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.

CORRECTION: The Art, Music, and Recreation Department left the following comment: "While Nicholas Baker accurately reported the rampant removal of books for the Library's collection, the Art, Music and Recreation Center did not take part in this act. We preserved our book and score collections during the transition to the new building. We were told by the Chief of the Main Library discard our LP collection, but we retained it and retain it to this day."

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.

Making Mothers Invisible at the Library

Three weeks ago a series of large, striking, black-and-white photos of women appeared plastered around the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.



I followed the website address on one of the posters (click here) to the Inside Out art project, a global initiative spearheaded by the Paris-based Tunisian photographer JR with a $100,000 TED Prize grant. Here's a description from the site:

"INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually."

There was an interesting article on JR in The New Yorker in November last year (click here for an abstract):

In the spring, JR launched a million-dollar global participatory project called “Inside Out,” for which he will not take a single picture. Instead, he is encouraging people to take their own portraits, which they can send to him with a statement of purpose; he will print the photos on a large scale and return them, so that participants can paste them wherever they choose. “The idea is that you have to stand for what you care about,” he explained on Al Jazeera.

This San Francisco Main Branch library wasn't on the project website, so I went to the library and asked if anybody knew who had sponsored this particular installation and why was it all women? Nobody at the information desk in the lobby could tell me a thing, and the installations and public relations office on the sixth floor was mostly empty, and the few people who were there didn't seem to know anything about it either.



I finally received the information from library curator Everett Erlandson who told me that the photos had been installed by something called the International Museum of Women. On their website (click here), they explain that the installation is called Making Mothers Visible San Francisco, but they haven't been very good at getting the word out. I was hoping that the exhibit was simply pictures of my Civic Center neighbors, and the fact that it was supposed to be about making mothers "visible" never crossed my mind.

The Izzies 1: Honoring Local Dance

Most arts awards ceremonies are expensive, ponderous affairs, filled with dreary speeches, and costing nominees and friends lots of money to attend. A major exception to that rule is the annual Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, known as The Izzies, which are short, free, and open to the public.



On Tuesday evening, the 24th annual version of the Izzies were presented in the basement of the San Fracisco Public Library's Koret Auditorium, honoring dancers, choroeographers, designers, composers and musicians who have contributed to the Bay Area dance scene. A few of the awards were for "sustained achievement" by a group, such as the woman above receiving an Izzie for Berkeley's Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center for its 35 years of world music and dance.



There were also a few special awards, such as the one to Dohee Lee (above), the "dancer/musician/vocalist" who seems to work with every interesting performance group in the Bay Area. She was a guest performer at the "Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners" last October at Yerba Buena Center, and just about stole the entire show.



Also receiving a specal nod was Jo Kreiter (above) who recently created a dance about female bridge builders at SOMArts that created a sensation.



The program also featured Academy Awards style competition among five nominees in various categories, with the winners leaping onto the stage for short thank you speeches. In the "Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance" during the the period between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009, Ramon Moreno Acanda (above) from Ballet San Jose tied for the award with Laura Elaine Ellis (below) from Dimensions Dance Theatre.



For a full listing of winners, you can click here to get to The Izzies website.



The legendary local choreographer Carlos Carvajal (above) gave out the final award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. Carvajal has been the co-artistic director of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival for the last four years, and the maturation of that group was reflected by the seven nominations it received this year against heavyweights like the San Francisco Ballet.



The auditions for the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts are continuing this weekend and next, and the public is invited to the all-day affairs for $10 with in-and-out privileges. For more information, click here.



Carlos prefaced the naming of the choreography winner with, "Well, this is a surprise," as he announced that Scott Wells' contact improvisation piece, "What Men Want," had snagged the award. The dancer/choreographer arrived at the podium with babe in arms, who looked perfectly content to be in the spotlight.

The Izzies 2: The Shoe and The Tattoo

The two emcees for The Izzies were Deborah Brooks Vaughan from the Dimensions Dance Theatre (above left) and John R. Killacky (above right), who is the "Program Officer, Arts & Culture" for the San Francisco Foundation, and he proved to be a lively, funny host.



After Sarah Van Patten (above) accepted the award for "Outstanding Achievement in Company Performance" for the San Francisco Ballet's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto," Killacky had her return to the stage so she could display the awesomeness of her outrageous high heeled shoes.



She gamely took off one shoe to display on the podium as he requested...



...and seeing that he had possibly embarrassed the dancer, he offered to show her his tattoo of the logo from Meredith Monk's opera "Atlas," which the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis had commissioned when Killacky was in charge of that institution.



He discreetly took off his tie and part of his white shirt and showed the horse tattoo to Ms. Van Patten and some of the audience. It was charming.

George Rickey's Sculpture Blowing in The Wind

A large kinetic steel sculpture, "Double L Eccentric Gyratory," by the recently deceased George Rickey stands on the Larkin Street side of San Francisco's Main Library.



I don't usually pause to look at it because the site is a favorite location for scores of street people acting out...



...but earlier this week there was a cold wind tearing through Civic Center that emptied the area of its usual citizens...



...and the sculpture was moving so beautifully and wildly that it brought me to a halt.



I have no idea what the relationship is between natural wind currents and the kinetic sculpture's movement since it doesn't look like the steel is actually being pushed around by the breeze, but there seems to be some connection.

Watching Obama's Inauguration in Civic Center Plaza

After watching Obama recite the presidential oath of office along with the inept Chief Justice Roberts, with the smashingly attractive Michelle at his side...



...I ambled over to Civic Center Plaza where thousands of people were watching the inauguration together on a large screen.



There was an extraordinarily happy vibe among the large group...



...which I would venture to say is as much relief at the world surviving the nightmare of eight years of the Bush and Cheney regime...



...as any serious hope that President Obama is going to magically make things right.



The organizers from NextArts deserve a round of applause for putting together the event, especially since they received so little official help from San Francisco's bureaucracies.



For those in the know who wanted to sit, the inauguration was also being broadcast live on a screen in the basement of the Main Branch of the public library across the street from the plaza.



Even better, there were volunteers ladling out celebratory cake...



...complete with presidential seal.



Any euphoria was quickly dimmed upon returning home and seeing local politicos Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein playing mother hens during an official presidential signing ceremony. These two ladies have enabled a vast range of crimes during the last eight years, from officially sanctioned torture of prisoners to an unprovoked war in Iraq, and it's time for them to step up and repair some of the damage. It's also time for Senator Feinstein to start considering a new hair-do, which looks like the same one she had in the 1970s during her stint on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. As a friend from New York asked me on the phone last night, "Has her hair always been that old-fashioned? It looks like something she wore in high school.

Politics in the YouTube Era

A San Francisco Public Library free lecture series called "City Speaks" featured Mayor Gavin Newsom interviewing YouTube co-founder Steve Shih Chen on Tuesday evening.



The subject was "Politics in the YouTube Era," complete with a couple of video clips on the big screen behind them, including Senator George Allen's "macaca" moment.



Chen seemed like a fascinating character, describing the "eureka" moment of YouTube's creation as simply being sick of having to load a different player/driver whenever somebody sent video to be watched on a computer.



This seemed to go over Newsom's head and in truth he seemed more interested in the gossip and "gotcha" implications of the technology where anyone with a cell phone camera can catch you in an unguarded moment and post it to the internet.



"Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea, to live fully in the open, for politicians," Steve said, before laughing as he realized the implications of what he just said and to whom he had said it. This is a mayor who's way too fond of secrecy and back room deals and bad behavior behind closed doors while advocating that San Francisco's citizens be constantly monitored by public cameras.



They also showed the "1984 Apple" parody with Senator Clinton standing in for Big Brother, and Gavin seemed simply amazed that "some guy in his basement, I think in Illinois, could do this in a couple of hours and then thousands of people see it."



Earlier in the day, Newsom had attended a photo-op in the Tenderloin with another young technology CEO, Sanjit Biswas. He's in charge of Meraki which is building an ad hoc wi-fi network throughout San Francisco at a fraction of the cost of the Google/Earthlink project proposed by Newsom over the last couple of years. For some interesting techie articles on the project, click here for Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch, click here for Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News, and click here for Marguerite Reardon at CNet.



Thank god for the technie activists who showed up at all the meetings and lobbied newspapers and internet sites to get the word out about what a disaster the Earthlink/Google deal would have been. That didn't stop the Chronicle, the Examiner, SF Weekly, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and Ron Vinson at the Department of Technology from vilifying them in every way possible. My friend Kimo Crossman should be given a medal and San Francisco's many thanks for his sheer stubbornness in the face of all that abuse, and it would be nice to hear a simple apology from Newsom, as in "I was wrong and they were right." A rational distribution of wealth would also be nice, but I don't see either one happening anytime soon.