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Press Releases
EXTENSITY Presents Pianist Sarah Cahill in The Future is Female
EXTENSITY Presents Pianist Sarah Cahill
in The Future is Female
Saturday, March 19, 2022 at 7:00pm
The Box Factory | 1519 Decatur St. | Ridgewood, NY
Tickets and more Information:
https://www.
Plus New Album – The Future is Female, Vol. 1, In Nature
Available March 4, 2022 on First Hand Records
Stream the album here (for press only, not for publication):
https://bit.ly/StreamFiFvol1
Downloads available to press on request
“a persuasive advocate for American experimentalist composers”
– The Chicago Tribune
Sarah Cahill: www.sarahcahill.com
On Saturday, March 19, 2022 at 7:00pm, pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by the New York Times, will give a performance of her ongoing project, The Future is Female, as part of EXTENSITY’s WOMEN NOW festival, at The Box Factory (1519 Decatur St.). Cahill will be performing music by living women composers, including Regina Harris Baiocchi, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Gebrou, Tania León, Gabriela Ortiz, Aida Shirazi, Mary D. Watkins, and Theresa Wong. The pieces by Baiocchi, Watkins, and Wong were all commissioned by Cahill.
The Future is Female, which Cahill began in 2018, 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 New York concert follows the March 4 release of Cahill’s album The Future is Female, Vol. 1 “In Nature,” which is the first of a three-album series on UK-based First Hand Records, as well as Cahill’s marathon 8-hour The Future is Female installment at The Barbican in London on March 5. Stream the album (press only, downloads available on request): https://bit.ly/StreamFiFvol1.
Cahill says, “Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard.”
About the Music on the Program:
Regina Harris Baiocchi’s Piano Poems was commissioned by Cahill in 2020 and is inspired by the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, as well as Baiocchi’s own poems. Along with her work as a composer, Baiocchi founded the Haiku Festival in Chicago to inspire children’s poetry and promote literacy.
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is an Ethiopian nun, now 98 years old, who has a distinctive style at the piano. Cahill first learned of Guèbrou’s music from composer, pianist, and music writer, Jed Distler. Cahill researched ??Guèbrou’s work and ordered scores from her music foundation. Of her piece The Homeless Wanderer, Guèbrou says, “The homeless wanderer plays on his flute…The wild animals and snakes do not dare approach him but listen spellbound to the melody his flute produces, which becomes its protector through the power of the notes. They become his friends.”
Pulitzer Prize-winner Tania León's Mistica is a work of sustained motions of rhythmic and harmonic cycles through cascades of successive pitches and sudden changes of tempo. There are fragments of a Guajira/Son/Danzon contrasting with the timbral sound world that surrounds the piece. Mistica was composed for Ursula Oppens in 2003, whose performance of this work was the first premiere of Tania León's music in La Habana, Cuba since 1967.
The music of Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has been performed recently by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a number of other notable ensembles. Ortiz’s piece, Estudio No. 3 from Estudios entre Preludios (Prelude and Etude No. 3) is dedicated to Jesusa Palancares, the main character in the 1969 novel Hasta no verte Jesu mio by Elena Poniatowska.
Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Aida Shirazi is a founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association. Her piece, Albumblatt, uses a number of techniques inside the piano, like strumming and plucking the strings, finger muting, and creating harmonics on the nodes of the strings.
Mary D. Watkins’ piece Summer Days was written for Cahill in 2020. Watkins is an eclectic composer as well as a pianist, arranger, recording artist, and record producer. Her music reflects many styles – jazz, gospel, country, rock, classical and pop. She says of the piece, “[the music] makes me think of children on a hot summer day freely playing in the water of a sprinkler, bouncing, running, wrestling, yelling, laughing, and screaming with delight.”
Theresa Wong wrote She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees for Cahill in 2019. She was inspired by Nina Simone’s a cappella song “Images” and its lyrics, which is a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. The melody of Simone’s song appears in the opening of the piece. Wong is a cellist, composer, vocalist and improviser based in San Francisco.
About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill, recently called “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, 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. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).
Recent appearances include the Interlochen Arts Festival, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art, a performance at Alice Tully Hall with the Silk Road Ensemble, Stanford Live, Le Poisson Rouge, and concerts at San Francisco Performances, Sacramento State’s Festival of New American Music, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the United Kingdom, and Toyusu Civic Center Hall in Tokyo. Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, ranging from the 18th century to the present day. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include concerts presented by The Barbican, 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, and Mayville State University.
Cahill’s recent and upcoming streaming speaking engagements have included a two-day discussion presented by the Boulanger Initiative, The Future is Female: In Conversation and Performance (watch online); a Piano Talk presented by the Ross McKee Foundation titled Challenging the Canon (watch online); a panel presented by American Composers Forum on Advocating for Gender Equity; three webinars presented by the San Francisco Symphony, including Five Composers You Should Know (Who Happen to be Women) (November 10); and At Home with Sarah Cahill a workshop presented by Amateur Music Network, where Cahill spoke about her life in new music and performed a short concert (watch online).
Her previous streamed performances during the pandemic have included the Bang on a Can Marathon in June 2020, a concert presented by Harrison House in Joshua Tree as part of Cahill’s residency there (watch online); a Piano Break recital presented by the Ross McKee Foundation, featuring the world premiere of Regina Harris Baiocchi’s Piano Poems, inspired by poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright (watch online); a faculty performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, featuring the world premiere of Up for two pianos by Riley Nicholson, performed with Regina Myers (watch online); as well as appearances streamed by Musaics of the Bay, Old First Concerts, SFSymphony , and Community School of Music and Arts.
The first episode of At Home With Sarah Cahill captures an afternoon of musical storytelling filmed at her home in Berkeley. Cahill performs Vítezslava Kaprálová’s Preludes 1 and 3 (1937) and Amy Beach’s Dreaming (1892), and shares the compelling background of the works and the composers. She performs the two works on Terry Riley’s historic Mason & Hamlin piano, which had just arrived a few days before as a gift from Riley. Additional footage of Cahill speaking in her garden about her home and life in Berkeley is available here.
Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Other Minds, Tzadik, Albany, Cold Blue, Other Minds, and Pinna labels. 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. Cahill recorded Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan with Gamelan Galak Tika, which was released by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2021.
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. Cahill is recording music from the project in a series of three albums for First Hand Records. The first volume, “In Nature,” is available in March 2022. Recent and upcoming performances include concerts presented by the Barbican, 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, and Mayville State University.
Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory. For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.
About EXTENSITY: EXTENSITY is a musician-founded series presenting cutting-edge programming by emerging and established artists working across a range of disciplines including music, fine art and multimedia. EXTENSITY aims to foster connections between musical traditions, artistic practices and time periods with emphasis on underrepresented and new voices. We also create platforms for artists and audiences to interact and make new discoveries through receptions, interviews, panels, lectures and special events. EXTENSITY hinges on this fluid, immersive perspective, both in programming and in experience; our goal is to promote a free flow of ideas, stimulate dialogue, and forge meaningful links between artists and engaged, active audiences.
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