Download Sarah Cahill Concert Programs PDF

The Future is Female is an investigation and reframing of the piano literature featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, from the Baroque to the present day, including new commissioned works. This flexible program is available as an evening—length recital performance or as a marathon performance and is ideal for concert halls, museums, and gallery spaces. The marathon performance duration is typically between four to seven hours, allowing audience members to sit and listen for any length of time, with the ability to come and go, as well as the ability to walk around the space.

Featured composers include Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Maria de Alvear, Galina Ustvolskaya, Franghiz Ali- Zadeh, Florence Price, Hannah Kendall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Kui Dong, Meredith Monk, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Tania León, Fannie Charles Dillon, and many others.

In March 2022, Sarah Cahill performed an 8-hour marathon of The Future is Female at the Barbican in London. Additional recent performances include concerts presented by Newport Classical, Carolina Performing Arts, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival,Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, North Dakota Museum of Art, Mayville State University, and the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York. Earlier this year, Cahill released The Future is Female, Vol. 1 “In Nature,” –– the first of a three-album series on UK-based First Hand Records. Of the album, BBC Music Magazine wrote, “The feminist slogan ‘The Future is Female’ is shown on the front cover, held up on a protest sign. And as this recording shows, the past was female too, it’s just that women are often written out of it. Here, then, is an alternative history of solo piano music – and one that’s delivered with real conviction by pianist Sarah Cahill.”

In conjunction with The Future is Female, Cahill offers in-person and online sessions to work with faculty and students about these composers and their music. Sessions can include lectures and demonstrations as well as “blind listening” workshops during which Cahill plays works by both men and women without identifying the composers and talks with participants about what we conceive as gender in music, as a way to confront our implicit biases. She has also compiled a curated database of solo piano music by women composers through history, which she can share with university/conservatory piano departments. Sarah Cahill hopes that students integrate music by women into their repertoire, so that female composers will be heard more often in concert halls.

Sarah Cahill highlights the innovative modern works of five American composers. Marion Bauer played an active role in shaping modern American music in the first half of the 20th century and dedicated herself to advocating for the promotion of American music and composers, particularly women. Louise Talma’s career spanned seven decades. She had planned to be a pianist, but Nadia Boulanger encouraged her to pursue a composing career, and she later became the first female composer elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters. Ruth Crawford composed in her own “ultramodern” compositional style, which rejected the conventions of traditional European art music in favor of dissonant sonorities and innovative textures. A renowned astrologer as well as a composer, French-American Dane Rudhyar’s musical credo states, “My music is essentially the exteriorization of inner experiences and states of consciousness and feelings.” Considered to be one of America’s most influential composers, Henry Cowell’s innovations with polyrhythms, chord clusters, and flexible structures anticipated a vast range of 20th century music, and his pioneering classes on world music were legendary.

Marion Bauer: Four Piano Pieces, Op. 21

Louise Talma: Six Etudes

RuthCrawford: Nine Preludes

Dane Rudhyar: Pentagram No. 3

HenryCowell: Rhythmicana

Birds and Insects is an ongoing project of piano works by ArleneSierra, a London-based American composer whose music is praised for its “highly flexible and distinctive style” (The Guardian), ranging from “exquisiteness and restrained power” to “combative and utterly compelling” (Gramophone). She explains: “Each piece features distinct characteristics to fit its title: spelling the name in pitches, employing a transcription of an animal’s song from nature, recalling its physical movement in various ways, or developing ideas drawn from an animal’s cultural symbolism.” Sarah Cahill premiered two pieces from Book 3 at the Barbican in March 2022, and she is preparing to record all three books of Sierra’s Birds and Insects for the Bridge label in 2023.

Although it took most of the 20th century for Ruth Crawford Seeger  to gain the recognition she deserves, composers across America have long acknowledged her inspiration. To celebrate Ruth CrawfordSeeger’s centennial in 2001, Sarah Cahill commissioned seven short pieces from composers whose work reminds her, in many ways, of the young Ruth Crawford and her preludes. The piano’s extraordinary capacity for resonance, the audible friction of a minor second, the inexhaustible possibilities of the piano’s middle(sostenuto) pedal, the drama of hearing the keyboard’s extreme ranges simultaneously, and the visceral powers of music are all elements which connect Ruth Crawford to these seven composers.

Ruth Crawford: Nine Preludes

Annea Lockwood: RCSC*

Pauline Oliveros: Quintuplets Play Pen*

Julia Wolfe: Compassion*

Eve Beglarian: Fireside*

Maggi Payne: Holding Pattern*

Mary Jane Leach: By’m Bye*

Cindy Cox: The Blackbird Whistling/Or Just After*

Sarah Cahill had the opportunity to work closely with maverick American composer Lou Harrison and has championed many of his works for piano. She has performed both of Harrison’s piano concertos and toured with his solo piano and chamber music, including a 100th birthday celebration in Fukuoka, Japan. In preparation for a recording project for the Other Minds label, Sarah Cahill performs rare and unknown works by Lou Harrison.

Lou Harrison: 1943Suite

Lou Harrison: The River Merchant’s Wife

Lou Harrison: Village Music Suite

Lou Harrison: Incidental Music for Corneille’s Cinna

Additional works

William Congreve wrote: “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.” Now, more than ever, we need the soothing powers of music. Composers through the centuries have been inspired by music’s capacity to heal our psyches and our spirits. Throughout Sarah Cahill’s career, she has gravitated to the mystical works of Dane Rudhyar, Pauline Oliveros, Ruth Crawford, and Henry Cowell. The Spirit Guide brings us together to breathe, listen, and heal from the stresses of the past few years.

with the Friction Quartet

Sarah Cahill joins the Friction Quartet, praised for their “fine blend of rhythmic ferocity and tonal flair” (San Francisco Chronicle), for a performance of 21st century piano quintets.

Tania León: Ethos

Timo Andres: Piano Quintet

Elinor Armer: Piano Quintet

Linda Catlin Smith: Piano Quintet

with pianist Regina Myers

Sarah Cahill performs with fellow Bay Area-based pianist Regina Myers, with whom she recorded her 2018 album, Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley.

Errollyn Wallen: The Girl in My Alphabet “Blue”

Gene Tyranny: The Decertified Highway of Dreams

Eleanor Alberga: Three-Day Mix

Riley Nicholson: Up*

Ingram Marshall: Five Easy Pieces

Elena Kats-Chernin: Dance of the Paper Umbrellas

Meredith Monk: Ellis Island

with violinist Kate Stenberg

Of Sarah Cahill’s collaboration with violinist Kate Stenberg, the San Francisco Classical Voice says, “Contemporary music fans are fortunate to have this simultaneously authoritative and approachable pair.” Sarah and Kate have performed at the Other Minds Festival, the Mendocino Music Festival, and the Cal State Fullerton New Music Festival.

Pamela Z: Presence for trio (featuring Pamela Z)*

Roscoe Mitchell: Cards in 3D Colors*

Somei Satoh: Birds in Warped Time

*commissioned by Sarah Cahill