The first selection was for four snare drums, two on opposite sides of the stage, and two in the side balconies. From start to finish, the movement is a near-continuous racket of 16th notes, but the texture is always shifting, different players starting and stopping, getting suddenly soft or suddenly thunderous, and varying the rhythmic patterns. The second selection, with the same set-up, was for four tam-tams whose vast stretches of overtones oscillated and vibrated around each other in a continuous yet ever-shifting metallic roar. After the barrage of thudding snares, it was striking how rich, even lush this sound seemed. Next came a selection for four vibraphones and four glockenspiels, all the players first on one and then the other. There was no delicate tinkling going on here, but harsh metallic dissonances and clattering peals of bells. Finally came a selection for four bass drums/tom-toms (the toms playing the role of higher-pitched bass drums) which featured the players speeding up and slowing down at different rates, to create an ever-shifting set of over-lapping rumbles. This selection was bathed in a red light and when the players sped up, their mallets went faster and faster until it looked like a blur of red fire bursting from the drums.

In the program notes, Adams writes that his “growing fascination with the violence of nature led [him] to a rudimentary study of chaos theory, fractal geometry and the science of complexity” and that this piece was his first attempt to work some of these ideas into a musical composition. I don't know these theories or this piece well enough to know exactly how he went about this, but I do know that I could sense these processes at work. The music seemed to enact vast and complex natural processes, as if I were witnessing, in sonic form, the solar system forming or the continents shifting. It had an incredible visceral impact and was, of all the music on the festival, the most profoundly unlike anything I have ever heard before.

Next on Saturday night came Evan Ziporyn's Melody Competition for six percussionists, also performed by So Percussion. Ziporyn leads a sort of double musical life, working on the one hand as a technically innovative bass clarinetist and clarinetist and composer with the post-minimalist/New York downtown group Bang on a Can and, on the other, as a lover of Balinese gamelan music, composer of works for gamelan, and founder of a community gamelan ensemble in Boston. These two worlds come together in Melody Competition.

The piece is constructed around the format of the Balinese mebarung, a battle of the bands in which two gamelan ensembles compete over who can play loudest and fastest, each group trying to drown out and/or throw off the other group. This happens quite literally in the center of the composition, and, in other parts, Ziporyn plays with other types of competition, pitting different melodies against one another, pitched against un-pitched instruments, etc. The melodic and motivic material bears some relationship to gamelan music, but owes much more to Ziporyn's Bang on a Can work, with its repetitive patterns with a hint of the blues and its off-kilter grooves. The piece is a very original and successful fusion of these two elements, and the competition aspect is exhilarating, a thrill to watch the two sets of percussionists trying to out-do each other.

So Percussion played both these pieces with vigor and virtuosity and an uncannily telepathic togetherness. In the first selection from the Adams piece, all four players were pounding away mechanically on their snare drum in different corners of the hall, staring straight ahead and yet were able to stop exactly together for the few strategically placed silences without any body language or outward communication whatever. In the Ziporyn, they played the competition with an inspiringly joyous virtuosity. This is a group to watch and I hope to see and hear much more from them in the coming years.

Closing out Saturday's concert was the astonishing jazz violinist, Billy Bang and his quintet. Bang combines the best of what there is of a jazz violin tradition with modern extended techniques and the facility and fluidity of a great classical virtuoso. His whole body gets into his playing: he dances around, eggs on the other players in the group, and has a naturalness, fluidity, and exuberance in his playing that is contagious to the audience and the other performers alike. His invention is explosive and continuous, always taking his solos on unexpected twists and turns and overwhelming the listener with the sheer power and joyousness of his sound and imagination. If I have one critique, it is that he would be better served by less traditional tune formats. Though the tunes were all original, and good tunes, they were all in very standard jazz structure – intro, head, a few solos, return to the head – and this seemed to constrain unnecessarily the stunning range of Bang's improvisational imagination.

The rest of the quintet was good, but drummer Michael Carvin was phenomenal, making all the soloists sound great by providing just the right backing for them, intuiting when they were heading for a climax and helping them along without overpowering them, giving a little extra kick right when the music needed it. As good as the quintet was, I couldn't help thinking that an even more exciting musical experience would have been simply a free improvisation between Carvin and Bang – we got a few minutes of the two of them in the middle of one tune and it was exhilarating to hear them playing and grooving off of each other. I could have listened to it for hours.

Friday's concert got off to a good start, though it ultimately proved to be a bit disappointing. It began with the director of the Other Minds Festival, Charles Amirkhanian's tape composition Son of Metropolis San Francisco, an idiosyncratic portrait of the city emphasizing more the natural beauty than the urban aspects. One of the strongest compliments I can give this piece is that I don't have very much to say about it, because it completely transported me to the point where my critical faculties more or less shut down. I can say that it had a certain trance-y quality to it; I remember parts with sustained, very consonant and soothing chords over which there were strange and disturbing sounds; I remember my imagination wandering this way and that in a quasi-dreamlike state; and I remember when it was over, looking around and feeling very disoriented to find myself surrounded by so many people and bright lights.

Next, Fred Frith on guitar and Sudhu Tewari on various homemade instruments collaborated on an improvisation that included Frith striking the guitar in about every way and with every sort of object imaginable. Certainly some interesting sounds resulted but the piece lasted about twenty minutes longer than these sounds were able to remain interesting, and it descended into self-indulgent monotony.

Closing Friday's concert was the world premiere of Spanish-German composer Maria de Alvear's Gran Sol for two voices and cello, performed by Alvear and Amelia Cuni as the vocalists with former Kronos Quartet cellist, Joan Jeanrenaud. The text was based on the writings of Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRaz, of the Cherokee Nation, which was sung, for some reason, in a combination of Italian, Spanish, and German. All three women were dressed in white and Alvear intoned the titles of the thirteen sections in a slow, deep, earth-mother voice. The music was simple and direct and seemed “indigenous” in some vague way. There was clearly meant to be some sort of spiritual meaning to all of this, but what this might be was anybody's guess. In the program, under the title, it reads “Ceremony for three honorable female trees in the beginnings of time on Earth” which sounds nice and kinda spiritual, but doesn't help clear anything up. It ultimately just seemed shallowly spiritual in a new-agey sort of way, and possibly even insulting in the way it tried to create some sort of generic indigenous spirituality and then put it on display to make us all feel inclusive and tolerant and nice about ourselves.

In fairness, I should note that I did not go to the pre-concert talk, which might have explained more what the piece was all about; on the other hand, it seems that the program notes and the work itself ought to be enough to make it comprehensible since the bulk of the audience does not go to the talks. Indeed, on Saturday night, the pre-concert talks did fill out the pieces a bit more but did not provide me with any essential information that was not already in the program notes.

On Saturday afternoon, there was a concert celebrating the centenary of Marc Blitzstein, probably best-known for his translation of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera for its Broadway run but also a gifted composer in his own right. Blitzstein's music sounds like a blend of Weill, Bernstein, and Stravinksy, with touches of other early twentieth-century composers like Bartók and Hindemith. The concert showed that Blitzstein was indeed a crafty, witty, and versatile composer with a strong flair for drama and a willingness to make bold political statements; but it seemed like an odd choice to feature him on this festival, since he is neither contemporary (he died in 1964) nor particularly innovative or influential.

I was unfortunately unable to attend the very interesting-looking opening concert Thursday which featured music of Michael Nyman, probably best-known to listeners for his score to the film The Piano; the young hip hop-classical crossover artist Daniel Bernard Roumain; and Phil Niblock, a specialist in swarming masses of overtones.

As advertised, the Other Minds festival showcased the whole gamut of adventurous new music out there, in all its excitement, innovation, and occasional self-indulgence and shallowness. For all those who would point to the prevalence of the latter qualities as signals of the poor state of music today, this festival showed that there is plenty of new music out there which is alive, vital, stimulating, even booty-shaking, thought-provoking, moving, and exciting. If this festival is any indication, the future of music looks to be full of promise and possibility and new barely-glimpsed horizons.