A panoply of composers will assemble for the 29th Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, an international annual showcase for composers held at the Brava Theater Thursday–Sunday, October 16–19, 2025. Join us for multi-generational musical connections, multimedia masterpieces, and contrasting takes on the fusion of gamelan and American musical traditions.
The Festival opens with a performance by the composer/performer/media artist Pamela Z. Pamela Z will present Simultaneous, an intermedia composition for voice, electronic processing, chamber ensemble, speech samples, gesture control, and projected video. The piece is partially composed of speech fragments taken from recorded interviews with friends and collaborators and is woven together with Pamela Z’s own vocalizations and found sounds. Opening night will also feature American composer Peter Garland‘s Songs of Exile and Wine, performed by vocalist Maria Tegzes and pianist Geoffrey Burleson, a beguiling song cycle with texts by multiple authors written in 2000 while the composer was living in Tlacotalpan, Mexico.
On Night 2, composer Samuel Adams will present a set of solo and chamber pieces performed by Friction Quartet, violinist Helen Kim, percussionist Haruka Fujii, and pianists Conor Hanick and Sarah Cahill. Adams’ piece commissioned by Cahill, which will receive its world premiere, is a tribute to his mentor Ingram Marshall (1942–2022), who is also represented on the program with a performance of Dark Waters for English horn by Libby Van Cleve.
Night 3 opens with the world premiere of a new choreographed work by Nancy Karp set to composer James Tenney‘s 1975 piece Three Pieces for Drum Quartet. Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen will present Piano Piece, a work for piano, electronics, and live camera using recordings of a spruce forest on the south coast of Norway performed by pianist Ellen Ugelvik and visual artist Evelina Dembacke. To close the evening, composer/harpist Zeena Parkins and percussionist William Winant will perform Parkins’ Modesty of the Magic Thing, based on Jay DeFeo’s series of drawings Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Lou Harrison’s American Gamelan tuning.
At the final concert of Other Minds 29, Putu Septa, leader of the ensemble Nata Swara, will perform an intercultural set of music for gamelan instruments and piano with fellow Balinese musician I Kadek Janurangga and ZOFO, the Bay Area piano duo of Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi. They will perform works by Putu Septa, Ni Nyoman Srayamurtikanti, Colin McPhee, and Brian Baumbusch.