Sarah Cahill Plays James Cleghorn

Old First Concerts opened their 2025 season with a fascinating piano recital by Sarah Cahill, playing the music of a forgotten San Francisco composer, James Cleghorn (1913-1987).

Cahill was introduced by Matthew Wolka, who is not only the director of the Old First Concerts organization, but was working as the A/V tech and stage manager. He also mentioned that the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts program had unaccountably rejected their application for funds this year after supporting them for decades. The venerable church on the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento has hosted the concert series since 1970, and the wide range of musical performances by mostly local artists is unmatched anywhere else in San Francisco. If you would like to get in touch with SF Grants for the Arts to support Old First Concerts, you can write a letter to this address: 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 321, San Francisco, CA 94102. Or send them an email at gfta@sfgov.org.

James Cleghorn, pictured above with his first wife Fern, was born and raised in the Bay Area. According to Bill Alves, who co-wrote the great 2017 biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, "What we knew of Jim Cleghorn was mostly through interviews with Lou and with John Dobson, who was also a roommate with them. Lou met Cleghorn in the SF State choir, where Lou sang bass and Cleghorn tenor. They were also both in the ancient music ensemble. Dobson remembered Cleghorn as a brilliant man (“an IQ of 170”) who exchanged poetry and music with Lou. Lou remembered him as plugged into the arts community in San Francisco, alerting Lou to things like Cowell’s performances and the New Music Society. At some point while they were living there, Dobson remembered Cleghorn coming downstairs and announcing that they needed to take him “to the booby hatch.” Dobson took him to a doctor. The doctor asked Cleghorn where he was born, and Cleghorn the intellectual replied with the original Indian language name for the area. The doctor took the answer for gibberish and agreed to recommend that he be committed to a sanitarium."

Alves continues: "After Lou Harrison moved away from San Francisco, they lost touch. We asked the reference desk at the SF public library, and they told us that Cleghorn was hired as a librarian in August 1946, became senior librarian in Feb. 1948, and was appointed principal librarian in Art, Music, and Recreation until his retirement in 1971. Lou and Cleghorn were back in touch by 1957, as there’s a letter from him in Lou’s archive. Cleghorn arranged to commission a fanfare from Lou for the opening of their new fine arts division. Lou composed Majestic Fanfare in 1963 while in residence at the East West Center in Hawaii. It was never performed as planned for the library but was performed in Hawaii."

That Art, Music, and Recreation department that Cleghorn developed in the old Main Branch of the SF Public Library was a marvel, with masses of musical scores, opera libretti, and LP recordings. Best of all, you could reserve a stereo and headphones to listen, which is how I did my homework in the 1970s before rushing across Civic Center Plaza to buy a $3 standing room ticket at the SF Opera in the years before Supertitles. I still have vivid memories of hearing Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes for the first time in that library. Sadly, most of the collection was thrown out along with hundreds of thousands of books when the new Main Branch opened next door in 1996, an indignity that author Nicholson Baker wrote about in The New Yorker magazine and a book called Double Fold.

Cahill's Cleghorn concert on Sunday afternoon was spurred by contact with his son, Peter Cleghorn, who brought her piles of unpublished scores in manuscript form.

Peter Cleghorn was in the audience and was invited by Sarah to offer some context to a few of the pieces, most of which were receiving their world premieres. One of my favorite works on the program was actually written for Peter on his seventh birthday, a brilliant, amusing riff on piano instructor John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play: A Book for the Earliest Beginner. The actual title of the 1945 Cleghorn piece is An Apotheosis of John Thompson: A Sonatina on Tunes from Teaching Tiny Fingers to Play (to Peter in his seventh year).

Though most of Cleghorn's music remains unpublished, Henry Cowell did print the 1937 How Do You Like This? Three Ironies for Piano in his groundbreaking New Music magazine. The performance by Cahill was wonderful, craggy and lyrical simultaneously.

Cahill performed 13 separate works on the program, many of them undated miscellaneous works in a series Cleghorn called Cyclus. There was also a Sonatina in memory of Bartok, a 1980 work called The Fear and The Trembling from Ludus Arbitralis, and a gorgeous, extremely sophisticated 1935 work, Six Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme. The entire concert was historical music excavation at its most rewarding.

Even better, the music is going to be recorded later this month by Cahill for the Other Minds music organization. In the photo above, Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian was congratulating Peter Cleghorn at the end of the concert for helping to rescue his father's music.