A Sweeter Music Recording

In a storefront on University Avenue in Berkeley Sunday afternoon, there was a CD release party for pianist Sarah Cahill above, and her A Sweeter Music suite of commissions.



The commissions for new piano music by Cahill from 18 composers dates from the Iraq War. Cahill grew up in Berkeley with a professor father, and remembered the protest music she heard as a child in the 1960s. During those awful years when we were invading and occupying Iraq, she realized there was no musical equivalent being created, even though thousands of people were marching through the streets in protest.



So she took it upon herself to do something about it, and the results have been trickling in since 2007. (Click here for a series of posts about the music and ensuing performances around the Bay Area.)



The recording quality by Other Minds Records is superb, and features fascinating music by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, Kyle Gann, Carl Stone, Phil Kline, Yoko Ono, and The Residents. The recording is only Part 1 of A Sweeter Peace, and I hope Charles Amirkhanian (above right, with Homer Flynn from The Residents) and Sarah get around to Part 2 soon.

Sarah Cahill Plays Pre-Maximalists at Old First Church

Old First Church, at the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento, not only attends to the spiritual needs of its parishioners and the material needs of poor people, but it also attends to the cultural needs of its surrounding community by allowing Old First Concerts the use of its lovely space for a Friday night and Sunday afternoon musical concert series (click here for their upcoming calendar).



The eclectic music concerts started in 1969, and have somehow survived for 42 years while charging the public very little money. The $15 ticket price, in fact, just went up a whopping $2 to $17. You can also attend a $25 fundraiser this coming Sunday the 20th where wine and chocolates are promised along with an amazing array of musicians, from jazz pianist Mike Greensill and vocalist Wesla Whitfield to cellist Vicky Ehrlich and pianist Sarah Cahill playing chamber music of Lou Harrison.



As part of the series, Sarah Cahill (above) performed a recital of contemporary piano music last Friday at Old First that was a combination of bracing, lovely, and ear-cleaning. All of the composers on the program are still living, and though many of them flirt with Minimalism in terms of repetitive patterns, a better name might be what composer Paul Dresher has coined as a joking rejoinder to "Postminimalist," which is "Pre-Maximalist." The major common thread that tied the program together was that Cahill knows all the composers and loves their music. In some cases, she even commissioned the pieces we were hearing, such as Paul Dresher's 2011 Two Entwined and Ingram Marshall's 2008 Movement (Deep in my Heart) which are part of Sarah's A Sweeter Music omnibus of contemporary piano music about peace.



The concert started brilliantly with the New Zealand/American composer Annea Lockwood's 1989 Red Mesa, a 16-minute tone poem about the American Southwest desert that managed to avoid every pictorial cliche while still evoking the desert with clarity. It started with Sarah playing repetitive notes on the keyboard and then playing inside the piano itself, at which she is an old hand after years of Henry Cowell, and then layering on the complexity until a very rich climax diminuendos into more soft, single, repeated notes. Click here for Lockwood's website which has musical samples and photos of her Burning Piano performance art pieces which predate Burning Man by decades.



This was followed by Victoria Falls, an early piece by New York based composer Evan Ziporyn "when he was a 25-year-old graduate student at UC Berkeley, which he doesn't list in his collected works because he forgot about it and doesn't even have a score, but I do," Sarah explained. The Africa influenced piece was rhythmically jubilant and a delight to hear. Ziporyn might want to get a copy of the score the next time he's in the Bay Area playing gamelan orchestra, which has been his mature musical obsession.



Two short pieces followed from Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants, a mammoth undertaking he started in 1995 that attempts to describe the biometric properties of flora in sound. Last month Sarah recorded a set of excerpts on a CD for the Tzadik label at the UC Santa Cruz recital hall, and though the evanescent, sweet sounding music doesn't do much for me, I trust Sarah's taste and figure the problem is mine.



After the enjoyable Dresher and Marshall pieces, Cahill was joined by Regina Schaffer (above right, with page-turner Kelsey Walsh on the left), another Bay Area pianist who focuses on new music. The pair played four-hand transcriptions of improvisations by Terry Riley that were so insanely virtuosic that Cahill's assertion that Riley was able to play them with only one pair of hands seemed impossible.



Both the 2000 Waltz for Christmas and the 2003 Etude from the Old Country are also extremely lively and fun, and it's good to hear that Cahill and Schaffer are going to be recording a collection of five of these pieces soon. The old San Francisco hippie "Godfather of Minimalism," as Sarah referred to the composer of In C has a literally groovy website (click here), where you can see what he's up to next.

A New Indigo Peace

The pianist Sarah Cahill performed pieces from "A Sweeter Music" last Saturday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as a benefit for the American Friends Service Committee, which is the oddly clunky name for Quakers. She was joined by her daughter Miranda (above) who helped out during a rehearsal of the official world premiere of a Pauline Oliveiros piece for audience sing-a-long called "A New Indigo Peace."



I heard a preview of Ms. Oliveiros' protest peace song over a year ago at Mills College and loved it, encouraging Sarah to program it again. She took me up on the challenge and insisted I be in charge of the audience sing-a-long at the Conservatory benefit, which was a stretch because my singing voice only approximates pitch. Plus, after a week of wage slavery at the Census Bureau, I had come down with a horrible cold for the weekend. Thankfully, I was able to dragoon a trio of Quakers from the weekly federal building peace vigil to fill in for me.



Also helping with the audience sing-along was Miranda. As Sarah wrote, "Before the concert I talked with Miranda about the history of the American Friends Service Committee, as much as I know about it, and she said she felt the same about the senselessness of war and the possibilities of peace. And when it came time for Pauline Oliveros' sing-along, she decided she wanted to go stand in front of the audience and guide the singing with the Quakers."



The three brave souls were (left to right above) Stephen Matchett, Sandra Schwartz, and Markley Morris. It helped that Matchett could read the penciled out score and sing with near-perfect pitch.



Markley Morris wrote an account:

"We came for rehearsal two hours before the show. When Sarah played it through, I was dazzled. The idea is simple: a three-part round based on the words “We want peace on earth” is embedded in brilliant swirls of piano music. There’s a certain rowdiness about it. The repeating words evoke the chanting at a demonstration.

I was sorry Mike was under the weather but thankful he was there to help us rehearse. I was given the simplest part of the round but clearly was out of my depths. I never did manage to sing it through correctly to say nothing of in tune!

When it came time to perform, Sarah and then Stephen skillfully explained the piece to the audience and we practiced a little. Then we sang. Somehow it all came together. “A New Indigo Peace” was glorious. I couldn’t really hear the audience but I could see that their mouths moving and the music flowed everywhere.

I think the sing-along was a pleasant and energizing break after some quite demanding music. Sarah likened it to the sing-alongs Pete Seeger’s been leading all these years.

I love “A New Indigo Peace,” and I hope it goes on to have a long life.

A Sweeter Music in San Francisco

San Francisco's Old First Church at the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento has been hosting classical, jazz and "world music" concerts since 1970. The surprisingly inexpensive tickets, with a $15 ceiling, are matched to an acoustically beautiful small church with sophisticated performers and audiences. It sort of reminds one why it's cool to live in San Francisco.



It also features a beautiful sounding Steinway grand piano for its soloists to play, and last Friday evening Sarah Cahill brought her set of new music commissions involving the concept of peace and war, "A Sweeter Music," to San Francisco for the first time. I heard a preview last year of some of the pieces at Mills College, and then a formal debut at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall in January. The great excitement about this concert was hearing Ms. Cahill play this brand new music after it had gotten into her bones over the course of performances around the country over the last six months. It sounded immeasurably better than the Cal Performances concert in Hertz Hall.



Three of the 18 commissioned composers are still working on their music: Paul Dresher, Carl Stone and Meredith Monk, whose reworked "Steppe Music" opened the concert. There were two new pieces for the West Coast by New York composers Phil Kline and Kyle Gann, both of which were violent and sensationally good. As Sarah noted when she started the concert (I'm paraphrasing), "Depending on which pieces I play, it's a very different reaction. Kosman in The San Francisco Chronicle noted the UC Berkeley concert's emphasis on peaceful music, while The New York Times wrote that the emphasis at Merkin Hall was on violence and war."



The music is so good that this may turn out to be one of the more important and lasting commissioned music projects in history. Though Peter Garland's two new pieces, part of "After the Wars," and Michael Byron's "Devotion to Peace" were a bit too sweet and dull for my tastes, every other composition Cahill played this evening struck me as music that's going to be around for a long time.



There's only one problem, and it's a big one. Ms. Cahill is married to the video artist John Sanborn, who has a long and established career in the New York art world. He has decided to create a multimedia piece over three screens for each of these commissioned musical pieces and has unintentionally created a "Fantasia" informed principally by an encyclopedia of multimedia cliches. I could hear Sarah Cahill play Terry Riley's "Be Kind to One Another (Rag)" happily at least another dozen times while I never want to see Sanborn's visual accompaniment again. According to a friend, it looked like "1980s computer screen savers."



Even more problematic is the visual accompaniment to Jerome Kitzke's brilliant nine-movement composition, "There is a Field." The composer asks the pianist to recite poetry by Whitman and Rumi, drum on the piano, and yip into a microphone while playing an amazing mix of rousingly patriotic music mixed in with its opposite. Sanborn's three screens, meanwhile, were reducing the complexities of the music and poetry to an MTV version of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary, complete with the same Matthew Brady photos zooming in and out. The result was grotesque in ways that I don't think were intentional. For a wiser and more nuanced take on the image versus music issue, check out Patrick Vaz's post about the same concert.

The World Premiere of A Sweeter Music

According to Gray Brechin's great book, "Imperial San Francisco," UC Berkeley has been an essential center of the United States military-industrial-academic complex since at least the Philippine-American War (1899-1902 with Americans slaughtering "insurgent" Filipinos until 1913). The university also gave birth and continues to sustain the nuclear arms race, which it has been spearheading since World War Two.



So it seems fitting that Sarah Cahill's "peace" commission, "A Sweeter Music," should be given its public birth at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus (click here for an earlier, more detailed explanation).



What was particularly exciting was looking at the program and seeing an asterisk, which meant "world premiere," and realizing that just about every piece at the concert was a World Premiere, something I've never seen before. In fact, Sarah only played about half of the music that's been commissioned so there are even more World Premieres left to hear for people in New York, Boston, Houston and Chicago where "A Sweeter Music" is traveling (click here for the calendar).



The concert itself was a triumph because most of the music was so good, with at least half of the pieces destined for a larger and longer life. I didn't care for the video art by John Sanborn because the music didn't need it. Part of the fun of great music is you get to envision it yourself.



I was invited to a post-concert party in the Berkeley Hills and bummed a ride from Luciano Chessa (above left), a wonderful Italian composer who lives in Berkeley and teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The party was filled with friends, family and composers from the afternoon's concert, including Mamoru Fujieda (above right) who wrote one of my favorite pieces, "The Olive Branch Speaks." It struck me as the most genuinely peaceful music of the day.



My real favorite of the concert was "There Is a Field" by Jerome Kitzke (above left) where he had Sarah play the piano, recite poetry (3 Whitmans, 1 Rumi) at the same time, drum on the head of the piano, shout, and sing/scat. She was fabulous and fearless with all of it, shifting as rapidly as the music from mournful to rocking and back again.



The lovely party was hosted by Sharon Mann (not pictured), who was Sarah's piano teacher when she was eight years old, and who currently teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. "She's the reason I'm a pianist," Sarah told me.

Sarah Cahill at Mills College

Sarah Cahill gave a show-and-tell preview of her "A Sweeter Music" project last Monday in a small classroom at Mills College in the Oakland foothills (click here for an explanation of the musical commissions).



She played the first movement from a four-movement work by Peter Garland, and a complex ragtime piece by Terry Riley, and asked for a volunteer to help turn the wide pages of the Riley score for her.



Her pageturner was the 17-year-old Preben Antonsen who had written the next piece, "Dar el-Harb (House of War)" whose title was taken from an expletive directed at the invading U.S. forces in Iraq by the local Muslims, and which was tattooed on the arm of one of Preben's cousins who was part of the United States force. It was a precociously interesting piece of music. And his website is sort of scary professional (click here).



Sarah looked insecure about her music project all evening, but there was no need for her to worry. Everything she played was fascinating.



In the case of Pauline Oliveros' "New Indigo Peace," which is a simple bluesy melody with a nursery rhyme calling for peace, Ms. Cahill may have a new classic on her hand. It's singable, even for people who can barely stay on pitch like myself, and the lyrics are absurdly easy without being particularly stupid.



Cahill still hasn't received all the scores from her 18 commissioned pieces, and some of the scores she's received are "really difficult," such as the 4th movement by Frederic Rzewski in his "Peace Dances." She introduced them with, "this is great music but right now I'm going to have to take the fourth movement at half-time. It's hard."

A Pianist of Note

By some freakish chance, this blog has ended up as the "Blog of Note" on Google/Blogger's home page for the last couple of days, which has boosted the traffic considerably, so I thought I'd repost an article that I'm proud of which I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy. By the way, the men in nuns' outfits are in the post below this.



The pianist Sarah Cahill came to my apartment on Thursday to talk about "A Sweeter Music," her amazingly ambitious project of the last year where she has commissioned 18 composers to write piano music on the subject of peace. The composers are an interesting mixture of the obscure and the celebrated: 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.



So far, Sarah has received 11 of the 18 scores and they range in style from angry and confrontational to the complete opposite, such as Terry Riley's "Be Kind to One Another" rag which the composer characterizes as "pro-peace" rather than "anti-war." Cahill has already fallen in love with the music.



One question is if a piece of music can even be thought of as political, especially without text.



A number of the composers are incorporating language into their pieces, as Frederic Rzewski did in his 2005 round, shown above...



...and even sign language within Larry Polansky's 17-part "Numbers for solo piano (and invited speakers)."



The brilliant young composer Preben Antonsen, a student of John Adams, has written a piece that starts off in exquisite beauty and ends in great violence, which Cahill has asked him to consider changing depending on who gets elected president this fall.



The four-figure commissions are being subsidized in a few cases by individual affluent patrons, but most of it is coming out of Cahill's own pocket "with the assistance of some stocks left to me at age 9 by my Nixon-supporting grandfather which seems like a good use for them."



It wasn't until we were at lunch that we both realized the date was 9/11. Sarah's husband, the video artist/director John Sanborn, had been offered a good job at the Comedy Central network, so they moved to Manhattan in 2001. Here's her account of that annus horribilis:

"We lived on 21st Street between Broadway and Park. My daughter was in preschool on 14th St (she was three). Right after September 11th, I would take her to school in her stroller, past Union Square, plastered with flyers of missing people, along 14th Street, which was the boundary: no one was allowed to cross that line unless they lived below 14th Street. So we would see the rescue workers coming off duty, and the fire engines and military vehicles, and the makeshift shrines, and I kept trying to protect her from the thick smoke and the news about body parts and terrorists and the endless footage of the planes going into the buildings. She and her preschool friends played games where they would rescue people from burning buildings. I got e-mails from some friends saying "Well, it's about time! The United States has been so brutal towards the Middle East, no wonder we've been attacked!" but mostly people were just shocked. I'll never forget looking down Broadway towards where the World Trade Center used to be, and the smoke pouring from the blankness.

Comedy Central was having a difficult time after that, and soon they closed the division that John was heading. We came back here to Berkeley, and he made a film called MMI, which is about our 2001: the death of his father, the deaths of our two dogs (both died in New York), the World Trade Center attacks, our move across the country first east and then west. It ends with the nine-foot Baldwin being hoisted out the window of our "loft."

"A Sweeter Music" takes its title 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." Sarah wrote to me about her initial impetus:

"It was Rzewski's arrangement of "Down by the Riverside" which first gave me the idea of "A Sweeter Music." After reading news about the latest deaths in Iraq, I would sit down and play his music as a kind of catharsis. And I kept thinking that there needed to be more pieces like this, which are composed in response to a particular war (in this case the Vietnam war, during which "Down by the Riverside" was often sung in protest marches), but can still provide solace and inspiration thirty years later and beyond. And I know a number of composers who, like me, feel so frustrated and helpless in the face of a senseless war, a completely insane and unprovoked and costly war, and need to express their response in some form. So I really left it to the composers whether their work would be "anti-war" or "pro-peace."

This historic musical omnibus is still gestating, but you can hear portions of it starting this fall for free at Mills College on November 24 (click here and go to the bottom of the link for more info). There will be another set of excerpts performed through Cal Performances at UC Berkeley on January 25th, and at Merkin Hall in New York City in March. It should be an extraordinary experience. (To get to Sarah's website with further links, click here.)

Sarah Cahill's Sweeter Music

The pianist Sarah Cahill came to my apartment on Thursday to talk about "A Sweeter Music," her amazingly ambitious project of the last year where she has commissioned 18 composers to write piano music on the subject of peace. The composers are an interesting mixture of the obscure and the celebrated: 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.



So far, Sarah has received 11 of the 18 scores and they range in style from angry and confrontational to the complete opposite, such as Terry Riley's "Be Kind to One Another" rag which the composer characterizes as "pro-peace" rather than "anti-war." Cahill has already fallen in love with the music.



One question is if a piece of music can even be thought of as political, especially without text.



A number of the composers are incorporating language into their pieces, as Frederic Rzewski did in his 2005 round, shown above...



...and even sign language within Larry Polansky's 17-part "Numbers for solo piano (and invited speakers)."



The brilliant young composer Preben Antonsen, a student of John Adams, has written a piece that starts off in exquisite beauty and ends in great violence, which Cahill has asked him to consider changing depending on who gets elected president this fall.



The four-figure commissions are being subsidized in a few cases by individual affluent patrons, but most of it is coming out of Cahill's own pocket "with the assistance of some stocks left to me at age 9 by my Nixon-supporting grandfather which seems like a good use for them."



It wasn't until we were at lunch that we both realized the date was 9/11. Sarah's husband, the video artist/director John Sanborn, had been offered a good job at the Comedy Central network, so they moved to Manhattan in 2001. Here's her account of that annus horribilis:

"We lived on 21st Street between Broadway and Park. My daughter was in preschool on 14th St (she was three). Right after September 11th, I would take her to school in her stroller, past Union Square, plastered with flyers of missing people, along 14th Street, which was the boundary: no one was allowed to cross that line unless they lived below 14th Street. So we would see the rescue workers coming off duty, and the fire engines and military vehicles, and the makeshift shrines, and I kept trying to protect her from the thick smoke and the news about body parts and terrorists and the endless footage of the planes going into the buildings. She and her preschool friends played games where they would rescue people from burning buildings. I got e-mails from some friends saying "Well, it's about time! The United States has been so brutal towards the Middle East, no wonder we've been attacked!" but mostly people were just shocked. I'll never forget looking down Broadway towards where the World Trade Center used to be, and the smoke pouring from the blankness.

Comedy Central was having a difficult time after that, and soon they closed the division that John was heading. We came back here to Berkeley, and he made a film called MMI, which is about our 2001: the death of his father, the deaths of our two dogs (both died in New York), the World Trade Center attacks, our move across the country first east and then west. It ends with the nine-foot Baldwin being hoisted out the window of our "loft."

"A Sweeter Music" takes its title 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." Sarah wrote to me about her initial impetus:

"It was Rzewski's arrangement of "Down by the Riverside" which first gave me the idea of "A Sweeter Music." After reading news about the latest deaths in Iraq, I would sit down and play his music as a kind of catharsis. And I kept thinking that there needed to be more pieces like this, which are composed in response to a particular war (in this case the Vietnam war, during which "Down by the Riverside" was often sung in protest marches), but can still provide solace and inspiration thirty years later and beyond. And I know a number of composers who, like me, feel so frustrated and helpless in the face of a senseless war, a completely insane and unprovoked and costly war, and need to express their response in some form. So I really left it to the composers whether their work would be "anti-war" or "pro-peace."

This historic musical omnibus is still gestating, but you can hear portions of it starting this fall for free at Mills College on November 24 (click here and go to the bottom of the link for more info). There will be another set of excerpts performed through Cal Performances at UC Berkeley on January 25th, and at Merkin Hall in New York City in March. It should be an extraordinary experience. (To get to Sarah's website with further links, click here.)