Calendar 2009 5 to 9 pm Sunday, June 21- New Music Bay Area presents Garden of Memory, the annual summer solstice concert at the Chapel of the Chimes, a beautiful columbarium and mausoleum designed by Julia Morgan.  Sarah premieres Eve Beglarian’s Night Psalm and Michael Byron’s Devotion to Peace- rose mist, translucent.  Performers you can hear during this popular event include Paul Dresher, Kitka, Jaron Lanier, Beth Custer, Cindy Cox, Vorticella, the Cardew Choir, the William Winant Percussion Ensemble,  Laura Inserra, the Del Sol Quartet, Maggi Payne, and many others.  Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle calls Garden of Memory “a walk-through fun house of musical and visual splendor.”  Updates soon at www.gardenofmemory.com. 8 pm Friday, July 31- Sarah performs new works from her project A Sweeter Music, with video by John Sanborn.  This program features music by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Kyle Gann, Ingram Marshall, Michael Byron, Mamoru Fujieda, Ingram Marshall, and Larry Polansky.  Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento Street at Van Ness, San Francisco.  www.oldfirstconcerts.org, and (415) 474-1608. September 2-6- For the Second International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Sarah performs music by Terry Riley, Eliane Radigue, Harold Budd, Meredith Monk, Dennis Johnson, and others.  University of Missouri-Kansas City, 5000 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO. www.musicminimalism.org.

PAST CONCERTS

2009

3 pm Sunday, January 25 - As part of the Cal Performances series, Sarah premieres new compositions, written on the theme of peace, from her project A Sweeter Music.  New works include Frederic Rzewski’s Peace Dances, Terry Riley’s Be Kind to One Another (Rag), Peter Garland’s After the Wars, Yoko Ono’s Toning, Larry Polansky’s b’midbar, Pauline Oliveros’ A New Indigo Peace, The Residents’ drum no fife, and Preben Antonsen’s Dar al-Harb.  Video projections, on three screens, are by John Sanborn, who has collaborated with such artists as Bill T. Jones, Van Halen, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.  Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley.  (510) 642-9988.  http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2008/20th_century_and_beyond/sc.php

Sunday, February 15 - Sarah performs selections from A Sweeter Music  at the Point Reyes Dance Palace. 503 B Street, Point Reyes Station.  (415) 663-1075. http://www.dancepalace.org/

8 pm Thursday, March 12 - As part of the New Sounds Live series, hosted by John Schaefer and broadcast on WNYC, Sarah performs a program of new commissions which for this concert has been titled “Notes on the War: The Piano Protests,” featuring the New York premieres of works by Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Garland, Phil Kline, Jerome Kitzke and Kyle Gann.  Video projections, on three screens, are by John Sanborn.  Merkin Hall, 129 West 67th Street, New York.  (212) 501-3330.  http://kaufman-center.org/merkin-concert-hall/event/notes-on-war-piano-protests/

Friday, March 27 - Sarah performs selections from A Sweeter Music for the annual Music for Peace concert, co-sponsored by the Foundation for Modern Music.  Rothko Chapel, 1409 Sul Ross St., Houston, Texas.  www.rothkochapel.org.

Friday, April 17 - Sarah presents new work from A Sweeter Music for the graduate seminar of pianist Bruce Brubaker.  New England Conservatory, 290 Huntington Ave, Boston, Massachusetts.

Sunday, April 26 - Sarah performs selections from A Sweeter Music.  Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., Chicago.  (312) 744-6630.

May 8 - Sarah performs selections from A Sweeter Music on the Wayward Music series, curated by Steve Peters. Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue, Seattle.  http://waywardmusic.blogspot.com

2008

In 2008, Sarah worked on a long-term project which involves commissioning eighteen composers to write new works envisioning peace.  This project is titled A Sweeter Music, after this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King’s Nobel Lecture: "We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war."

The composers are Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Garland, Kyle Gann, Paul Dresher, Carl Stone, Ingram Marshall, Jerome Kitzke, Phil Kline, Mamoru Fujieda, Larry Polansky, Michael Byron, The Residents, and Preben Antonsen.   Video projections will be by John Sanborn.

Sarah premiered a group of these new pieces in the Fall of 2008, and take them on tour throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Sarah has joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, teaching a class on contemporary keyboard literature.  www.sfcm.org.

8 pm Saturday, February 2, 2008	As part of the Berkeley Arts Festival, Sarah performs works by Terry Riley, Stephen Blumberg, Kyle Gann, and others. The new Arts Festival location is on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Details TBA at www.berkeleyartsfestival.com.
4 pm Wednesday, February 20, 2008	Sarah performs a recital in memory of the scholar, teacher, and music lover Helene Brewer. Women’s Faculty Club, UC Berkeley campus. (510) 642-4175.
8 pm Friday, February 29, 2008	Sarah performs an all-Leo Ornstein concert to celebrate the release of her new Ornstein CD on the New Albion label. www.berkeleyartsfestival.com and www.newalbion.com.
8:30 pm Friday, March 7	Sarah and Joseph Kubera perform the New York premieres of recent four-hand pieces by Terry Riley, including Etude from the Old Country, Jaztine, Tango Doble Ladiado, and Waltz for Charismas. Sarah and Joe also perform Riley’s Cinco de Mayo and Ingram Marshall’s Five Easy Pieces, and they each play solo works as well. Roulette, 20 Greene Street, New York. (212) 219-8242. www.roulette.org.
5 to 9 pm Saturday, June 21	New Music Bay Area presents Garden of Memory, the annual summer solstice concert at the Chapel of the Chimes, a gorgeous columbarium and mausoleum designed by Julia Morgan.  Sarah performs music by Marc Blitzstein, James Tenney, Jim Fox, and Leo Ornstein.  Performers you can hear during this popular event include Charles Amirkhanian, Paul Dresher, Amy X. Neuburg, Walter Kitundu, Ed Campion, Brenda Hutchinson, Pamela Z, Willie Winant, Aaron Ximm, Laura Inserra, the Del Sol Quartet, John  Bischoff, Maggi Payne, and many others.  Updates soon at www.gardenofmemory.com.
8 pm Friday, July 18	Sarah performs a program of works by Marc Blitzstein, including his 1929 Piano Percussion Music and 1927 Piano Sonata, in preparation for a Blitzstein recording on the Other Minds label.  Best known for his opera The Cradle Will Rock and other music theater works, Blitzstein studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, and was an excellent pianist.  According to the Blitzstein website, his piano music is “typical of the Boulanger-influenced products of American modernism: strongly rhythmic (although in Blitzstein's case, not influenced by jazz), and described by himself as ‘wild, dissonant, and percussive.’ All of which was very far removed from the Schoenbergian line of compositional thought.”  Old First Concerts, 1751 Sacramento Street at Van Ness, San Francisco.  www.oldfirstconcerts.org, and (415) 474-1608.
8:30 pm Saturday, August 2	Sarah performs works by Peter Garland, Evan Ziporyn, Ingram Marshall, Henry Cowell,  Kyle Gann, Virgil Thomson, and Terry Riley as part of the New Albion at SummerScape Festival.  This exciting festival, outdoors in a tent, features the composers who have defined the New Albion label over the past several decades, including Lou Harrison, John Cage, Carl Stone, Paul Dresher, Frederic Rzewski, and many others.  The festival features stellar composer-performers and musicians over several days.  Bard College, Spiegeltent by the Fisher Center, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.  www.newalbion.com and www.bard.edu/fishercenter.
December 8	Other Minds presents its third New Music Séance, featuring “composers of hypnotic, spiritual music.”  Sarah alternates with violinist Kate Stenberg and pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann during the course of three concerts at 2 pm, 5:30 pm, and 8 pm.  “Once again,” says the Other Minds website, “the 1895 Arts & Crafts style Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco, with its handmade chairs, candlelit interior and rustic décor, will be the site of three concerts of rarely-heard gems of the past 100 years. Whereas the Other Minds Music Festival gives us a snap-shot of current trends by living composers, our Séance is designed to channel new music’s progenitors alongside composers working today.”   Sarah performs music by Meredith Monk, Dane Rudhyar, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, Mamoru Fujieda, Henry Cowell, Jim Fox, Alexander Scriabin, Ingram Marshall, Peter Garland, and others.  www.otherminds.org.
6-10 pm Sunday, December 21	Sarah curates a winter solstice concert, presented by Lifemark Group Arts and New Music Bay Area, at the beautiful Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes, with performances by Ya Elah, Shira Kammen and Peter Maund, Eva-Maria Zimmermann, WAVE (Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble), and other musicians in half-hour sets alternating in the two main chapels.  6-10 pm.  Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland. https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/50681

 

2006-2007

8 pm Tuesday, September 12, 2006	Sarah performs fifteen minutes of new work by Mamoru Fujieda, Kyle Gann, Elizabeth Lauer, and others in a fundraiser for Zelda Bronstein, running for mayor of Berkeley.  Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. www.zeldaformayor.org, www.hillsideclub.org.
September 28-30, 2006	Sarah joins a group of scholars, educators, and artists for a conference entitledEmerson and the Power of the Imagination, presented by the Boston Research Institute for the 21st Century, an international peace institute that envisions a worldwide network of global citizens developing cultures of peace through dialogue and understanding.  On the second day of the conference, Sarah premieres a piece composed for the occasion by Kyle Gann.  Here is the program note: On Reading Emerson (2006) Pianist Sarah Cahill asked me to write a piece about one of our mutually favorite authors, Emerson. I resisted the impulse to title the piece "Whim," though like Emerson, "I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation." Of course my conception of Emerson is filtered through Charles Ives, who wrote of him, "As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them, along the ground first." To create that effect in music, I did the reverse: wrote a bunch of passages of music around a single (or double) idea, and arranged them along the ground before fitting them together. Because I think of Emerson as ever aware of the interpenetration of opposites, almost every chord in the piece contains a tone from the opposite chord, and because he is all encompassing, I have used, for the first time in my life, a 12-tone row (It only appears twice, and elsewhere in fragments, and is never transposed, retrograded, or anything). Like Emerson's writing, the piece is peppered with quotations, three of which the listener may recognize. The fourth will not be recognized; it is from a song that I began writing in college on Emerson's "The Rhodora" and never finished, because the only good phrase in the song was to these lines of Emerson:     Why thou wert there, O, rival of the rose!     I never thought to ask, I never knew.... I thank Sarah for giving that phrase a home at last. Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, 396 Harvard St., Cambridge, Mass.  www.brc21.org.
12:30 pm Wednesday, August 2, 2006	Sarah performs a lunchtime concert with music by Ornstein, Grainger, Cowell, Fujieda, and others as part of the Noontime Concerts series. According to their website, “St. Patrick’s Church, built in 1872 and rebuilt by 1914 after the destruction of the 1906 earthquake, is one of San Francisco’s prized historic buildings. Inside, you’ll find dazzling Tiffany stained glass windows, pillars, an altar of Bottecino Italian and Connemara Irish marble, twelve tuned steeple bells, and an exquisite 30-rank 1930 E. M. Skinner organ with a Gothic pipecase featuring a statue of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music.”  St. Patrick’s Church, 756 Mission St. (near Yerba Buena Gardens), San Francisco.  www.noontimeconcerts.org
4 pm Sunday, October 15, 2006	- Sarah performs works by Grainger, Cowell, and others at a beautiful community center located in one of the most idyllic places on earth.  Point Reyes Dance Palace, 5th and B Streets, Point Reyes Station.  www.dancepalace.org
8 pm Friday, October 27, 2006	Sarah plays a recital of new work as part of the Berkeley Arts Festival: Snippets 2 (2006)- Frederic Rzewski (premiere) Almost a Quintet (2006)- Larry Polansky (premiere) On Reading Emerson (2006)- Kyle Gann Tango (2006)- Andrea Morricone (premiere) Improvviso (2006)- Andrea Morricone (premiere) “Le Crepescule” Rag (2006)- Elizabeth Lauer Pleasant Dreaming (2006)- Phil Collins The pieces by Rzewski, Polansky, and Gann, as well as Morricone’s Improvviso, were written for Sarah. Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley.  www.berkeleyartsfestival.org.
November 18-24, 2006	Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo.  This year the festival celebrates the eccentric and brilliant Australian composer Percy Grainger.  Sarah performs some of the scintillating and often radical solo works as well as virtuosic four-hand and two-piano pieces with Joseph Kubera.  Concerts take place at the American Embassy, at the Jiyugakuen Myonichikan (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), and at the Kanazawa Art Center.   www.pacificcrossings.com.
11 am Sunday, December 10, 2006	Sarah talks with British composer-pianist Thomas Ades, in conjunction with a rare Bay Area recital he performs the night before (at Herbst Theatre), featuring works by Janacek, Ades, Castiglioni, Stravinsky, and Nancarrow.  Salon at the Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter St. (between Powell and Mason), San Francisco.  www.performances.org.
4 pm Sunday, January 28, 2007	Sarah performs with the remarkable cellist Emil Miland.  Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez Street, San Francisco.  www.nvcm.org.
February 24, 2007	Other Minds presents its second New Music Séance, featuring a wide range of hypnotic and spiritual music from the 20th and 21st centuries.  Violinist Kate Stenberg and pianist Eva-Maria Zimmerman also perform.  Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon St., San Francisco.  www.otherminds.org.
Wednesday, April 11 to Saturday, April 14, 2007	Sarah performs on prepared piano in Arvo Part's Tabula Rasa, with violinists Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman and the New Century Orchestra. www.ncco.org
Wed/Apr 11 at 7:30 pm	Osher Marin JCC, 200 North San Pedro Road, SAN RAFAEL
Thu/Apr 12 at 8pm	St John's Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue, BERKELEY
Fri/Apr 13 at 8pm	St Mark's Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Avenue, PALO ALTO
Sat/Apr 14 at 8pm	Florence Gould Theatre, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 34th /Clement, SAN FRANCISCO
1 pm Sunday, April 15, 2007	Sarah talks about Henryk Gorecki, in conjunction with the premiere of his Third String Quartet by the Kronos Quartet. Faculty Club, UC Berkeley. (510) 642-9988 or www.calperfs.berkeley.edu.
8 pm Wednesday, April 18, 2007	Sarah and Joseph Kubera perform a program of four-hand piano music by Terry Riley, including the premiere of his Waltz for Charismas, in preparation for performing the pieces at the Triptych Festival in Scotland. Berkeley Arts Festival Hall, Walter Ratcliff's Landmark Fidelity Bank Building, 2323 Shattuck Avenue (between Bancroft and Durant), Berkeley. (510) 665-9496, and www.berkeleyartsfestival.com.
Monday, April 23 to Sunday, April 29	Sarah teams up with Joe Kubera for a set of new four-hand piano pieces by Terry Riley. Sarah and Joe have been invited by Terry Riley to perform in the Triptych Festival in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, where Riley is a featured composer this year. www.triptychfestival.com.
2-4 pm Saturday, June 9, 2007	Sarah speaks with Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens, and then with Paul Dresher, as part of Edge Fest, the new music festival presented by Cal Performances. Free and open to the public. 125 Morrison Hall, Department of Music, UC Berkeley Campus. (510) 642-9988 or http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest
5-9 pm Thursday, June 21, 2007	Sarah performs music by Terry Riley, Peter Garland, and others at the annual summer solstice walk-through concert known as Garden of Memory, produced by New Music Bay Area and Lifemark Group Arts. The line-up this year includes Terry Riley, Paul Dresher, Ellen Fullman, Todd Reynolds, Amy X. Neuburg, and about thirty other musicians and ensembles. At the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland. www.gardenofmemory.com
8 pm Friday, July 13, 2007	Sarah performs a program of summery piano music, including the Bay Area premiere of Peter Garland's Waves Breaking on Rocks, selections from Hans Otte's The Book of Sounds, and works by Terry Riley, James Cleghorn, and other local composers. Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento St., San Francisco. (415) 474-1608 and www.oldfirstconcerts.org.
8 pm Friday, September 28, 2007	Sarah performs a program of works by Chester Biscardi, Annie Gosfield, and others. Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento St., San Francisco. (415) 474-1608 and www.oldfirstconcerts.org.
November 1-6, 2007	Sarah is a featured artist at the Sacramento Festival of New American Music, performing music by Pauline Oliveros, Stephen Blumberg, and others. More information coming soon.