Pianist Sarah Cahill in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert Performs Music from The Future is Female Album Trilogy on First Hand Records
Photo credit: Michael Zamora
Pianist Sarah Cahill in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Featuring Music from Sarah Cahill’s
The Future is Female Album Trilogy on First Hand Records
“Sarah Cahill plays a wide-ranging selection of music composed by women on the final volume of a series distinctive for its finesse and conviction.”
– Gramophone Magazine on The Future is Female
Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, recorded a NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert in July 2023, which premieres today. Cahill performed selections by composers highlighted on the three volumes of her album trilogy, The Future is Female –– the recorded counterparts to her ongoing curation project of the same name. The concert is available for viewing via NPR Music –– watch here.
The Future is Female is a three-volume series which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe and include many new commissioned works and world premiere recordings.
Listen to The Future is Female, Vols. 1-3 (First Hand Records):
Vol. 1: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol1
Vol. 2: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol2
Vol. 3: https://lnkfi.re/CahillFutureisFemaleVol3
“It was an incredible honor to perform in the iconic Tiny Desk series,” says Sarah Cahill. “I've admired the crew there for many years, and they were so welcoming. It was deeply meaningful to be in that legendary space where some of my favorite musicians have performed.”
NPR Music producer Tom Huizenga writes, “Pianist Sarah Cahill commands a near godlike status among fans of contemporary classical music. She's commissioned dozens of new works from today's top composers including John Adams, Julia Wolfe and Terry Riley. But when she sat down at the piano behind Bob Boilen's desk, she was focused not so much on new music but instead the plight of women composers. . . For this performance, she offers a sampler of The Future is Female, her multi-volume project that collects piano music by a staggeringly wide swath of women composers over a four-century span."
For her NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, Cahill performed Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová’s April Prelude No. 1; Ethiopian nun and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s Presentiment; Sarabande and Gigue from French Baroque era composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Suite No. 1; and "a candle burns time" from American composer Regina Harris Baiocchi’s Piano Poems, written for Cahill in 2020. (Presentiment is included courtesy of the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, a self-financing non-profit that funds music education for underserved children in the U.S and Ethiopia.)
Sarah Cahill began working on The Future is Female, which now encompasses more than 70 compositions, in 2018. “For decades I had been working with many living American composers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe,” she explains. “Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard. Since recording these three albums in August 2021, I’ve performed extraordinary music by Louise Farrenc, Maria Szymanowska, Helen Hopekirk, Dora Pejačević and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Reena Esmail, Arlene Sierra, Viola Kinney, Marion Bauer, and many other composers who should rightfully be included in this series. The possibilities are, in fact, limitless.”
Cahill’s recent performances of The Future is Female include concerts presented by The Barbican, National Gallery of Art, 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.
About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill 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). Her discography includes more than twenty albums on the First Hand Records, New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Her radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8pm 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.