Mind Over Clatter

And Other Minds was born.

The early Other Minds festivals -- held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts -- earned mixed reviews. Local critics said that while the festival exhibited important artists, it featured the same artists Amirkhanian had been championing for years on KPFA. One critic wondered aloud if he was just watching the "Charles Amirkhanian Record Collection Festival." But, for the small, avid group of new music fans they were playing to, that collection was sufficient. And diverse: Through the years, the festival attracted artists such as Brant, Riley, the then-unknown Chinese composer Tan Dun (who later won an Oscar for the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score), and DJ Spooky, who the London Independent once said represented "the intellectual face of turntable culture."

By 2000, the 6-year-old festival was finally drawing some critical notice outside of San Francisco. The Los Angeles Times declared it "an event worth trumpeting, and copying (in Los Angeles, for instance?)." But a rising profile within the new music world did not mean Other Minds was financially healthy. In spite of operating with only one full-time employee for most of its existence, the group often suffered budget deficits, Newman says.

This March, though, Other Minds threw its best-attended festival ever. In the event's grand finale, more than 1,000 people packed the lobby of the Palace of Fine Arts to watch a composer named Ellen Fullman strum her invention, a 90-foot guitar known as the Long String Instrument.

In other words, what Newman had envisioned all along had come to pass?

"Yeah, I think so," Newman says, without so much as a hint of a smile above his white goatee. "It definitely wasn't beyond our imagination."

But, he insists, there was something he never imagined: being linked to a prize like Henry Brant's Pulitzer. "It's extremely mainstream," he says, emphasizing the last word with faint contempt. "And it typically goes to a mainstream composer, which Henry is not."

Hesitancy about commercialism aside, Newman knows Other Minds -- currently below its fund-raising targets for the year -- needs to cash in on the Pulitzer. Hence, a fund-raising note written by Brant that recently hit the mail, accompanied by a donation card with gifts broken down in avant-garde terms. A supporter might be a minimalist ($35-99), a cacophonist ($2,500-4,999), or a maximalist ($5,000-plus).

"We're suddenly on the map with a lot of people," Newman says. "We've now got credibility in areas where we were virtually unknown or unrecognized before. So far, though, we haven't seen the results."

The small office of Other Minds is located two floors above Valencia Street Muscle and Fitness. There, Amirkhanian sits at a large, almost comically cluttered corner desk; the two twentysomething employees he shares the space with toil nearby. They'd probably be getting more work done if Amirkhanian would stop laughing so hard -- at George Frideric Handel's "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba."

Normally, there is nothing particularly funny about Handel's rollicking orchestral masterwork, which has managed to pry its way into the popular subconscious through countless appearances in movie soundtracks and television commercials. But the version currently blaring from Amirkhanian's stereo -- the one saved from obscurity by Other Minds' fledgling record label -- is different. This version comes, in its entirety, from a player piano, in this case a pianola with foot pedals that a skilled player can use to add accents to music programmed via holes punched into paper rolls inside the machine.

"This just strikes me as humorous for some reason," Amirkhanian says. "I think it's because these are supposed to be trumpets."

The pianola, Amirkhanian explains, was once eyed as a cash cow by composers of the early 20th century (among them Stravinsky) who saw its potential to become a home entertainment system in the days before radio. Radio, of course, rendered the player piano obsolete, and most of the works produced for pianola were never released. Still, Other Minds has recorded many of them for its label. The idea wasn't to make money -- typical releases sell fewer than a thousand copies -- but to keep the music in existence.

Amirkhanian's fascination with this type of music seems to be rooted in process as much as result. "This," he says, referring to the still-rollicking Handel, "is a player piano played by a man named Rex Lawson; he's pedaling and giving accents by pushing the pedal down. All of this is not indicated in the score; he has to know to do this, and he has to change the speed by hand.

"So he's a real artist for doing this."

Amirkhanian knows Lawson well. The two met after Amirkhanian saw Lawson playing a small part in a concert at Carnegie Hall. As is his custom, Amirkhanian investigated. It turned out that Lawson happened to own the world's largest stash of player piano rolls. "He has 10,000 player piano rolls in his basement," Amirkhanian says, fascinated. "It's all he does. His wife left him. I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, you know. But he's one of these obsessive guys who makes life interesting."

Other Minds' next CD release -- a collection of musical works composed by the noted poet Ezra Pound and described by Amirkhanian as a cross between medieval music and cubist painting -- sounds almost inane. So why does Amirkhanian do it?