Sarah Cahill: A Piano Party for Terry Riley at 80 FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015 New works composed in celebration of Terry Riley’s eightieth birthday by Samuel Carl Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Gyan Riley, Evan Ziporyn, Christine Southworth, Danny Clay, Dylan Mattingly, Luciano Chessa, Elena Ruehr, and Keeril Makan. June 24, 2015 is the eightieth birthday year […]
Sarah Cahill: A Piano Party for Terry Riley at 80 FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015 New works composed in celebration of Terry Riley’s eightieth birthday by Samuel Carl Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Gyan Riley, Evan Ziporyn, Christine Southworth, Danny Clay, Dylan Mattingly, Luciano Chessa, Elena Ruehr, and Keeril Makan. June 24, 2015 is the eightieth birthday year […]
Sarah Cahill: A Piano Party for Terry Riley at 80 FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015 New works composed in celebration of Terry Riley’s eightieth birthday by Samuel Carl Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Gyan Riley, Evan Ziporyn, Christine Southworth, Danny Clay, Dylan Mattingly, Luciano Chessa, Elena Ruehr, and Keeril Makan. June 24, 2015 is the eightieth birthday year […]
Sarah Cahill: A Piano Party for Terry Riley at 80 FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015 New works composed in celebration of Terry Riley’s eightieth birthday by Samuel Carl Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Gyan Riley, Evan Ziporyn, Christine Southworth, Danny Clay, Dylan Mattingly, Luciano Chessa, Elena Ruehr, and Keeril Makan. June 24, 2015 is the eightieth birthday year […]
Sarah performing at Soundbox. Photo: Charles Redding.
The San Francisco Orchestra has come up with a Vegas-like way to attract a younger audience: a nightclub built underneath the orchestra’s main concert hall with a state-of-the-art sound system, high-tech lighting and artistic video images. (April 23) AP Watch the Video at USA Today
SoundBox, the San Francisco Symphony’s attempt to draw in a younger crowd with late-evening, monthly concerts in a nightclub style setting, has been successful on a scale that probably nobody ever imagined. The Meyer Sound System has transformed an acoustically dead rehearsal stage at the back of Davies Hall into a reverberant concert hall, the […]
Last Fall, Pinna Records released Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, performed by pianist (writer, and producer) Sarah Cahill. We talked to Cahill as she prepared for the New Music Gathering… Read the full article
As part of a growing national movement to revitalize the symphony experience for patrons, the San Francisco Symphony recently launched SoundBox, a show series meant to create new musical experiences and entice new audiences. KQED’s Cy Musiker reports. SoundBox on KQED
Classics Today has given “MAMORU FUJIEDA PATTERNS OF PLANTS” a perfect 10 out of 10 for artistic quality and sound quality. From the Review: “Fujieda’s Plant Patterns are tonal (or modal), but their outward, post-minimalist simplicity conceals real sophistication of technique. The pieces are built out of a few basic ideas: repetition of the initial […]
Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. Keyboard Magazine writes, “Through her inspired interpretation of works across the 20th and 21st centuries, Cahill has been instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers.” She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).
Cahill enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for each performance. She researched and recorded music by prominent early 20th-century American modernists Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford and commissioned a number of new pieces in tribute to their enduring influence. She has also premiered and recorded music by Leo Ornstein, Marc Blitzstein, and other 20th century mavericks. In May 2023, she performed the world premiere of Viet Cuong’s Stargazer, a concerto for piano and orchestra, with the California Symphony.
Cahill has worked closely with composer Terry Riley since 1997, when she commissioned his four-hand piece Cinco de Mayo for a festival at Cal Performances celebrating Henry Cowell’s 100th birthday – the first of six works she has commissioned from him. For Riley’s 80th birthday, Cahill commissioned nine new works for solo piano in his honor and performed them with several of Riley’s own compositions at (Le) Poisson Rouge and Roulette in New York, MIT, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and other venues across the country. Sarah Cahill commissioned the late Frederic Rzewski to compose a substantial solo piano work in honor of Terry Riley’s 85th birthday.
Sarah Cahill also worked closely with Lou Harrison and has championed many of his works for piano. In 1997, Cahill was chosen to premiere his Festival Dance for two pianos with Aki Takahashi at the Cooper Union and worked with Harrison in rehearsals. She was also chosen to perform his Dance for Lisa Karon, discovered only a few years ago and not heard since its premiere in 1938, and she performed his Varied Trio, both piano concertos, and a number of solo and chamber works on her 2017 Lou Harrison tour celebrating his centennial year, with concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Orlando, Miami, Hawaii, Tokyo and Fukuoka in Japan, and more. In fall 2019, Sarah performed Lou Harrison’s exuberant Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan in two Berkeley performances and at the ICA Boston. She also performed and recorded the work with Gamelan Galak Tika at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, 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. Featured composers include Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Maria de Alvear, Galina Ustvolskaya, Regina Harris Baiocchi, Franghiz Ali- Zadeh, Florence Price, Hannah Kendall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Kui Dong, Meredith Monk, Vıt́ězslava Kaprálová , Tania León, Fannie Charles Dillon, Tina Davidson, and many others. Cahill is performing this project in museums, galleries, and concert halls in current and future seasons. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include concerts presented by The Barbican, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carolina Performing Arts, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery of Art, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of Washington, North Dakota Museum of Art, Gretna Arts, WoCo Festival, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Music Festival. Most recently, Cahill performed selections from The Future is Female for an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, with NPR describing her as a pianist “commanding a near godlike status among fans of contemporary classical music.”
Cahill has performed classical and contemporary chamber music with artists and ensembles such as Jessica Lang Dance; pianists Joseph Kubera, and Adam Tendler; violinist Stuart Canin; the Alexander String Quartet; New Century Chamber Orchestra; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many more. In addition, she performs as a duo with violinist Kate Stenberg, and has a two-piano duo with Regina Myers.
Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Her three-album series, The Future is Female, was released on First Hand Records between March 2022 and April 2023. These albums encompass thirty compositions by women from around the globe, from the 17th century to the present day, and include many world premiere recordings. Cahill’s performance on the album and the recording itself each earned four stars in BBC Music Magazine. 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.”
Cahill’s 2013 release A Sweeter Music (Other Minds) featured musical reflections on war by eighteen eloquent and provocative composer/activists. In 2015, Pinna Records released her two-CD set of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, an extraordinary fusion of nature and technology created by identifying the musical patterns in the electrical impulses of plants. In September 2017, she released Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley, a box set tribute to Terry Riley, on Irritable Hedgehog Records. The four-CD set includes solo works by Riley, four-hand works with pianist Regina Myers, and world premiere recordings of commissioned works composed in honor of Riley’s 80th birthday. Upcoming recordings include the third volume of Arlene Sierra’s Birds and Insects for Bridge Records and a Lou Harrison album on Other Minds Records.
Sarah Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. The program focuses on the relationships between classical music and new music, encompassing interviews with musicians and composers, historical performances, and recordings outside the mainstream. Cahill is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Piedmont Gardens, Oakland, CA
Sarah performs works by James Cleghorn at this afternoon concert.
Old First Church, Sacramento and Van Ness, San Francisco
Sarah performs works by James Cleghorn in preparation for a recording for the Other Minds label. Cleghorn grew up in San Francisco and wrote a wide variety of piano music in the 1930s to 1950s, was active in the new music circle of Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison (and was responsible for introducing them), and became head of the music department at the San Francisco Public Library. His son Peter Cleghorn gave Sarah the original scores for her upcoming recording.
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Sarah records works by James Cleghorn for the Other Minds label. Cleghorn grew up in San Francisco and wrote a wide variety of piano music in the 1930s to 1950s, was active in the new music circle of Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison (and was responsible for introducing them), and became head of the music department at the San Francisco Public Library. His son Peter Cleghorn gave Sarah the original scores for this recording.
The Met 5th Ave - European Paintings 1300–1800
Sarah performs a marathon version of her program The Future Is Female at The Met.
https://engage.metmuseum.org/events/metlivearts/2024-25-season/sarah-cahill-the-future-is-female/
If you go to your local record store, you’ll find Meredith Monk and Björk in completely separate categories, but as you’re about to hear, they’ve got a lot in common. Born a generation apart, both women have gained a reputation for creating adventurous music for the human voice, work that has taken them beyond the concert stage and into the realms of theater, film, visual art, dance, and performance art. Over the course of this hour-long program, these two artists share personal stories and trade ideas about music alongside illustrative samples drawn from their extensive recorded catalogues.
Curious how Elliott Carter, one of our most venerable composers of music for the concert hall, and Phil Lesh, best known as the bass player for the Grateful Dead, ever crossed paths? Though you might not ordinarily connect these two composers, there are some surprising musical links between them, supported by a friendship of many years.
Hear them speak with Sarah Cahill about their shared influences and the personal connections they’ve made through music.
Before he performed a concert at Davies Hall with Debussy’s second book of Preludes,Richard Goode and I met at a practise room backstage at Davies where he discussed these works and demonstrated various passages.
Saariaho was in the Bay Area to deliver the Bloch lectures at UC Berkeley, and came to the KALW studios for a two-hour program about her work.
This is just the first hour of a two-hour program with Oliveros, in which she plays her accordion and leads the listening audience in a sonic meditation exercise. I’m still searching for the second hour, and will post it as soon as it turns up.
This was right after the premiere of Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and we also talk about his City Noir and other works.
This was actually when I hosted a show at KPFA (I left there in 2001 and started at KALW in 2002). Ohlsson came to the performance studio for a two-hour program about Chopin, and didn’t bring any scores with him- everything he plays here is from memory. Again, frustratingly, this is just the first hour of a two-hour show, and eventually I will find the second hour and post it here.
Meredith Monk was in town for a performance, and she graciously came to the studio for a two-hour interview. Once again, I could only find this first hour.
