Other Minds to Begin Annual Festival Next Month

Ivan Wyschnegradsky (courtesy of Charles Amirkhanian)

This year the annual festival held by Other Minds, which will be Festival 24, will consist of three concerts. The first of these will take place near the end of next month, followed by two concerts over the course of a single weekend in June. As has been the case with several previous festivals, one composer will be singled out for attention.

This year that composer will be the Franco-Russian microtonal composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky. The adjective “microtonal” involves working with an octave that has more than the usual chromatic pitches. More often than not, this involves dividing the octave into some number of equal parts that is greater than twelve. Three of the six works to be performed at next month’s concert require that the octave be divided into 24 equal parts, meaning that each semitone is evenly divided into two “quarter tones.” Whether or not these pieces were selected specifically because this is the 24th installment of the festival is left as an exercise for the reader.

The performers for next month’s program will be the members of the Arditti Quartet, led by founder and first violinist Irvine Arditti. The other members are violinist Ashot Sarkissian, violist Ralf Ehlers, and cellist Lucas Fels. The microtonal pieces on the program will be Wyschnegradsky’s first two string quartets (Opus 13, completed in 1924, and Opus 18, completed in 1931), the Opus 43 called “Composition in quarter tones” (composed in 1960), and his unfinished Opus 53 string trio (probably to be performed in the version completed by Claude Ballif). The other works on the program (which are not microtonal) will be Wyschnegradsky’s third quartet (Opus 38b in the revised version completed in 1958) and Georg Friderich Haas’ second quartet, completed in 1998.

This concert will take place on Saturday, March 23, beginning at 8 p.m. The venue will be the Taube Atrium Theater, which is part of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, located on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building at the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street. General admission will be $45 with a $30 rate for students presenting proper identification at the door. Tickets may be purchased online through a Brown Paper Tickets event page.