Mind Over Clatter

In Brant's case, Other Minds secured a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to produce one of his works, and then sold the San Francisco Symphony on presenting it. The process sounds simple enough, but there aren't a lot of organizations actively looking to fund or present music that so few people take an interest in. Brant, for one, knows he wouldn't have a Pulitzer Prize if it weren't for Other Minds.

"It required two things: an interest in this kind of music, and funds," Brant says. "Other Minds had both."

In new music circles, Charles Amirkhanian manages to be both a relentless archaeologist and an extraordinary connector. If he was less of either, Other Minds wouldn't be possible.

To hear Amirkhanian tell it, his maven tendencies were born in high school, when he was drumming in a Fresno marching band. He'd become a percussionist, he says, "because there's a certain exhibitionist element in that. When you want to get attention, the easiest way is to bring a thunder sheet into a concert hall."

During high school, he also discovered the work of John Cage and Lou Harrison, two new musicians who had become remarkably adroit at shocking people. Cage, of course, is today recognized as the patriarch of American experimental music, and one of the greatest musical minds in American history. His 1992 death merited a nearly 3,000-word, Page One obituary in the New York Times, a publication that, five decades earlier, likened his music to "the meaningless sounds made by children amusing themselves by banging on tin pans and other resonant kitchen utensils."

Cage's particular genius was locked in the notion that all sounds can be musical. Even silence. His most famous piece, "4´33´´," featured four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, divided into three movements. His innovations included new ideas about instrumentation -- he saw flowerpots, cowbells, and the sound of water being transferred from pot to pot as percussion instruments -- and he rethought long-held orthodoxies of composition. Said the Times: "He started a revolution by proposing that composers could jettison the musical language that had evolved over the last seven centuries, and in doing so he opened the door to Minimalism, performance art, and virtually every other branch of the musical avant-garde."

Harrison -- who collaborated on the percussion experiments that entranced Amirkhanian -- is one of Cage's few peers.

"I didn't hear either of them until I was in high school band, and when I finally did, I realized I'd missed something huge," Amirkhanian recalls. "It was all these people writing for exotic percussion instruments with no melody at all, just five people playing garbage cans or oil drums. I realized that I'd better keep my ears open, because there was a lot of stuff in contemporary music that wasn't at the record store."

In the late 1960s, when graduate school -- and the promise of audiences for his own unorthodox compositions -- brought Amirkhanian to the Bay Area, he immediately sought out a job that would keep him as apprised as possible of the new music scene. He became music director of Berkeley's KPFA radio -- one of the nation's best-known new music hubs -- and wasted little time in meeting his idols. "Because I'd come from a relatively small town, I'd never had a chance to meet any of these composers I'd been reading about for years in various publications," he says. "So I was very aggressive about bringing people I wanted to meet to KPFA."

He wanted to meet them all. And, in 24 years, he almost did.

"Charles is someone who has interviewed just about every well-known composer," says Terry Riley, a new music icon frequently credited with introducing minimalism and repetition to Western music. (Riley's seminal work, "In C," features a pianist tinkling the C key for 40 consecutive minutes as other musicians improvise around the repetition.) "He's met everybody, and he has also been very good at directing people together when he thinks they'd be good for each other."

Amirkhanian's aggressive booking practices created wide connections -- many of which would make Other Minds possible in later years -- but they barely begin to describe the depth of his musical curiosity. For example: Shortly after taking the KPFA job, he found himself sitting in Ghirardelli Square, watching a dance troupe perform. The dancers were accompanied by some unusual music that caught his attention. Amirkhanian inquired about the piece, learning it was the work of an obscure composer, Conlon Nancarrow, who lived in Mexico City. This tape, Amirkhanian learned, had somehow found its way to Cage, who had given it to the director of the dance group.

"If you have any concept of composition as an art form, you realized this was an outstanding achievement, but you couldn't figure out how [Nancarrow] did it," Amirkhanian says. "I just had to see."

Perhaps there are other music junkies who have driven from Berkeley to Mexico City to meet a composer. It's doubtful there's anyone besides Charles Amirkhanian who has used the event of his own wedding as an excuse to do so.

"So when Carol and I got married, we hopped in our Volkswagen and went down to Mexico City for our honeymoon, just to meet him," Amirkhanian recalls. When the happy honeymooners arrived, they found Nancarrow to be almost a hermit, unwilling to admit Amirkhanian's wife to his apartment because, he claimed, women react violently to his music.