June 2005
The Musical Miracles of Sarah Cahill
A Berkeley pianist finds her deepest inspiration in community
by Jason Victor Serinus
In 2001, while commissioning seven composers to write tribute pieces for the centennial of the great American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (the avant-garde composer who was stepmother to Pete Seeger and mother of Mike and Peggy), Berkeley pianist Sarah Cahill had an epiphany.
She was talking with the founder of “deep listening,” Mills College’s Pauline Oliveros, when Oliveros told her, “It’s not the career; it’s the community.”
“It suddenly made so much difference to me,” says Cahill in her soft, warm voice, “to think that it’s not about ‘me me me me me.’ It’s about a community of colleagues; it’s about composers and musicians. Because we are all doing things on such a small financial level, we help each other and have a continuous exchange of contacts and ideas.”
For well over two decades, by means of radio, piano, and countless community events, Cahill, 44, has participated in a continuous, musical exchange, serving Bay Area lovers of new and spiritually inspired music.
She has also become a model deep listener, a person who, in Oliveros’ words, listens “in every possible way, to everything possible to hear, no matter what one is doing.” Such intense listening, Oliveros explains, “involves the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep listening is a life practice.”
The term “holistic” — uniting mind, body, and spirit — aptly describes Cahill’s path. As a pianist specializing in new music and host of KALW-FM’s weekly “Then and Now” music show, she frequently interviews composers on-air. Sometimes serendipitous events occur. She recently interviewed Jim Meredith from the Sonos Handbell Ensemble and composer Daniel Feinsmith on the same show. Once they heard each other’s music, they decided to collaborate; Daniel wrote a piece for Sonos and the Kronos Quartet that premiered in San Francisco.
“I love working with real, living composers who you can bump into at Whole Foods,” says Cahill. “Practicing the piano and doing your music can be such a solitary task that there isn’t much of a social element to it.”
Happily for Cahill, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams and his photographer wife Deborah O’Grady live only a couple of blocks away. “Having Sarah Cahill in the Bay Area is a source of pride and gratitude for all of us who make and listen to music,” says Adams. “Her interests and passions range all over the map — one never knows what next will fall into her radar. I can’t imagine musical life here without her.”
As a mother, Cahill loves the fact that her 7-year-old daughter, Miranda, has the opportunity to meet working composers.
“There are women composers and African-American composers and Asian composers. Miranda learns that composers are not all dead, white males whom you read about in history books. Not that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart aren’t incredibly important to know and appreciate.
“If Schubert were alive today,” she adds, “he’d probably be a homeless person on Telegraph Avenue.”
Cahill recently performed unpublished music by the late 20th century composer/activist Marc Blitzstein at San Francisco’s cutting-edge Other Minds Festival. When asked about the performance, she explained,
“I’m very drawn to composers who fall through the cracks in different ways. Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein became famous, but Marc Blitzstein didn’t. The reasons don’t always have to do with who is a better composer or more talented.”
Cahill’s advocacy made her a frequent soloist at festivals like Other Minds whose director, Charles Amirkhanian, calls her “a first-rate new music spelunker. She’s unafraid to visit the dark caves into which the narrow windows of music historians and journalists have buried the careers and output of many intrepid musical explorers and revive them with ravishing performances of their best music.”
Creation Theory
Cahill’s friendship with John Adams is a prime example of the different parts of her life coming together. Adams first composed a piece for her when she was 17. She has since written program notes for his Lincoln Center Festival and liner notes for some of his albums. She even hosted a KPFA mini-preview of his controversial opera, The Death of Klinghoffer.
The pianist has also earned national recognition for her advocacy work. The American Music Center, a composer support organization founded by Virgil Thompson, Aaron Copland and other composers, has proposed a 13-part radio series that features Cahill hosting conversations between leading composers and pop artists. She recently taped the pilot for the series, a dialogue between pop singer Bjork and an important inspiration, avant-garde composer and performance artist Meredith Monk.
At the root of Cahill’s work lies a genuine awe at the act of creation. She recalls what composer Robert Schumann said of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony : that no matter how many times you listen to it, it remains a miracle that it came from someone’s brain.
“I remember thinking the same thing when Miranda was born,” she says. “Every person comes out of a woman’s womb. It happens thousands or millions of times a day. Yet you just can’t believe that you make a human being inside your body.
“I feel the same way Schumann felt when he listened to Beethoven. No matter how many times you listen to that piece of music or a baby is born, it never detracts from the miracle of what it is. That’s what classical music is to me.”
She cites the slow Prayer of Thanksgiving movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132 as “the ultimate transcendent prayer of thanksgiving for being alive. When you listen to that movement, you’re in the heavens. You can’t possibly stay on earth when you hear it.”
Other pieces she finds especially meditative include the slow movement from the Schubert cello quintet, John Cage’s In a Landscape for piano, and works by Morton Feldman and Hildegard von Bingen.
Songs of the Plants
For the past five years, Cahill has been playing Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants.
It had always bothered Fujieda that plants were silent, and he wondered how they would speak if they could. So Fujieda obtained measurements of the bio-electrical fluctuations from leaves of plants and translated them into music. Cahill explains that these “really gorgeous, melodic” pieces represent the voices of plants.
And then out of the blue, Fujieda invited her to perform the California composers she particularly loves —Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, and Terry Riley — along with Japanese composers at Tokyo’s new Pacific Crossings Festival. Fujieda also asked her to return to Tokyo a month later to play an hour of his Patterns of Plants on an old German upright in the dining room of a Frank Lloyd Wright building.
The concert started at dusk, when it was still light and the cicadas were singing outside in the trees. As the sun went down, the cicadas stopped singing. Fujieda had counseled Cahill to breathe deeply between pieces and to try and sense the audience breathing. He reminded her to remain aware of the cicadas, of the light and the trees outside.
“Fujieda created a total experience inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ idea of deep listening,” she explains. “It’s more than sitting and listening to the music. You’re listening to the space, you’re paying attention to the surroundings.”
Cahill credits the work of another kind of deep listener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with changing her life completely. She was introduced to the essays of the 19th-century transcendentalist by her 97-year old teacher and friend, Helene Brewer.
“Emerson says that we all have powers within us that we don’t yet realize,” Cahill says. “It’s tremendously inspiring to think of this goodness and spirit that’s in each of us. Emerson was very much of the mind that Jesus and Buddha and so on were human beings, and that we all have that energy within our reach.”
Cahill and at least 30 other cutting-edge musicians perform June 21, 5 to 8 pm, at the annual New Music Bay Area summer solstice extravaganza in Oakland’s wondrous Julia Morgan designed Chapel of the Chimes. Cahill and Monique Buzzarte will present the world premiere of a new work by Pauline Oliveros. (415)563-6355 ext. 3 www.gardenofmemory.com
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