I told him about my work with the Composer-to-Composer series and we began to discuss the possibility of creating another festival that used its model. He was concerned that the experimental music scene of the Bay Area was going to take a significant hit as a result. We were unable to raise the necessary funds to continue on the grand scale we’d established.Īfter announcing my resignation from KPFA in 1992, I received a call from the legendary San Francisco art gallerist and film producer Jim Newman. It was a truly wonderful four years but, it was with heavy hearts that we realized in 1991 that Telluride, Colorado, just couldn’t sustain a festival of avant-garde music. Thus, the Composer-to-Composer festival was born, and from 1988-1991 many brilliant minds met in the scenic Southwest Rockies to talk about music and share it with those brave enough to come and listen. We discussed how the Ideas Festival could be used as a model for a conference of composers. When the festival concluded, Lifton, who was a pioneer of computer music, confided to me how much he missed his composer friends. I was struck by the openness and honesty of the unfolding interpersonal and intellectual play between people so far apart ideologically. The goal was to bring together speakers from opposite ends of the political spectrum to confer in private for a time and then come together for a public, civil discourse on the issues. It was curated by our old friends Pamela Zoline and John Lifton and their Telluride Institute. The conception of this cooperative festival came a few years prior when Carol Law and I attended the second annual “Ideas Festival” in Telluride, Colorado. That was the date of the first “Composer-to-Composer” festival which featured Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Laurie Spiegel, Peter Sculthorpe, Brian Eno, Sarah Hopkins, Kyle Gann, Paul de Marinis, and others. The seeds for Other Minds were planted in Southwest Colorado in the Summer of 1988.