Ninety Trips Around the Sun by Sarah Cahill

Sarah Cahill’s concert is the debut of our new “88+” concert series, focusing on 20th- and 21st-century piano repertoire and world premieres, and is supported by the Amphion Foundation and individual donors. Next on the series is Clara Yang [Saturday, May 16].

The program will include Terry Riley's Keyboard Studies, Be Kind to One Another, The Walrus in Memoriam, Fandango on the Heaven Ladder, and The Great Beauty, along with Circle Songs by Danny Clay and Shade Studies by Sam Adams, both composed in honor of Terry Riley’s eightieth birthday in 2015.

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. She has recently performed at the Metropolitan Museum, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. She has worked with Terry Riley for more than thirty years and has recorded his music, with Regina Myers, on a boxed set of albums titled "Eighty Trips Around the Sun."

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, Metropolitan Museum, 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, spanning 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 6 to 8 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.

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