Sarah Cahill (pianist)

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Sarah Cahill
Born Washington, D.C., United States
Genre(s) Contemporary
Occupation(s) Pianist, radio host,

writer, recording artist
Instrument(s) Piano
Label(s) New Albion Records
Website www.sarahcahill.com
Notable instrument(s)
Prepared piano

Sarah Cahill, an American pianist born in Washington, D.C., is a long-time resident of Berkeley, California. She is best known for insightful performances of new works, many of them written for her. Sarah has also established a reputation as a writer on music and as a radio-show host.

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[edit] Biography

Cahill has commissioned, premiered and recorded numerous ground-breaking works for solo piano. Compositions dedicated to her include John Adams’ China Gates, Frederic Rzewski’s Snippets 2, Pauline Oliveros’ Quintuplets for Play Pen, and Kyle Gann's Private Dances and On Reading Emerson. She has also premiered works by Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Evan Ziporyn, Julia Wolfe, Ingram Marshall, Ursula Mamlok, George Lewis, Leo Ornstein and many others.

Sarah's far ranging musical tastes often take her into unexplored territory. Other projects developed and/or curated by Cahill include Playdate, a group of commissioned pieces about childhood combined with classical works; the commission of an evening of new scores for four hands by Terry Riley, performed with pianist Joseph Kubera; and a concert of recent Italian music, featuring premieres by Luciano Chessa, Andrea Morricone, and others.

One of Sarah's other projects is Bay Area Pianists, an organization she founded in 1993. In 1996, in association with New Music Bay Area, Sarah created the annual Garden of Memory walk-through concert at the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes wherein audience members move through the environment with new music ensembles performing simultaneously throughout the spaces. In 2003 she co-curated the Berkeley Edge Fest at Cal Performances.

As a radio personality Sarah has hosted weekly radio shows on the classical and contemporary music scenes on both KPFA 94.1FM in Berkeley, where her program was cited as "One of the 100 Best Things in the Bay Area" by Citysearch magazine, and on KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco.

Sarah investigated the impact early 20th-century American modernists had on the composers of her time. She explored these influences in concert programs at the Miller Theater, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, Galapagos Art Space, Spoleto Festival USA, the Phillips Collection, the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. (part of the Smithsonian Piano 300 gala), and at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco. She has also performed at the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival at the American Academy in Rome, the Santa Fe New Music Series, and at the Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo, Japan.

[edit] Background

Born into a musical and academic family in Washington, D.C., at the age of five Sarah moved to California when her father became Professor of Chinese Art History at U. C. Berkeley. She grew up listening to her father’s extensive collection of records, including rare historical recordings of composers like Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartok, and pianists such as Artur Schnabel, Walter Gieseking and Clara Haskil. Sarah began her formal piano studies at the age of six, and at seven she began studying with Sharon Mann, a nationally recognized specialist in Bach’s keyboard music. By twelve she was performing concertos with several local orchestras. At sixteen she was invited to Sommermusikwochen, a chamber music festival in Trogen, Switzerland where the local press praised her remarkable technique and sympathetic engagement in Bach’s D major Toccata. Skipping her final year of high school she went directly to the San Francisco Conservatory where Adams composed China Gates for her. She finished her academic studies at the University of Michigan where she continued her musical training with Theodore Lettvin.

Sarah's knowledge of both music performance and scholarship resulted in her writing music reviews for Gramophone Explorations, Historical Performance, ClassicsToday.com, Grove’s Dictionary and numerous international publications, as well as liner notes for recordings by John Adams, Terry Riley, and others. In 1985 she became the music critic for the East Bay Express and has been widely published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and others.

Sarah is married to the filmmaker John Sanborn; together they are raising their daughter Miranda.

[edit] Selected discography

[edit] External links