Annual "Garden of Memory" Summer Solstice Concert Returns for 2023 Presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes
“Garden of Memory”
Annual Summer Solstice Concert Returns for 2023
Presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes
Featuring Bay Area performers and composers
Wednesday, June 21, 2023, 5-9pm
Chapel of the Chimes
4499 Piedmont Avenue | Oakland, CA
Parking is limited. Public transit and carpooling are recommended. No ticket sales at the door.
Tickets ($20 general, $15 students & seniors, $5 children 5-12) available through Eventbrite.
More information: bit.ly/gardenofmemory2023
Oakland, CA – On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 from 5 to 9pm, Garden of Memory –– the annual summer solstice celebration presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes –– returns for an evening of musical performance. Tickets, which will be available through online sales only, are limited to 2500. Though not required, masks are encouraged for indoor performances.
At this popular solstice concert, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a walk-through fun house of musical and visual splendor” and by the East Bay Times as “the best party of the year,” the program features concurrent performances in different parts of the building by Bay Area composers, musicians, sound artists, and other performers presenting a variety of acoustic and electronic music, installations, and interactive events. The audience is free to explore the multilevel labyrinth of interior gardens, cloisters, stairwells, fountains, alcoves, pools, and antechambers during the performances.
Select highlights of programming and performers for 2023:
Pianist Sarah Cahill will perform Ballade by the late Kaija Saariaho, who passed away on June 2; excerpts from Birds and Insects by Arlene Sierra; and Kotekan from Vivian Fung's Glimpses
Pamela Z, a multimedia artist, composer, and pioneer of digital looping techniques
The Cornelius Cardew Choir, a Bay Area-based vocal performance ensemble specializing in experimental music
Theresa Wong, an internationally-renowned composer, cellist, and vocalist with Bay Area composer, vocalist, producer and improviser Roco Córdova
SORIAH (stage persona of Enrique Ugalde), an internationally-acclaimed throat singer and ritual artist
Additional artists to be featured for 2023, many of whom are known around the Bay Area, include: Beth Custer, Guillermo Gallindo and Andy Meyerson, Nico Simonian, Paul Dresher, Duo B: Lisa Mezzacappa and Jason Levis, Karen Stackpole and Krys Bobrowski, Randy Porter and Friends, Orchestra Nostalgico, Dan Plonsey and Friends, Jon Raskin, Gino Robair and Steve Adams, and many others.
Garden of Memory offers a unique and personal musical experience to every listener roving freely through the Chapel of the Chimes. Getting lost is part of the experience as guests climb up and down the three floors of this Oakland Historic Landmark building and its unique architectural elements, which rise into vaulted ceilings. Seamless in feel, there are three separate design sections created by four architects; Cunningham & Politeo 1909, Julia Morgan 1926-1951 (consulting until her retirement 1951), Aaron Green 1956-1986 and JST Architects 1986-1998. In the older section the complexity of chapels, columbaria, and mausoleum areas are adorned with murals, paintings, sculpture, mosaics, California tile and 16th century antiquities. All architectural and garden areas have excellent acoustics and are illuminated by gentle natural light, often through beautiful arrangements of stained glass.
Drawing crowds of over four thousand people in past years (including a large number of children), Garden of Memory has become a favorite summer solstice celebration for Bay Area audiences. Since the pandemic, the audience is now limited to 2500. Information about performances, directions, parking, accessibility, food/beverage, and is available at www.gardenofmemory.com.
About New Music Bay Area: Since 1996, New Music Bay Area, a nonprofit organization which provides opportunities and information to composers and performers of new music throughout the Bay Area, has hosted the Garden of Memory solstice concert every June 21st from 5pm-9pm. Board president Sarah Cahill came up with the idea after wandering into the Chapel of the Chimes, and now Cahill and Lucy Farber Mattingly organize the concert each year, in collaboration with the small board of New Music Bay Area and the Chapel of the Chimes. Cahill recalls, “As I meandered around the building, I heard distant organ music, and tried to follow the sound to its source, through a labyrinth of magical gardens and gothic alcoves with the afternoon light filtering through stained glass. I imagined putting musicians all around this maze, so that when you turn a corner you might encounter a string quartet or an electronic music installation or a Georgian choir. So that's what we did.”
About Chapel of the Chimes: Chapel of the Chimes, the largest above-ground cemetery west of the Mississippi, started out as a street car station and became the California Memorial Crematorium and Columbarium in 1909. The property was expanded and transformed by Julia Morgan and later, Aaron Green – a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. The lobby and hallways feature artwork by Diego Rivera, a marble table top from the Medici family crest and a page from the Gutenberg Bible.
The facility’s numerous chapels, columbaria, and mausoleum areas are adorned with antiquities that date back to the 16th century. All architectural and garden areas have excellent acoustics and are illuminated by gentle natural light, often through beautiful arrangements of stained glass.
About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). In May 2023, Cahill premiered Viet Cuong's new piano concerto, Stargazer, with the California Symphony.
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. 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, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Music Festival.
Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Cahill's latest album, The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play, was released in April 2023 on First Hand Records. The Future is Female is a three-volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day.
Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.