User:Amirkhanian
CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN BIOGRAPHY
Charles Amirkhanian, co-founder with Jim Newman in 1993 of Other Minds in San Francisco, is its Executive & Artistic Director. As a composer, he is renowned for his text-sound compositions that employ speech sounds in rhythmic patterns resembling percussion music and for his electroacoustic essays incorporating acoustic ambient sounds alongside more traditional musical tones to create disjunct, trance-like dreamscapes. His Dutiful Ducks, Church Car, and Seatbelt Seatbelt are considered classics of the sound poetry genre.
In addition to programming and directing the Other Minds Festival since 1993, Amirkhanian has led the organization in producing many additional concerts devoted to the work of the American experimental tradition (Cage, Cowell, Rudhyar, Nancarrow, Hovhaness and others), establishing a record label, a weekly radio program, and an ambitious website (radiOM.org) that provides access to new music information for listeners in 165 countries and territories, and commissioning new work annually from composers around the world.
Amirkhanian served as Music Director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley (1969-1992) and Executive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (1993-1997). For his work at KPFA he received the Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center in 1984 and the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 1989. At Other Minds, he received the 2005 Letter of Distinction from the AMC, in 2009 the coveted ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and in 2017 the Champion of New Music award from the American Composers Forum. In 1999 he was awarded the first Ella Holbrook Walker Fellowship for a year-long residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study & Conference Center on Lake Como in Northern Italy, where he established an electronic music facility for the foundation and composed Pianola (Pas de mains) for WDR Cologne.
In addition to his work as a composer, percussionist and poet, Amirkhanian has produced several pivotal commercial recordings, including the complete works for player piano of Conlon Nancarrow, the first compilation of American text-sound composition, the first compilation of electronic music by American women composers, the only compilation of George Antheil performing his own piano music, and first recordings of unpublished music by Marc Blitzstein.
As a radio producer, Amirkhanian pioneered the broadcasting of minimalist music, sound poetry, radio happenings, and, with Richard Friedman, the World Ear Project, bringing continuous recordings of ambient sounds to the airwaves beginning in 1970. Many of his hundreds of interviews with composers, performers, poets and intermedia artists are available for listening on radiOM.org, the second website of Other Minds, designed to preserve the voices and work of cutting edge artists.
Amirkhanian has been awarded numerous composer commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Meet the Composer, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the 1984 Summer Olympics, the Arch Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain and other organizations. His music has been choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Anna Halprin, Margaret Fisher, Nancy Karp + Dancers, and Richard Alston (Ballet Rambert). From 1975-1988 he performed theatrical realizations of his sound poetry with projections by Carol Law at venues such as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Langton Arts (San Francisco) and throughout Australia.
His music is available on five solo CD releases: Walking Tune (Starkland Records), Mental Radio and Loudspeakers (New World Records), Lexical Music and Miatsoom (Other Minds Records). His work also has been released on Cantaloupe, Centaur, Wergo, Perspectives of New Music, and Fylkingen, among other imprints.
Charles Benjamin Amirkhanian was born January 19, 1945, in Fresno, California. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from California State University Fresno (1967), and M.A. in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts from San Francisco State University (1969), and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College (1980). His mother, Eleanor Kaprielian Amirkhanian (1917-2007), was a piano major at Fresno State (B.A., 1939), as were her three sisters, Armorel, Lorraine, and Sylvia. Their parents, Charles Kaprielian (1891-1960) and Aznive Shooshan Kaprielian (1891-1954), both arrived in the U.S. in the first decade of the 20th Century from Harpoot. Charles Kaprielian had the ambition of becoming an architect but became a successful vineyardist producing table grapes and raisins. Benjamin Amirkhanian (1915-2016) completed a B.A. in Education at Fresno State in 1937 but was denied a position in the school system of Fresno County because of his ethnicity. He worked as a postal clerk and supervisor and founded the annual William Saroyan Festival in Fresno and served in the U.S. Army in World War II, commanding a postal unit in Blandford, Dorset, England (1944-5). He retired as a Major after years of continuing service in the Army Reserve.