New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes Present the 2019 Annual

“Garden of Memory” Summer Solstice Concert Featuring over 60 Bay Area performers and composers

Friday, June 21, 2019, 5-9pm

Chapel of the Chimes | 4499 Piedmont Avenue | Oakland, CA

Tickets ($20 general, $15 students & seniors, $5 children 5-12) available at the door and through Brown Paper Tickets. More information: www.gardenofmemory.com

Oakland, CA – On Friday, June 21, 2019 from 5 to 9pm, New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes present Garden of Memory, the annual summer solstice celebration at Chapel of the Chimes (4499 Piedmont Avenue). At this popular solstice concert, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a walk-through fun house of musical and visual splendor,” the program features simultaneous performances in different parts of the building by Bay Area composers, musicians, sound artists, and other performers presenting a variety of acoustic and electronic music, installations, and interactive events. The audience is free to move throughout the multilevel maze of interior gardens, cloisters, stairwells, fountains, alcoves, pools, and antechambers during the performances. This year's event benefits Youth ALIVE! and Oakland Summer Jazz Camp.

Select highlights of this year’s unique programming and performers:

• Pianist Sarah Cahill performs Percy Grainger's arrangement of John Dowland's "Now, O Now I Needs Must Part," Terry Riley's The Walrus in Memoriam, and Theresa Wong's She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees. With bassist Richard Mix, she also performs works by Roscoe Mitchell and Ann Callaway. Cahill will be performing in memory of Joe Botz, an avid audience member at new music concerts who died in March.  

• Lightbulb Ensemble performs on hand-built instruments, including steel metallophones and wood marimbas. They are joined by the Bay Area's own Friction Quartet in a new work by Brian Baumbusch, the founder of Lightbulb Ensemble.  

• Shelley Hirsch, an award-winning vocalist, composer, and storyteller based in New York City, will collaborate with other musicians and vocalists at the event.

• Christopher Olsen makes flags out of birch bark and picks up their resonances to create music.

• The Kevin Robinson KREation Ensemble creates "non-conventional improvisational sonic vibrations."

• A large shrine made of dozens of piano harps will be available for listeners to climb inside and interact with hundreds of piano strings.

• The Baker-Barganier Duo performs with toy pianos, mandolin, experimental electronics, motion, and more.

Additional artists to be featured at this event, many of whom are well-known to Bay Area audiences, include Kitka, Pamela Z, Anne Hege, Majel Connery, Henry Kaiser, Beth Custer, Stephen Kent, Sahba Sizdahkani, Dylan Mattingly, IMA, The Living Earth Show, Wendy Reid, John Benson, the Cardew Choir, SCLOrk, Krys Bobrowski and Karen Stackpole, Zachary Watkins, Paul Dresher & Joel Davel, Amy X Neuburg, and many others. A sunset bell-ringing ceremony is led by Brenda Hutchinson for her Daily Bell Project.

Garden of Memory offers a unique and personal musical experience to every listener roving freely through the Chapel of the Chimes. Getting lost is part of the experience as guests climb up and down the three floors of this Oakland Historic Landmark building and its unique architectural elements, which rise into vaulted ceilings. Seamless in feel, there are three separate design sections created by four architects; Cunningham & Politeo 1909, Julia Morgan 1926-1951 (consulting until her retirement 1951), Aaron Green 1956-1986 and JST Architects 1986-1998. In the older section the complexity of chapels, columbaria, and mausoleum areas are adorned with murals, paintings, sculpture, mosaics, California tile and 16th century antiquities. All architectural and garden areas have excellent acoustics and are illuminated by gentle natural light, often through beautiful arrangements of stained glass.

Drawing crowds of over three thousand people in recent years (including a large number of children), Garden of Memory has become a favorite summer solstice celebration for Bay Area audiences. Information about performances, directions, parking, accessibility, food/beverage, and is available at www.gardenofmemory.com.

Since 1996, New Music Bay Area, a nonprofit organization which provides opportunities and information to composers and performers of new music throughout the Bay Area, has hosted the Garden of Memory solstice concert every June 21^st from 5pm-9pm. Board president Sarah Cahill came up with the idea after wandering into the Chapel of the Chimes, and now Cahill and Lucy Farber Mattingly organize the concert each year, in collaboration with the small board of New Music Bay Area and the Chapel of the Chimes. Cahill recalls, “As I meandered around the building, I heard distant organ music, and tried to follow the sound to its source, through a labyrinth of magical gardens and gothic alcoves with the afternoon light filtering through stained glass. I imagined putting musicians all around this maze, so that when you turn a corner you might encounter a string quartet or an electronic music installation or a Georgian choir. So that's what we did.”

Chapel of the Chimes, the largest above-ground cemetery west of the Mississippi, started out as a street car station and became the California Memorial Crematorium and Columbarium in 1909. The property was expanded and transformed by Julia Morgan and later, Aaron Green – a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. The lobby and hallways feature artwork by Diego Rivera, a marble table top from the Medici family crest and a page from the Gutenberg Bible.

The facility’s numerous chapels, columbaria, and mausoleum areas are adorned with antiquities that date back to the 16^th century. All architectural and garden areas have excellent acoustics and are illuminated by gentle natural light, often through beautiful arrangements of stained glass.

About Sarah Cahill

Sarah Cahill, recently called “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned and premiered over sixty compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Yoko Ono, 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. Cahill has worked closely with composer Terry Riley since 1997, and for his 80^th birthday, Cahill commissioned nine new works for solo piano in his honor and performed them with several of Riley’s own compositions at venues across the country. Cahill also had the opportunity to work closely with Lou Harrison, and has championed many of his works for piano.

Cahill has performed classical and contemporary chamber music with artists and ensembles such as pianists Joseph Kubera, Adam Tendler, and Regina Myers; violinists Kate Stenberg and Stuart Canin; the Alexander String Quartet; New Century Chamber Orchestra; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many more.

Recent appearances include a concert at San Quentin of the music Henry Cowell wrote while incarcerated there, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art, a performance at Alice Tully Hall with the Silk Road Ensemble, San Francisco Symphony’s Soundbox, a residency at the Noguchi Museum, and concerts at San Francisco Performances, Terry Riley’s Sri Moonshine series, and (Le) Poisson Rouge and the Italian Academy in New York. Performance highlights for the 2018-19 season include the Interlochen Arts Festival, Festival of New American Music, Huddersfield Festival (UK), Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Bowling Green New Music Festival, among many others.

Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, a ritual installation and communal feminist immersive listening experience featuring more than forty compositions by women around the globe, ranging from the 15th century to the present day, including new commissioned works. Featured composers include Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Maria de Alvear, Galina Ustvolskaya, Frangiz Ali-Zadeh, Florence Price, Hannah Kendall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Kui Dong, Meredith Monk, Vítezslava Kaprálová, Deirdre Gribbin, Fannie Dillon, and many others. Cahill will perform this project in museums, galleries, and concert halls in coming seasons.

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 2013 release A Sweeter Music (Other Minds) featured musical reflections on war by eighteen composer/activists. In 2015, Pinna Records released her two-CD set of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, aa fusion of nature and technology created by identifying the musical patterns in the electrical impulses of plants. In September 2017, she released her latest album, 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.

Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. Cahill is on the piano faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and curates a monthly series of new music concerts at the new Berkeley Art Museum. For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.