Live Stream
Sarah Cahill piano
Deirdre Gribbin (Northern Ireland, 1967)
Unseen (2018) 6′
Annea Lockwood (New Zealand/USA, 1939)
Ear-Walking Woman UK Premiere (1996) 8′
Theresa Wong (USA, 1976)
She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees UK Premiere (2019) 7′
Maria de Alvear (Spain/Germany, 1960)
Intenso UK Premiere (1995) 5’
Aida Shirazi (Iran/USA, 1987)
Albumblatt UK Premiere (2017) 6′
Gabriela Ortiz (Mexico, 1964)
Preludio y Estudio No. 3 UK Premiere (2011) 9’
This 45-minute concert from American pianist Sarah Cahill comes from her ever-expanding project The Future is Female. A songbook celebrating and uplifting women composers around the world, it includes over 60 pieces that can be sequenced together as a ‘ritual installation’, lasting up to seven hours. Through the project, Cahill draws from a diverse pool of pieces for the piano, tracing a lineage of work that spans from the 1700s to now.
Motivated by a lack of representation in the classical canon, Cahill wanted to redress our agreed upon history of music, finding music from women composers who worked around the world without gaining historical recognition, while also emphasising the importance of work being made by musicians today. Usually performing the work as a ‘marathon’, intending for listeners to absorb the concert the way they would an exhibition, this lockdown-ready version highlights six of the artists found in Cahill’s repertoire.
60 pieces is a huge undertaking, but Cahill has gotten close and personal with each composition she’s chosen to perform. She has chosen these works for a number of reasons, bringing together pieces teeming with historical significance, political action and groundbreaking musicality. Deirdre Gribbin’s lamenting Unseen is written as a cry for help in the fight against homelessness, honouring the large number of impoverished people living on the streets of London. The piece rushes by in a flurry of uncertain chords, Cahill scattering notes across the piano like an overcast fog.
Writing She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, Theresa Wong was inspired by Nina Simone’s song Images, in which the legendary pianist and singer recited a poem by Harlem renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. A poem that signals the oppression of black women in the way they are ignored, downplayed and underrepresented, Wong’s piece creates a musical figure out of Cuney’s No Images, using striking piano motifs but suppressing them, with ‘dampened pitches’ to echo his ‘depiction of oppression’.
Cahill’s songbook contains overlooked innovations to piano music, with works such as Annea Lockwood’s Ear-Walking Woman exploring adjustments to traditional prepared-piano compositions. In the piece, Lockwood makes use of the instrument’s extreme sensitivity, making tiny changes to the typical ways people use objects to detune and distort the piano’s sound. Due to the myriad discoveries made in making the piece, Lockwood decided to compose it ‘open-ended’, giving the performer the chance to play their own way as they notice the ‘variants in sonic detail’ Lockwood’s object placements have created.
With her unique approach to space, Maria de Alver offers smaller, but no less formative, changes to piano music, using Intenso to build a metered, distanced sound that is wholly her own. Intenso sounds both assertive and unsettled. It pairs effortlessly with Aida Shirazi’s Albumblatt, a work of stop-start contradiction in which the Iranian composer attempts to ramp up intensity while sustaining tension. On Shirazi’s Soundcloud page, an image accompanies the piece with plain text that reads “Hi! Have a great day pretending everything is normal!”. The piano is practically playing those words, revelling in the chaos. Completing Cahill’s programme is Preludio y Estudio, an impassioned work from Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, written in tribute to Jesua Palancares, a fictional Mexican revolutionary who serves as the iconic main character of Elena Poniatowska’s novel Hasta no verte Jesu.
She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees is commissioned by Sarah Cahill