June 21: Garden of Memory Celebrated Summer Solstice Concert Back for 2024 – Presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes
Photo credit: Top: Chris Tompkins;
Bottom Left: John Sanborn; Bottom Middle: Michael Zelner; Bottom Right: John Sanborn
Garden of Memory
Celebrated Summer Solstice Concert Back for 2024
Presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes
Celebrating Bay Area Performers and Composers
Friday, June 21, 2024, 5-9pm
Chapel of the Chimes | 4499 Piedmont Avenue | Oakland, CA
Parking is limited. Public transit and carpooling are recommended.
Tickets ($20 general, $15 students & seniors, $5 children 5-12)
available through Eventbrite.
No Tickets Sales On-Site; Online Sales Only
More information: www.gardenofmemory.com
Oakland, CA – On Friday, June 21, 2024 from 5-9pm, Garden of Memory – the beloved annual summer solstice celebration presented by New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes – returns to celebrate the longest day of the year with a rich variety of musical performances. Tickets, which will be available through online sales only, are limited to 2750. Though not required, masks are encouraged for indoor performances.
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,” this highly anticipated and locally renowned solstice concert features a cornucopia of performances happening simultaneously around the grounds of the Chapel of the Chimes. Composers, musicians, sound artists, and other performers present a variety of acoustic and electronic music, installations, and interactive events. Listeners are free to explore the multilevel labyrinth of interior gardens, cloisters, stairwells, fountains, alcoves, pools, and antechambers during the performances, each person crafting their own unique musical journey throughout the day.
Select highlights of programming and performers for 2024, with more artists to be announced:
Pianist Sarah Cahill will perform Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants
Pamela Z, a multimedia artist, composer, and pioneer of digital looping techniques
Kitka, acclaimed women's vocal ensemble
Harmonic Drift, featuring interactive gongs and found instruments
Evan Ziporyn GRAMMY-winning composer, conductor, clarinetist, collaborator, who will perform the West Coast premiere of a new work composed for him by Terry Riley
SORIAH (stage persona of Enrique Ugalde), an internationally-acclaimed throat singer and ritual artist
Additional artists to be featured in this year’s festivities, many of whom are known in the Bay Area, include: Sparrows & Ortolans - Laetitia Sonami & James Fei; Laura Inserra; Brian Baumbusch; Paul Dresher & Joel Davel; Liam Herb; Dylan Mattingly, Kitka; Orchestra Nostalgico; Cardew Choir; Dan Plonsey & friends; Randy Porter & Jennifer Ellis; Andy Meyerson; John Benson; Beth Custer, Will Bernard, & Stephen Kent; Sidney Chen; Gyan Riley; Monica Scott; The Mycos Project; Giacomo Fiore; Wendy Reid & Friends; Edward Schocker; Voicehandler-Jacob Heile & Danishta Rivero; Harmonic Drift; Roco Córdova & Adrián Montúfar; Sruti Sarathy; Tom Djll, Karen Stackpole, Cheryl Leonard; Kaitlin McSweeney; Regular Music; ROVA; Anne Hege; Silvia Matheus; Dean Santomieri, Cindy Sawprano, & Christina Braun .
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 2750. Information about performances, directions, parking, accessibility, food/beverage, and is available at www.gardenofmemory.com.
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.”
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).
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 at The Barbican, Carolina Performing Arts, National Gallery of Art, 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. Cahill also performed music from The Future is Female for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert series.
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. Her three-album series, The Future is Female, was released on First Hand Records between March 2022 and April 2023. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe, from the 17th century to the present day, and include many world premiere recordings.
Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8-10 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.