Cowell was another composer who proved crucial to
Crawford’s development in more important ways. He too visited Djane Herz
as he criscrossed the country looking for audiences for his piano recitals
and fellow travelers in the avant garde. Crawford met Cowell in 1925. He
was twenty-eight years old, just at the threshold of a career as composer,
pianist, and leader of the ultra-modern wing of American composition.
One year earlier Cowell had founded his New Music Society, intended to
support concert series at which recent works would be played exclusively.
At his debut recital in Chicago on February 28, 1924, one critic described
him as a “pale young man, languid and blasé, quite at ease but indifferent
to surroundings,” who had come to Chicago to show its pianists “how to
crush all the keys at once.”
Cowell was so impressed by Crawford’s music that soon he invited
her to join the non-resident Board of Outside Advisors for the New Music
Society. In 1926 he included her in his lecture series on modern music
in San Francisco and Carmel, California, surveying music by “Goossens,
Honegger, Malipiero, Béla Bartók, Leo Ornstein, Ruth Crawford, Edgard
Varèse and other important modem composers, showing the trend which
is indicated by their music.”
Henry Cowell considered Ruth Crawford to be an amazing
discovery for two reasons. Not only was she a “completely natural
dissonant composer,” but she was also that minor miracle: a woman who
could actually write his kind of new music. He praised her Sonata for
Violin and Piano as “vital... with none of the undesirable sentimentality
8
which often destroys the creative efforts of women composers.” For the
magazine Musicalia, he wrote, “Her work of deep beauty is at the level of
high accomplishment that men realize. She is the only female composer
that I know of, of which I can say this.” Cowell published Crawford’s four
piano preludes in the fifth issue of the New Music Quarterly in October
1928. This turned out to be the only music from her Chicago period that
was published in her lifetime. More than any other musician, not only
in the 1920s but throughout their enduring friendship, Henry Cowell
supported Ruth Crawford, the composer. All subsequent publications of
her music and the one recording of her work in her lifetime came under
his sponsorship or through the organizations which he had founded.
In 1929 Cowell changed Crawford’s musical and personal
destiny even more profoundly. He encouraged her to move to New York to
study with his former teacher, Charles Seeger. He arranged for lodgings
at the home of a patron-friend and Crawford risked everything to go.
Soon Charles Seeger’s discipline of “dissonant counterpoint” dislodged
Crawford’s harmony-based style. A new phase of her career began
and such famous works as Piano Study in Mixed Accents and String
Quartet 1931 (both finished in Berlin on a Guggenheim Fellowship) soon
followed. She and Charles married and had four children between 1932
and 1941. Their participation in modernist music waned; their priorities
shifted dramatically to American folk music (Pete Seeger, Charles’s son
from a previous marriage and Mike and Peggy Seeger formed the next
generation of this famous family of the American folk revival.) Although
Crawford’s own career as a composer got derailed by the priorities of
family, income-producing piano teaching, and perhaps most of all by
folk revival activities, she took on occasional composition pupils. Among
them was Johanna Beyer, who studied dissonant counterpoint with both
Cowell and then Crawford in the late 1930s. Thus the cycle of avant-garde
apprenticeships continued.
Techniques change to be sure, but the essence of “personality” (to
borrow a favorite term from Aaron Copland, who knew Crawford and later
regretted underrating her work) remains. No matter what the language
and techniques of Crawford’s compositions, we honor the spiritual
resonance of her music as one of the qualities which make it so compelling
today. Even the String Quartet 1931, praised as proto-serial now was more
appreciated in its own time for its expressive qualities. “Spiritual in spite
of method,” her friend Wallingford Riegger wrote of its slow movement in a
private note to her. Rudhyar, who believed Ruth Crawford had lost her way
by following Charles Seeger, just might have smiled.

Judith Tick, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Music at Northeastern University in

Boston, specializes in American 20th-Century music and Women’s Studies in music. As the author
of articles and books about Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, she has won
two ASCAP Deems Taylor awards and two awards for outstanding scholarship from the Society
for American Music. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and
serves on the editorial board of Musical Quarterly. Her most recent book, Music in the USA: A
Documentary Companion, with Paul Beaudoin as Assistant Editor, was published by Oxford
University Press in 2008. She was recently appointed to the Board of Advisors for the revision of The
New Grove Dictionary of American Music. She served as Consulting Scholar and Guest Speaker for
the 2007 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
9
Birds in Warped Time
Program Notes, Concert One

Percy Gr ainger
Shepherd’s Hey (1908)
Irish Tune from County Derry (1902)
Grainger set numerous folk tunes from the British Isles and
various Scandinavian countries for classical ensembles,
often publishing multiple versions in different scorings for
each song. Shepherd’s Hey was collected by musicologist
Cecil Sharp when he heard the violinist of the Bidford
Morris Dancers play this tune in 1906 and it was there
that Grainger encountered the music. It became one of his
most-played compositions. Irish Tune from County Derry
was collected in the early 1850s by Miss Jane Ross of
New Town, Limavady, County Derry, but she neglected to
ask the name of the piece. Today it’s widely known as “A
Londonderry Air” or “Danny Boy.”
–Charles Amirkhanian

Gr azyna Bacewicz
Stained Glass Window (1932)
Melodia (1946)
Although Bacewicz’s later music turned more dramatic and
chromatic, the haunting strains of Stained Glass Window
hails from her earlier connection to French Impressionism
through the colored musical glass of her elder compatriot
Karol Szymanowski. Melodia (Song) employs modal
harmonies in a compressed three-movement setting,
complete with mini-cadenza at the end of the development.
–Charles Amirkhanian

Meredith Monk
St. Petersburg Waltz (1993)
St Petersburg Waltz is a piece for solo piano performed by
Nurit Tilles, a Monk associate since Do You Be (and also
featured on all of Steve Reich’s New Series albums). The
Waltz was written after Monk returned from a long journey
through Asia. “Oddly enough, being in Asia made me
think more than ever about my blood roots—my parents’
10
Russian/Polish Jewish background. This Eastern lineage
is something I share with Nurit Tilles, whose parents were
Polish Jews. I wrote this piece especially for Nurit. As I
worked on it, I sensed my Russian grandfather in a very
strong way. St. Petersburg Waltz was inspired by the idea of
a place rather than the place itself.”
–Meredith Monk

Somei Satoh
Birds in Warped Time II (1980)
Birds in Warped Time II is Somei Satoh’s only work for
violin and piano to date. Here the violin is not overtly
imitating the kokyu (a bowed snake-skin fiddle used in
traditional Japanese music) but the wide vibratos spanning
a quarter-tone, the expressive, speech-like quality of the
embellishments along with the modal and pentatonic
melodic patterns all contribute to the unmistakably
Japanese atmosphere. The iridescent shimmering of the
piano provides an impressionistic backdrop through
subtly shifting tremolo figurations repeated in a minimalist
fashion.
–Margaret Leng Tan

Tan Dun
Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978-9)
I. Missing Moon, II. Staccato Beans,
III. Herdboy’s Song, VII. Floating Clouds,
VIII. Sunrain
Eight Memories in Watercolor was written when I left Hunan
to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
It was my opus one. The Cultural Revolution had just
ended, China just opened its doors, I was immersed in
studying Western classical and modern music, but I was
also homesick. I longed for the folksongs and savored the
memories of my childhood. Therefore, I wrote my first piano
work as a diary of longing. Many of the melodies are based
on my favorite folksongs from my childhood in Hunan.
–Tan Dun

11
Per Nørgård
Animals in Concert (1988)
I. Esperanza, A Hermit Crab Tango
II. Tortoise Tango: Without Jealousy
“Tortoise Tango” and “Hermit Crab Tango” are movements of
the suite Animals in Concert, originally composed for piano.
The tortoise as tango dancer must presumably possess
certain rhythmic peculiarities, which I have chosen to
express by letting the tune of the tortoise shuffle broadly,
tripartite through the strict four-partite time of tango. The
situation is quite different as far as the Hermit Crab Tango
is concerned. It is a well-known fact that the hermit crab—
this soft animal—must run the gauntlet among the many
perils at the bottom of the sea when it must move house.
I have chosen to express the angers by a tango pattern—
sharp as a cactus—through which the tune, optimistic,
slips to its new shelter. I have borrowed the tune from
Hanne Methling’s Introduction. “I want to get through this
time,” she sings in the ecstatically ascending melody line—
and I believe that these words must correspond very well to
the mood of the hermit crab.
–Per Nørgård

Dylan Mattingly
Night #3 (2008)
Night #3 (“don’t the moon look good, mama”) is an eight
minute lullaby for solo piano, a lullaby for those nights
when old guitar strings or a slow fan blows in a fog-wind
down the bay, down through that moon somewhere up
above where your eyes can get, somewhere up above those
sweet gushing airplanes who look down on all us little
lights the same, who keep going going like that ocean (O
dreamwater in the dark!), like the freeway, like Shenendoah
being picked real slow, out past railroads and mountains
and gas stations that peek out of the dark like a reflection
of some long lost memory of Mediterranean stillness, like
the first notes of this piece (deep low black on the left of the
piano), when your bright light stays up staining the dark
outside by that tarped pool, until someone’s rainbow laugh
plugs in this lonesome night like the whole great amplifier

12
of the world finally got switched on, and suddenly this
driving flying American black is playing an electric blues!
–Dylan Mattingly

Luciano Berio
Wasserklavier (1964)
Wasserklavier, water-piano in German, composed for the
Italian pianist Antonio Ballista, has an interesting history.
It was initially written for two pianos, and was soon after
reworked for one piano. Berio, dissatisfied after hearing
recordings of a famous European pianist’s recording of
short pieces by Brahms and Schubert, determined to
set things right, pianistically. This short, tonal, piece
incorporates motives from Brahms’s Op. 117 no. 2 together
with Schubert’s Op. 142 no. 1, with a prominent bass line
featuring repeated F’s. The ironic ending, however, could
only be written by the composer of Sinfonia.
–John Thow

Lois V Vierk
To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)
When it is calm the ocean is gentle and inviting. It can be
mysteriously majestic or humblingly powerful. Sometimes
it thrashes about frighteningly. The title of my piece was
inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem “Her Triumph.” Yeats’s
words say to me that the energy of life itself is untamed and
often wilder and more beautiful than what shows on the
surface.
  The piece is played entirely inside the piano on
the strings. It is composed in three sections, beginning
percussively in the lowest register, adding “tremolos” and
“trills” (no pitches here are notated exactly). The music
moves to higher strings and develops tonally with plucked
string phrases and dynamic glissandos. It ends with a
flurry on the highest strings.
–Lois V Vierk

Steed Cowart
Blackberry Winter (2007)
In December 2007 an old friend, Daniel Wolf, an American
composer who lives in Germany, invited me to contribute a
composition to a collection of piano pieces he was hosting
13
on his blogsite. The works were to have a winter theme in a
set called “A Winter Album.” I don’t know how music might
convey winter-ness without extra-musical references. I used
a title, Blackberry Winter, to make my piece seem wintery.
The expression “blackberry winter” is used in the South
to refer to a brief period of cold weather after spring has
already started to warm.
–Steed Cowart

Olivier Messiaen
In honor of the centenary of his birth on December 10, 1908

Fantaisie for Violin & Piano (1933)

Olivier Messiaen’s Fantaisie for Violin and Piano, though
written in 1933, was only published by Durand in January
of 2007. The one-movement work is dedicated to Messiaen’s
first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos. The Fantaisie is
a rarity in Messiaen’s output, being one of only three
chamber works with a solo violin, though it bears some
of Messiaen’s familiar compositional hallmarks despite
lacking an explicit theological program. The Fantaisie
appears to be modeled as a first-movement sonata form. An
opening declamatory theme in the piano, which Messiaen
reused later that year in the second movement of the
orchestral work L’Ascension (1932–33), leads into the first-
subject area. The descending triplet figure in the violin
recurs throughout the work. The second-subject area is
a passage of long, lyrical melodies, similar to those in Le
Verbe from the organ cycle La Nativité du Seigneur (1935).
Messiaen introduces brass-like writing in the piano during
the development; the two instruments gradually moving
towards a passionate climax before the recapitulation
begins. The work concludes with a virtuosic coda. The
sonata-movement pattern might leave one wondering if
Messiaen had further movements planned; however, even
if this were the case, the Fantaisie is more than strong
enough to stand as a work its own right.
–Luke Berryman

14
Deep River Dreams
Program Notes, Concert Two

Samuel Barber
Excursions, Op. 20 (1944)
I. Un poco allegro
II. In slow blues tempo
III. Allegretto
VII. Allegro molto
Barber’s first piano composition amply demonstrates his
mastery of style and idiom. The composer has provided
a brief explanation for the title of the work: “these are
‘Excursions’ in small classical forms into regional American
idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their
source in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of
local instruments, are easily recognized.” As Barber implies,
these pieces are evocative, not imitative. The first movement
suggests jazz elements, the second is a convincing blues
piece. The beautiful third movement is a seamlessly flowing
arrangement of folksong material brilliantly scored for the
piano. The final movement brings to mind folk instruments
handled with virtuosity.
–Jeffrey Jacob

Olivier Messiaen
In honor of the centenary of his birth on December 10, 1908

Eight Préludes (1929)

V. Les sons impalpables du rêve
VI. Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu
A year after Le banquet céleste [his first published work],
while still a composition student of Paul Dukas at the
Conservatoire, Messiaen produced his Eight Préludes for
piano. Dukas brought them to the attention of his own
publisher, Durand, who suggested bringing out a small
selection; however, to his credit, Dukas insisted that
they should all be published as a set, which was done in
1930. While these pieces show the influence of Debussy’s
Impressionism, their harmonic richness emphasizes
the personal commitment of a composer whose religious
convictions provided the mainspring of his creative
inspiration. This found expression in a profound love for
15
nature, which was already leading the young composer
towards birdsong and rhythm. As a student, he had already
worked on what he called “modes of limited transposition”
which he employed regularly in improvisations on the
organ. ... The sixth Prélude, Cloches d’angoisse et larmes
d’adieu (Bells of anguish and tears of farewell), is the most
extended of the set and a gripping piece of musical intensity
and serenity. The power of the bells rises dramatically to
a climax which is wonderfully replaced by a pure melody
which, in turn, seems to unwind at each repetition until a
mere three notes provide a final “adieu.”
–Denby Richards

Morton Feldman
Piano Piece 1955
Piano Piece 1956, A & B
These three brief pieces explore the entire range of the
keyboard with a variety of articulations and attacks and a
continuous juxtaposition of sound and silence. Piano Piece
1955 is marked “Slowly and quietly.” Piano Piece 1956A,
with a dedication “To Cynthia,” is marked “Slowly and
softly.” Feldman asks the pianist to depress certain keys
silently, creating subtle sympathetic resonances (in some
cases too subtle to be heard). Piano Piece 1956B also uses
sympathetic resonances, and while it is marked “Slow—soft
as possible,” Feldman has noted three pitches in the piece
which should be played “as loud as possible.”
–Sarah Cahill

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Deep River, Op. 59, No. 10 (arr. ca. 1904)
Although Coleridge-Taylor composed prolifically for violin,
the present work is derived from one of his piano solos
from the collection 24 Negro Melodies. The arrangement is
by the unjustly forgotten American violinist Maud Powell
(1867–1920), a brilliant performer who studied in 1884
with Joseph Joachim, and who concertized in nearly every
major American city and many smaller ones between 1885
and 1920 when she died. Like Coleridge-Taylor, she refused
to curtail her work and touring. After suffering a heart
attack brought on by exhaustion, she tried to honor further
16
concert commitments and the music world was shocked to
learn of her death at 52.
While touring England in 1902 she met Edward
Elgar and young Samuel Coleridge-Taylor who later
dedicated his Violin Concerto to Powell. As there was little
modern repertory for the violin at a time when Powell was
the first American-born violinist to record 78rpms, she
often would arrange music for the combination of violin and
piano, as she did with Coleridge-Taylor’s Deep River.
Many of Powell’s recordings are being re-released on
Naxos compact discs, including her version of Deep River.
Her biography, Maud Powell—Pioneer American Violinist
by Karen A. Shaffer and Neva Garner Greenwood, with a
forward by Yehudi Menuhin, was released in 1988 by Iowa
State University Press.
Of this arrangement she later confessed in
contemplating the use of octaves, “Though they are
supposed to add volume of tone they sound hideous to me.
I have used them in certain passages of my arrangement of
Deep River but when I heard them played, promised myself
I would never repeat the experiment.”
The words of the spiritual derive from Zachariah,
Book 10: “And he shall pass through the sea with affliction,
and shall smite the waves in the sea, and all the deeps of
the river shall dry up: and the pride of Assyria shall be
brought down, and the scepter of Egypt shall depart away.”

Deep river,
My home is over Jordan.
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.

O don’t you want to go

To that gospel feast,
That promised land
Where all is peace?
O don’t you want to go
To that promised land,
That land where all is peace?

17
 Deep river,
My home is over Jordan.
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.

–Charles Amirkhanian

Ingr am Marshall
Movement (Deep in My Heart) (2008)
The famous civil rights “anthem” “We Shall Overcome” is
the basis for this music. The title Movement refers to that
struggle and to a piece of piano music by Debussy simply
called Mouvement. It too has its say in this music. The
music alternates between two textures: a continuous moto
perpetuo mostly written in an “inbal” or dove-tail style, and
a slow descending figure which stops the forward motion,
or, it could be argued, constitutes the real movement in the
piece.
–Ingram Marshall

Gabriela Lena Fr ank

Sueños de Chambi: Snapshots for an
Andean Album (2002)
V. Adoración para Angelitos
VI. Harawi de Chambi
VII. Marinera: “Folkloric Musicians, Cuzco, Peru 1934
Sueños de Chambi: Snapshots for an Andean Album is
inspired by the work of Martín Chambi (1891–1973), the
first Amerindian photographer to achieve international
acclaim, albeit posthumously. In a career spanning half a
century, he recorded as much of Peruvian life, architecture,
and landscape as possible. In his documentation of both
the Quechua-speaking descendants of the Incas and the
mestizo (mixed-race) elite, Chambi produced more than
18,000 glass negatives depicting the customs and festivals,
the working lives and public celebrations of 20th-Century
Peruvians. Sueños de Chambi (“Dreams of Chambi”) is
my musical interpretation of seven photos from Chambi’s
vast collection of pictures. The fifth movement, “Adoración
para Angelitos,” sets a Peruvian nursery rhyme as a piano
solo to reflect “Dead Child Displayed for the Mourners,

18
Cuzco, Peru, 1920s,” a photograph of a deceased child laid
out among flowers and candles on a bed, ready for burial.
There is a self-portait of Chambi which caught my eye
for its similarity
to a portrait of
Miguel Quispe.
Consequently, in
the sixth movement,
“Harawi de Chambi,”
the same harawi
melody from the
introduction is set
in the finale. I also
pay tribute to the
folk-influenced
music of Béla
Bartók by alluding
to his Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1922). “Folkloric
Musicians, Cuzco, Peru, 1934” is the inspiration for the
final movement, “Marinera.” It is in an enlivened marinera
style, a coastal dance popular among folk musicians
throughout Peru.
–Gabriela Lena Frank

Mamoru Fujieda
The Olive Branch Speaks (2008)
The Olive Branch Speaks is included in a series of Patterns
of Plants. The series is based on the melodic patterns
that are extracted from the data of slight changes of
electric potential found in living plants. The changes of
electric potential not only present the condition of the
living organism but also show the transformation of the
ecosystem surrounding the plants. In The Olive Branch
Speaks, written for Sarah Cahill, the data of olive plants,
which I take care of in my apartment, is used for the
composition. There are two small movements, which have
unique melodic patterns. 
–Mamoru Fujieda

19
Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu
Program Notes, Concert Three

Alexander Scriabin
Five Preludes, Op. 74 (1914)
I. Douloreaux, déchirant, II. Très lent, contemplatif,
III. Allegro drammatico, IV. Lent, vague, indécis,
V. Fier, belliqueux
The Five Preludes, Op. 74, among Scriabin’s last
compositions, distill his mature style into compressed
forms: the longest of these preludes is only 26 bars. The
writer/pianist Donald Garvelmann wrote: “Opus 74 is
psychologically jarring, shattering. All the sadness and
troubles of the world are encapsulated in these few pages.”
–Sarah Cahill

Dane Rudhyar
Pentagram No. 4 (The Human Way) (1926)
I. Pomp, II. Yearning
Originally entitled “The Human Way,” the five-movement
Pentagram No. 4 was written between 1924 and 1926, and
began as a work for two pianos. It remained in manuscript
until it was published in a version for solo piano in the
1970s. The first three Pentagrams, also published in the
1970s, are revised versions of earlier pieces by Rudhyar as
well. As a cycle, the four Pentagrams present a gradually
increasing subtlety and complexity in the use of harmony.
The fourth Pentagram in particular is unified structurally,
with motivic connections linking its various movements. In
the second movement, “Yearning,” the listener might notice
references to the famous yearning letimotif from the Prelude
to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
–Ronald Squibbs

Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 4: Grave, No. 5: Lento
The Preludes were written while Crawford was studying
with Djane Lavoie-Herz in Chicago. Judith Tick has noted
that Crawford shared Herz’s interests in “theosophy,
Eastern religious philosophy, 19th-Century American
20
Transcendentalism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt
Whitman.” It was to Herz that Crawford dedicated, “with
deep love and gratitude to Djane,” her Nine Preludes. Herz
was also a leading proponent and interpreter of Scriabin,
whose harmonic and metric influence echo through
the Preludes (when Ruth Crawford brought them to her
teacher Charles Seeger, he called them “derivative” of
Scriabin). In 1927, Crawford wrote in her diary that Bach
“and Scriabin are to me by far the greatest spirits born
to music.” Compound meters, chromatic clusters, lyrical
dissonance, and unusual pedal effects are hallmarks of
these miniatures. Preludes Nos. 1–5 remained unpublished
until 1993.  
–Sarah Cahill

Henry Cowell
Tiger (1927)
In an atonal, dissonant style, this is a set of variations on
two themes stated in the first few measures: one with small
intervals, the other with widely separated intervals. There
are many different kinds of clusters, some of which are
used silently to bring out high overtones, as are also some
small chords. The piece was originally inspired by William
Blake’s “The Tiger.”
–Sidney Cowell et al.

Lou Harrison
Largo Ostinato to John Dobson (1937)
Harrison often recycled material, and revisited compositions
after several decades. This piece was originally written
in 1937, and dedicated to his friend John Dobson, an
astronomer he met while attending San Francisco State
University in the mid-30s. Harrison revised it for piano in
1970, and orchestrated it to become the third movement of
his Third Symphony in 1982. 
–Sarah Cahill

Johanna Beyer
Suite for Violin and Piano (1937)
I., II., III.
Described by the 1937 New York Herald-Tribune as
“experimental in form and modernistic in harmony,”
21
Beyer’s brooding three-movement composition (one of
several solo or duo suites and sonatas she composed
during the 1930s) works like a study in three-against-four.
In the first movement the violin plays mostly in patterns
of four, while the piano plays three repeated single notes
or octaves in the left hand. In the second movement this
relationship is reversed: the violin plays mostly in three
throughout while the piano maintains the pulse in four.
A solo violin cadenza featuring double- and triple-stops
closes this brief middle movement. The third movement also
begins with a violin cadenza before the piano enters with
material from the opening of the piece. Here the low triplet
octaves of the piano return like the memory of a dream,
a relentlessly plodding motive reminiscent of increasingly
insistent knocks on a closed door. Principles of dissonant
counterpoint are evident throughout this short, tightly
organized work, and it is similar in its dark, ominous tone
to Beyer’s Movement for Two Pianos (1931).
–Amy C. Beal

Henry Cowell
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945)
III. Ballade, IV. Jig
About 1942 I came across William Walker’s Southern
Harmony, one of the handbooks of the singing schools that
flourished in post-Revolutionary America, and that may
still be found here and there in the South. This old book
circulated great numbers of the fine old modal British-
American ballad tunes, adapted to religious texts, and it
contained some fuguing tunes from earlier New England
“primitive” composers like Billings, Edson, Read and others.
The music is plain but fervent. The fuguing tunes rarely use
the modes, and they differ from Baroque in being extremely
condensed in length yet freer, and for each voice may have
a tune of its own although the voices (usually three) enter
one after another. They tend to stay closer to the tonic than
European music does, also.
I found myself wondering what turn music in the
United States might have taken if this widespread style
had not disappeared from the knowledge of sophisticated
musicians in this country who scorned anything that did
22
not conform to the European standards for over a hundred
years.
It was not with the idea of imitation, but rather of
carrying forward into a more extended and modern form
some of the basic elements in this old religious music that
I began to write a series of pieces in two parts, the first a
hymn, the second a fuguing tune, often both modal; there
were for various combinations of instruments and voices.
Later on the idea grew in me to extend the fuguing tune
into sonata form by developing two themes. Such a work
would then logically find the basis for the other movements
in other types of traditional American music. The present
sonata is the result. The work was undertaken in 1944
at the suggestion of Joseph Szigeti who recorded it with
pianist Carlo Bussotti for Columbia Records.
–Henry Cowell

Johanna Beyer
Bees (date unknown)
Dissonant Counterpoint II (ca. 1934)
Gebrauchs-Musik III (1936)
Dissonant Counterpoint II and Gebrauchs-Musik III are
two suites of short movements, similar in style and
form. Both are highly dissonant, heterophonic, graceful,
subtle, highly pianistic, and beautiful pieces. They are
important early examples of the influential ideas of Charles
and Ruth Crawford Seeger, yet they also show Beyer’s
unusual tendency towards minimalist, single-minded
formal procedures, and reveal her intensely intimate style.
Dissonant Counterpoint uses formal “phrase structure”
techniques shared by Charles Seeger, while Gebrauchs-
Musik tends to be slightly freer, more lyrical, sedate, and
pensive. Bees is part of a large collection of pedagogical
pieces of Beyer’s, and she has written above the one-page
score: “The bees are so busy.”
–Sarah Cahill

Ruth Cr awford
Nine Preludes (1924–8)
No. 7: Intensivo, No. 9: Tranquillo
Prelude No. 9, inspired by Lao Tse, is one of several
23
Crawford works influenced by Taoist ideas. Henry Cowell
published Preludes Nos. 6–9 in his New Music Edition.
–Sarah Cahill

Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930)

Just slightly more than a minute in length, the Piano Study
in Mixed Accents is a single atonal melody, ascending
from the lowest register to the highest and then returning
downwards, in three- to seven-note gestures. It is a
perfect palindrome. The Piano Study provides a very early
example of choices for the performer. The player may start
pianissimo, gradually crescendo to fortissimo at midpoint,
and then decrescendo back to pianissimo; do the inverse
(start fortissimo, with a decrescendo to pianissimo, etc.); or
play fortissimo throughout.
–Sarah Cahill

Sonata for Violin & Piano (1926)

I. Vibrante, agitato, II. Buoyant,
III. Mistico, intenso, IV. Allegro (attacca)
One of the major works of Crawford’s early years in
Chicago, this powerful sonata nearly perished in 1932
when the composer, in a fit of depression, burned her
copy of the score along with some 200 of her early poems.
Fortunately, composer colleague and confidant Vivian
Fine saved her copy of the manuscript and revived it in
1982, later recording it with violinist Ida Kavafian. Allied in
spirit and style with her taut and pungent piano preludes,
the Violin Sonata achieves a “high drama of expressionist
intensity,” in the words of Crawford’s biographer Judith
Tick. “The violin sweeps through free-ranging lines in which
leaps of sevenths, octaves, and ninths abound. In the
other movements certain signature formal characteristics
appear, among them the use of an ostinato containing some
compelling syncopated or dotted rhythms and an exposed
dissonant interval.” The indication “mystic” appears in the
score more than once, likely inspired by Dane Rudhyar’s
music. But Crawford’s chromatic language is spikier than
the former’s, with his layers of perfect fourths and fifths.
–Charles Amirkhanian

24
Performer Biographies

Sarah Cahill, piano

Sarah Cahill, recently called “as
tenacious and committed an advocate as
any composer could dream of” by Joshua
Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle,
has commissioned, premiered, and recorded
numerous compositions for solo piano.
Composers who have dedicated music to her
include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic
Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Morricone,
and Evan Ziporyn, and she has also premiered
pieces by Lou Harrison, Julia Wolfe, Ingram
Marshall, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ursula Mamlok,
George Lewis, Leo Ornstein, and many others.
Cahill is particularly fascinated Ken Probst
by how the early 20th-Century American
modernists have influenced composers working today. She has explored
these musical lineages in numerous concert programs, the most
ambitious being a three-day festival celebrating the centennial of Henry
Cowell in 1997. For the 2001 centennial of Ruth Crawford Seeger, she
commissioned seven composers, all women, to write short homage
pieces, which she has performed at Merkin Hall, Dartmouth College,
the Cincinnati Conservatory, and at Hampshire College in Amherst. Her
newest project, A Sweeter Music, features eighteen commissions on the
theme of peace, and will premiere on January 25, 2009 at Hertz Hall in
the Cal Performances series, with future performances at New Sounds
Live at Merkin Hall and other venues across the country. She enjoys
working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare
scores for performance.
She has performed at the Miller Theatre and Cooper Union in
New York, the Other Minds Festival, Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo,
at the Spoleto Festival USA, and at the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival in
Rome. Cahill and pianist Joseph Kubera appear frequently as a duo;
they premiered a set of four-hand pieces by Terry Riley at UCLA’s Royce
Hall, and have performed them at the Triptych Festival in Scotland and
at Roulette in New York.
Cahill has recordings available from New Albion, Other Minds,
Tzadik, CRI, New World, Albany, Cold Blue, and Artifact labels. Her
radio show “Then & Now” can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to
10 pm on KALW 91.7 FM.

25
Kate Stenberg, violin
Violinist Kate Stenberg’s career as a soloist and chamber
musician has spanned a broad spectrum of styles with particular
emphasis on contemporary music. New Music Box described one of
her performances at a previous Séance as
“highly virtuosic and deeply communicative...
a startlingly powered interpretation, full of
character and presence.” She has performed
throughout the U.S. and Europe and
currently is most active as first violinist of
the Del Sol String Quartet, whose recent
accomplishments have won them two ASCAP
first prizes for Adventurous Programming
for Contemporary Music. She also plays
with the San Francisco Symphony, the San
Francisco Ballet Orchestra and the San
Francisco Contemporary Music Players and
was a founding member of Left Coast, a
San Francisco-based contemporary music
ensemble. As soloist, she has given world
and U.S. premieres of works by Ronald Jim Block

Bruce Smith, Henning Christiansen, Josef Matthias Hauer, Pelle

Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and Charles Amirkhanian.
Stenberg is first violinist with Del Sol on the world premiere
recording of the complete string quartets of George Antheil, a
compilation Ring of Fire with composers from around the Pacific Rim,
and on a forthcoming CD of the unpublished string quartets of Marc
Blitzstein, all for Other Minds Records. She has also recorded with
Ali Akbar Khan, Stratos and the San Francisco Contemporary Music
Players. Stenberg’s history with Other Minds dates to our first festival
in 1993, where she performed music by Julia Wolfe. She has appeared
subsequently at five other OM Festivals. Her other festival performances
include Centre Acanthes, The Banff Centre, Sandpoint, the Music
Academy of the West and Tanglewood. Stenberg trained with Gunther
Schuller (Sandpoint Festival), Elliott Carter (Festival Acanthes, Avignon)
and Leon Fleisher (Tanglewood). She has performed chamber music with
Bonnie Hampton and Joan Jeanrenaud, and played under the direction
of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Michael Tilson Thomas.
A native of Northern California raised in a dynamic family of
professional musicians, Stenberg is a graduate of the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music and received her Master’s Degree from the
Eastman School of Music where she also served on the violin faculty.
She also has taught at the University of San Francisco and continues to
teach privately. In her spare time she enjoys Tai Chi Chuan and hiking.

26
Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano
Swiss Pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann
maintains a career on two continents through
performances that are “breathtakingly
intense” (Der Bund, Switzerland) and “brilliant
and sensitive” (Berner Oberländer). Her solo
appearances include recitals as well as concerto
performances with major symphony orchestras
such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
Winner of the prestigious Rotary International
Ambassadorial Scholarship, Zimmermann has
appeared at international festivals in Israel, the
US and Europe including the Festival Piano
Sven Wiederholt
en Saintonge in France, the Sommerfestspiele
Murten in Switzerland, the Yerba Buena International Music Festival
and the Other Minds Festival. Zimmermann has studied with many
distinguished musicians such as Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, Leonard
Hokanson and Dominique Merlet. She graduated with highest honors
from the Conservatory of Geneva.
Zimmermann is a musician of broad interests and in addition
to her solo appearances devotes herself to chamber music, lieder
recitals, and teaching. Her partnership in ChamberBridge with soprano
Lara Bruckmann includes both concertizing and the production of an
annual one-day festival celebrating the work and compositional lineage
of a selected 20th/21st-Century composer (2008 ChamberBridge:
Messiaen Illuminated). Other collaborations include projects with the
Del Sol String Quartet (Del Sol – Del Seoul: premieres of Korean women
composers in Seoul) and bass-baritone René Perler (Festival du Lied,
Fribourg, Switzerland). Zimmermann was a founding member of the
award winning Charmillon Piano Quartet. Many of her chamber music
and lieder recitals have been broadcasted in Swiss Radio DRS2 and
Radio de la Suisse Romande. As an educator, Zimmermann has been a
faculty member of the University of San Francisco and currently teaches
in the music program at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA, which
was founded by Sir Yehudi Menuhin.
Zimmermann spent her early childhood in Indonesia, where
her parents were Peace Corps workers. Being exposed to different
cultures and languages from very early on has greatly enhanced
her understanding of diverse styles of music and art. Zimmermann
currently lives in San Francisco where she pursues her career while
raising a family.

27
Composer Biographies
The late Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–1969) began her
career as both a violinist and composer, studying music at the Warsaw
Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Warsaw. With a
scholarship from the great composer and pianist Paderewski, she moved
to France to study with Nadia Boulanger and violinist André Touret.
As a performer she won honorable mention in 1935 at the Wieniawski
Competition and pursued a career as a virtuoso soloist until 1953. She
was praised particularly for her exquisitely pure intonation, utmost
rhythmic precision and a perfect sense of musical form. Bacewicz wrote
prolifically for her instrument: six sonatas for violin and piano, four solo
violin sonatas, and seven violin concerti, as well as many miscellaneous
pieces such as Stained Glass Window and her serenely beautiful
Melodia. She also composed six symphonies, incidental music for film
and theatre, and a substantial body of miscellaneous orchestral and
chamber music, including seven string quartets. 

Samuel Barber’s music, masterfully crafted and built on romantic

structures and sensibilities, is at once lyrical, rhythmically complex,
and harmonically rich. Barber (1910–1981) was born in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, writing his first piece at age 7 and attempting his first
opera at age 10. At the age of 14 he entered the Curtis Institute, where
he met lifelong partner and collaborator Gian Carlo Menotti. Menotti
supplied libretti for Barber’s operas Vanessa (for which Barber won the
Pulitzer) and A Hand of Bridge. Barber’s music was championed by a
remarkable range of renowned artists and musicians, from Vladimir
Horowitz to Martha Graham. His intensely lyrical Adagio for Strings has
become one of the most recognizable and beloved compositions, both in
concerts and films (Platoon, The Elephant Man, El Norte, Lorenzo’s Oil).

Luciano Berio (1925–2003) was born into a musical family from

the Ligurian coastal town of Oneglia. After studies at the Milan
Conservatory, he began a long career of living alternately in Italy and
the United States. In 1950 he married American singer Cathy Berberian,
and his regular attendance at the Darmstadt summer school put
him in dialogue with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György
Ligeti, and Mauricio Kagel, among others. Berio’s love for music was
exuberantly promiscuous, and it drew him close to Italian opera, 20th-
Century modernism, popular music, the great Romantic symphonists,
and folk songs from around the world. All gave him models for original
compositions or arrangements, or for works that were neither entirely
new nor entirely old, works in which threads of the old could be
combined with new strands. This was perhaps most clearly expressed in
his famed Sinfonia (1968) for voices and orchestra.

One of the most curious figures in modern American music, Johanna

Magdalena Beyer (1888–1944) was born in Leipzig and came to
New York in 1924, leading a solitary life while producing over 50
28
compositions, some of which anticipate techniques and sounds used
decades later. She studied composition with Dane Rudhyar, Ruth
Crawford, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell. She died of ALS (“Lou
Gehrig’s Disease”) and left her manuscripts to the American Music
Center where they were preserved for future generations.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was the Barack Obama of his

day in English classical music. He was known for his great nobility
and patience and his efforts to establish the dignity of black people.
The composer was born in London to a black Sierra Leone physician,
who thereafter returned to Africa, leaving Samuel’s white English
mother to raise him, which she did brilliantly. Coleridge-Taylor became
a heralded concert violinist whose orchestral compositions, including
The Bamboula and Ethiopia Saluting the Colours were widely performed.
He also conducted the Handel Society from 1904 until the end of his
life. His untimely death from pneumonia, in England at the age of 37,
was attributed to overwork. Stylistically his music is related to that of
Dvorák who, like Percy Grainger, Ruth Crawford, Henry Cowell, and
Gabriela Lena Frank, cultivated the setting of folk music in classical
forms.

Steed Cowart (b. 1953) is a composer, conductor, and teacher living

in Oakland, California. He has composed works for an array of
instrumental and vocal combinations, electronics and inter-media. Since
1986, he has worked at Mills College where he directs the Contemporary
Performance Ensemble and is the Concert Coordinator. He also teaches
music theory at Diablo Valley College, and taught at UC Santa Cruz in
the early 1980s. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, San
Diego, where he studied with Bernard Rands, Pauline Oliveros, Robert
Erickson, Roger Reynolds, and Edwin Harkins. As a conductor, he led
the San Francisco-based Club Foot Orchestra in touring performances
accompanying silent films. He has appeared as guest conductor with the
San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and has conducted many ad
hoc ensembles in performances of new music.

A tireless musical explorer and inventor, Henry Cowell (1897–1965)

was born in Menlo Park, California. Already composing in his early
teens, Cowell began formal training at age 16 with Charles Seeger
at the University of California. His use of varied sound materials,
experimental compositional procedures, and a rich palette colored by
multiple non-European and folk influences revolutionized American
music and popularized, most notably, the tone cluster as an element in
compositional design. In addition to tone clusters evident in such works
as Advertisement and Tiger, Cowell experimented with the “string piano”
in works like The Aeolian Harp and The Banshee where strings are
strummed or plucked inside the piano. Studies of the musical cultures
of Africa, Java, and North and South India enabled Cowell to stretch
and redefine Western notions of melody and rhythm. Cowell’s influence
is legion, counting among his students John Cage, Lou Harrison, and
George Gershwin.
29
Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) was born in East Liverpool, Ohio. In 1921
she moved to Chicago where she studied piano and composition at
the American Conservatory of Music. Crawford left Chicago in 1929 to
continue composition studies with Charles Seeger in New York, whom
she would later marry. In 1930 she traveled to Germany, supported
by the first Guggenheim Fellowship in composition ever awarded to a
woman. There she composed her well-known String Quartet which, along
with her Preludes, established her as a brilliant and inventive composer.
Returning to New York City, Crawford became a vital participant in
the “ultra-modern” school of composition, a group of composers that
included Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and Aaron Copland. Crawford
would later move to Washington, DC, focusing on teaching music
to children and publishing American folk songs, projects she would
continue until her untimely death from cancer at the age of fifty-two.

Born in New York City, Morton Feldman (1926–1987) is best known

for his instrumental pieces, which often feature unusual ensembles
and low dynamic levels. After studying with Wallingford Riegger and
Stefan Wolpe, Feldman met John Cage in 1950. At that time he began
experimenting with grid notation and other indeterminate techniques.
He was deeply involved in the New York arts scene, and dedicated pieces
to friends such as Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Hara, Mark Rothko, and
Philip Guston. Feldman joined the faculty of the University of Buffalo in
1973, and in the ‘80s produced his very long works such as For Philip
Guston (four hours) and String Quartet II (six hours). His numerous
essays and lectures complement a body of work that has influenced an
entire generation, and secured his position as a central figure in 20th-
Century American Music.

Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese

ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Bay Area based
composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) explores her
multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Frank
holds a DMA in composition from the University of Michigan where she
studied with William Bolcom and Michael Daugherty, among others.
Inspired by the works of Béla Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank is
something of a musical anthropologist. She has traveled extensively
throughout South America and her pieces reflect and refract her studies
of Latin American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native
musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her
own. Writing challenging idiomatic parts for solo instrumentalists,
vocalists, chamber ensembles, and orchestras, Frank’s compositions
seem to reflect her virtuosity as a pianist—when not composing, she is a
sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire.

Mamoru Fujieda (b. 1955) received his Ph.D. in music from the
University of California, San Diego in 1988. His composition teachers
have included Joji Yuasa and Morton Feldman, among others. Fujieda
is internationally recognized as one of music’s outstanding younger
30
composers. Working with artists such as John Zorn, Yuji Takahashi,
and Malcolm Goldstein, he composes music that emerges from his
fascination with the essentially collaborative formation of music.
Influenced by Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, he has been working
with alternative tuning systems based on just intonation, and in 1997
he founded Monophony Consort, an ensemble dedicated to music for
alterative tuning systems. His work also includes sound installations
that have incorporated living plants, diatomaceous earth, and aeolian
harps into their construction. Recordings of his work have been released
by Tzadik, ALM Records, Fontec, and the MAM label. He currently
serves as a professor of design at Kyushu University.

Although he was born in Australia and lived for a time in Europe, the
eminent composer and concert pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961)
lived the majority of his years in the United States, from 1917 until his
death. He was an inveterate experimenter attempting at one point to
build keyboard instruments to play continuous glissandi and scoring
works for percussion ensemble to imitate Indonesian gamelan music, not
to mention a plan to create an analog synthesizer. His most courageous
act of benevolence, hiring Henry Cowell as his music copyist and
thereby obtaining his release from San Quentin Prison in 1941, came
at a time when literally the entire music world, including those who had
benefited from Cowell’s tireless publishing and promotion of new music,
abandoned him for four years when he was incarcerated on allegations
of homosexual conduct. 

Born in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Bay Area, Lou Harrison
(1914–2003) established himself as one of the most original and
important American composers of the 20th century. His studies were
with Howard Cooper, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Virgil
Thomson, and he resided on both the east and west coasts of the
United States during the course of his career. He helped introduce the
Indonesian gamelan to the United States and, with William Colvig,
constructed two large gamelans now in use at San Jose State University
and Mills College. Ned Rorem has said, “Lou Harrison’s compositions
demonstrate a variety of means and techniques. In general he is a
melodist. Rhythm has a significant place in his work, too. Harmony
is unimportant, although tonality is. He is one of the first American
composers to successfully create a workable marriage between Eastern
and Western forms.”

Currently living in Connecticut, composer Ingram Marshall (b. 1942)

has lived and worked extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area. After
studies with Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia University and Morton
Subotnick at the California Institute of the Arts, Marshall went on to
study gamelan music in Bali and Java in 1971. Over the next several
years, Marshall further cultivated his interest in Indonesian music
while continuing experimental work in electronic music. Certain
characteristics of Marshall’s music, such as the slowed-down sense
of time and use of melodic repetition, can be traced to his study of
31
Indonesian music. These characteristics pervade his music, but can
be heard especially in his earlier works such as Fog Tropes (1981) and
Gradual Requiem (1980).

Dylan Mattingly (b. 1991) has been writing music for ten years, since
the moment he realized that there was music he wanted to hear which
just didn’t exist. Born in Oakland, California and influenced alike by
Olivier Messiaen, John Adams, and the gritty blues and folk music of
Alan Lomax’s recordings, Mattingly’s music has been performed around
the world, in cities such as Berlin, Sydney, and New York. He is the co-
director of Formerly Known as Classical, a local new music ensemble of
young musicians who perform works written only in their lifetimes, and
plays cello, bass, piano, guitar, and ukulele.

Initially trained at the Paris Conservatoire, French composer Olivier

Messiaen (1908–1992) later became an influential teacher at his alma
mater while serving as organist of La Trinite in Paris for the rest of
his life. His pupils included Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis. On
the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and
while incarcerated he composed his famed Quatuor pour la fin du temps
for piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by
Messiaen and fellow prisoners to an audience of inmates and prison
guards. An ardent ornithologist, Messiaen incorporated birdsong
transcriptions into his music, and developed many innovations in
harmony (including the use of modes of limited transposition) and
rhythm (utilizing rhythms with palindronmic properties). His Roman
Catholic faith was deep and lasting, and much of his music has an
explicitly religious program.

Born and currently based in New York, Meredith Monk (b. 1942) is a
composer, singer, director/choreographer, and creator of new opera,
music theatre works, films and installations. A graduate of Sarah
Lawrence College, Monk has created more than 60 music/theater/
dance and film works since 1964 and has been a recipient of numerous
awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and the prestigious
MacArthur “Genius” Award. In 1968 Monk founded The House, a
company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance,
and then formed the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble in 1978. A
pioneer in extended vocal technique and interdisciplinary performance,
Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and
movement, image and object, light and sound, in an effort to discover
and weave together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking
exploration of the voice as an instrument has expanded the boundaries
of musical composition itself.

In his youth a traditionalist from the mold of Carl Neilsen and Jean
Sibelius, Per Nørgård (b. 1932) has explored many compositional
techniques throughout his career. With an early interest in organic
development and the concept of metamorphosis, the 1960s led Nørgård
to experiment with collage, interference techniques and electronic
32
music. At this time, Nørgård developed his own serial procedure, the
infinity series, that generates melodies fractally and endlessly in multi-
layered polyphony reminiscent of the Renaissance prolation canon.
Upon viewing works by schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolph Wölfli (1864–
1930) in the 1980s, Nørgård adopted a more dramatic, spontaneous
style. This encounter prompted the composition of many of Nørgård’s
most popular works, including Wie ein Kind, performed at OM12. Even
in his Wölfli period, Nørgård did not completely abandon his earlier
compositional techniques. In subsequent work and today, Nørgård melds
his techniques into new forms.

In addition to composing, Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985) was a pioneer

of modern transpersonal astrology, about which he published more
than forty books and hundreds of articles. He also penned two novels
and many books on music, including Dissonant Harmony (1928), The
New Sense of Sound (1930) and The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music
(1982). His compositions often involve concepts from Henri Bergson
and theosophy, as evidenced by titles like Tetragram, Pentagram and
Syntony. Rudhyar influenced many early 20th-Century composers
including Ruth Crawford and Carl Ruggles, as well as later composers
such as James Tenney and Peter Garland, who helped rediscover and
popularize his music in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Somei Satoh (b. 1947) was born in Sendai, Japan, and began his career
in 1969 with Tone Field, an experimental, mixed media group based in
Tokyo. He has gone on to write more than thirty compositions, including
works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, choral and electronic music,
theater pieces and music for traditional Japanese instruments. In one
of his most interesting projects held at a hot springs resort in Tochigi
Prefecture in 1981, Satoh placed eight speakers approximately one
kilometer apart on mountain tops overlooking a huge valley. As a man-
made fog rose from below, the music from the speakers combined with
laser beams and moved the clouds into various formations. A composer
of the post-war generation, Satoh’s hauntingly evocative musical
language is a curious fusion of Japanese timbral sensibilities with
19th-Century Romanticism and electronic technology. Satoh has truly
created an inimitable approach to contemporary Japanese music.

Mystic, visionary, virtuoso, and composer, Alexander Scriabin (1874–

1915) dedicated his life to creating musical works which would, as he
believed, open the portals of the spiritual world. After initial studies at
the Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin began a career as an international
concert pianist, while slowly building his reputation as a composer. In
true Romantic tradition, and influenced by theosophy and Nietzsche,
he sought to situate his work as a composer in the wider spiritual
and intellectual context of his age. Aiming towards mystical ecstasy,
Scriabin’s music features many harmonic innovations such as chords
based on fourths, unexpected chromatic effects, and his much utilized
“mystic chord” (C-F sharp-B flat-E-A-D). After his untimely death at the
age of 43, Scriabin would be proclaimed by Dane Rudhyar to have been
33
“the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization,
the father of the future musician.”

The conceptual and multifaceted composer/conductor Tan Dun (b.

1957) has made an indelible mark on the world’s music scene with a
creative repertoire that spans the boundaries of classical, multimedia,
Eastern and Western musical systems. Tan has composed distinct
series of works which reflect his individual compositional concepts
and personal ideas, among them a series which brings his childhood
memories of shamanistic ritual into symphonic performances; works
which incorporate elements from the natural world; and multimedia
concerti. Based in New York, Tan was born in Simao, China. Having
served as a rice-planter and performer of Peking opera during the
Cultural Revolution, he later studied at Beijing’s Central Conservatory.
He holds a doctoral degree in musical arts from Columbia University of
New York. Among the many international honors he has received, Tan
was elected in 1996 by Toru Takemitsu for the Glenn Gould Prize in
Music Communication.

American composer Lois V Vierk (b. 1951) has spent most of her
career in New York City. Born outside of Chicago, Vierk studied at the
California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and Leonard
Stein, among others. Her interest then turned to gagaku (Japanese
court music), first in L.A. and then in Tokyo, where she studied
with Sukeyasu Shiba, a lead flutist of the Imperial Court Orchestra.
The gradual building of intensity in Vierk’s compositions are one
manifestation of gagaku’s influence on her music. She also composed
the gagaku work Silversword (1996), which was commissioned for
performance by an ensemble led by Shiba, with the premiere occurring
at Lincoln Center. Vierk has written many works for ensembles with
multiples of the same instrument, and her work often uses glissando
prominently and builds exponentially in level of activity.

Special thanks to The Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco and

ProPiano for their sponsorship of the New Music Séance.

14th Other Minds Festival of New Music

March 5, 6, 7, 2009
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

Michael Harrison (USA) John Schneider (USA)

Ben Johnston (USA) Linda Catlin Smith (USA/Canada)
Catherine Lamb (USA) Bent Sørensen (Denmark)
Chico Mello (Brazil/Germany) Pawel Szymanski (Poland)
Pawel Mykietyn (Poland)

Purchase tickets at www.jccsf.org/arts or call (415) 292-1233

34
 Other Minds, Inc., is dedicated to the encouragement and
propagation of contemporary music in all its forms through
concerts, workshops and conferences that bring together artists
and audiences of diverse traditions, generations and cultural
backgrounds. By fostering cross-cultural exchange and creative
dialogue, and by encouraging exploration of areas in new music
seldom touched upon by mainstream music institutions, Other
Minds is committed to expanding and reshaping the definition of
what constitutes “serious music.”

Staff Board of Directors Board of Advisors

Charles Amirkhanian Curtis Smith Muhal Richard Abrams
Executive & Artistic Director President Laurie Anderson
Adam Fong Jim Newman Gavin Bryars
Associate Director President Emeritus, Treasurer Brian Eno
Emma Moon Andrew Gold Fred Frith
Development Director Vice President
Philip Glass
Adrienne Cardwell Mitchell Yawitz
Executive Assistant &
David Harrington
Secretary
Preservation Project Director Joëlle Léandre
Charles Amirkhanian
Betsy Teeter Executive Director George Lewis
Business Manager Anthony Brown Meredith Monk
Stephen Upjohn Richard Friedman Kent Nagano
Librarian Jessica Gabel Yoko S. Nancarrow
Clyde Sheets John Goodman Michael Nyman
Production Manager Celeste Hutchins Terry Riley
Robert Shumaker Eric Kuehnl Ned Rorem
Recording Steve Wolfe Frederic Rzewski
Mark Palmer Peter Sculthorpe
Videographer Morton Subotnick
Michael Strickland Tan Dun
Titles Trimpin
Wayne Smith Julia Wolfe
Design
David Martinson
Program Editor

Other Minds would like to thank the following individuals and institutions whose
generous support between July 1, 2008 and November 20, 2008 has helped
make our programs possible.
Alvin H. Baum, Jr., in honor of Jim Newman Vivian Perlis
Vic Bedoian Robert Potter, in honor of Henry Brant
Levon Der Bedrossian Jon Raskin
Charles Boone & Josefa Vaughan The Stone Family
Agnes Bourne & James Luebbers Marcia Tanner & Winsor Soule
Kenneth Bruckmeier Bronwyn Warren & James Petrillo
Gavin Bryars
Thomas & Kamala Buckner Anonymous
Anthony B. Creamer III Grants for the Arts
Tom Dambly & Debra Blondheim William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
John Duffy National Endowment for the Arts
J.B. Floyd & Pin-I Wu Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation
John Goodman & Kerry King WHH Foundation
Stephen B. Hahn & Mary Jane Beddow
Mel Henderson Calistoga Water
Jeffrey Hollingsworth DayDarmet Catering
Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund Diptyque Candles
Alden Jenks & Mikako Endo Krispy Kreme Doughnuts
Dan Joseph Honest Tea
Elizabeth Lauer Noah’s Bagels, Fillmore
Anne Le Baron Noah’s Bagels, California
Liz & Greg Lutz Pauline’s Pizza
Jeffry Mitchell Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Laurel Heights
Dan Murphy, in honor of Mike Bloomfield Rainbow Grocery
Jim Newman & Jane Ivory Semifreddi’s Bakery
 © 2008 Other Minds
333 Valenci a Street, suite 303, sa n fr a ncisco, c a 94103
(415) 934-8134 / other minds@other minds.org
w w w.other minds.org / w w w.r adiom.org