The
innovative American pianist Sarah Cahill is rapidly developing a following as an
interpreter of new and recent works for keyboard. She has premiered works by
many important composers, among them John Adams, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley and
Chen Yi, and she has become particularly associated with the works of Ruth
Crawford Seeger. Since its release in
June 2001, Cahill's recording of music by Crawford Seeger and Johanna
Beyer has received universally enthusiastic reviews. As she prepared for
several major New York performances in the fall of 2001, including the "Solo
Flights: pianorama!" series at Lincoln Center's Clark Studio Theater on
18–20 October, Cahill spoke with andante contributor Jason Serinus
about the evolution of her playing and her reasons for specializing in
contemporary music.
Jason Serinus: When did you first become involved with music?
Sarah Cahill: I learned about music mainly from my father's huge collection of 78s. When I was growing up, we would sit and listen to the Pro Arte Quartet playing late Beethoven, Prokofiev playing Prokofiev, Gieseking playing Debussy and Ravel, Bela Bartok playing Bartok, Stravinsky conducting his own works, and Landowska and Szigeti. I loved Brahms, and catalogued every recording of Chopin's piano music. My heroes of the piano were Gieseking, Haskil, Schnabel, and Lipatti.
JS: What draws you to the contemporary repertoire?
SC: Since John Adams wrote China Gates for me in 1977, when I was a teenager, I've been very involved with the so-called "California School" of composition: Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Ingram Marshall, Henry Cowell, Paul Dresher, John Adams and Daniel Lentz. All these composers consciously turned away from an East Coast sensibility that they found too rigid. Instead of composing in twelve-tone rows or sonata form, they found inspiration in the vastness of the California landscape, in their dreams, in Balinese gamelan or Indian music. It's a very different aesthetic from the Western European tradition that filtered directly into East Coast academia.
I'm particularly fond of music that's ecstatic and that penetrates your soul directly. When you play Henry Cowell's big forearm clusters, there's something so ecstatic and sensuous and joyful about it. I feel the same way about Ruth Crawford Seeger's music. I admire how she found her own way to express her inner world and her deepest emotions without compromise.
I also love working with living composers. Several years ago, when I was practicing with Chen Yi on her new piano concerto, she leaned over and wrote a few notes in the score. I love the feeling that the score is still in a malleable state. When I was recording George Lewis' Endless Shout, he suggested trying it much faster. I'll never have these experiences playing Beethoven or Brahms.
JS: When did your career start taking off on a national level?
SC: It began with a 1995 East Coast tour of women pianists and composers called "Ladyfingers." We bussed to colleges like Sarah Lawrence, Bard and Farleigh Dickinson. The tour started with a big concert at the New School in New York City, featuring Tania Léon, Margaret Leng Tan, Nurit Tilles, Joan Tower and others. I played some of the Crawford Preludes plus Henry Cowell. I got some really good gigs out of it, and also had the opportunity to hang out with some gifted women.
The other important breakthrough was the 1997 Cal Performances Henry Cowell Festival that I organized. It was a really great idea, but the three concerts lasted three or four hours each. Everything got tremendously inflated. For example, I asked Meredith Monk for a 10-minute piece, and it became a 25-minute opus. And, of course, I didn't say to Meredith Monk, "That's too long; please cut it down," I said, "Wow, that's so great, a 25-minute Meredith Monk piece for the same price as a 10-minute piece!"
Everybody was irritated. Allan Ulrich at the San Francisco Examiner called the first concert a disaster. But then Alex Ross at The New Yorker and Mark Swed at the Los Angeles Times were very positive. I'm really grateful that those critics stayed through all three concerts, even late into the night, and were very generous with their reviews.
Those concerts made a big difference. I was much more "on the map" after that.
JS: What have been your most noteworthy concerts since then?
SC: I gave a big concert in February 2001 at the Freer Gallery as part of the Smithsonian's Piano 300 Festival. I played Asian music and music inspired by Asia, including commissions from Evan Ziporyn and Kui Dong. I repeated the program at spring 2001 Spoleto Festival USA, where I also performed on a concert celebrating Ruth Crawford's centennial.
In December 2000, I performed at New York's Miller Theater, celebrating Leo Ornstein's 108th birthday and George Antheil's centennial. I visited Ornstein the week before in a nursing home in Wisconsin. He's still very lucid at 108, but didn't want to talk much about his music, only about how much he loved his wife and wanted to be reunited with her in heaven. It was very touching. I gave him red roses and a big kiss because I think he's really brilliant.
JS: You're involved in a commissioning project as part of a program for the 2001 Ruth Crawford Seeger centennial.
SC: I've commissioned seven women composers — Pauline Oliveros (who is writing a notated piece, which is rare for her), Annea Lockwood, Eve Beglarian, Julia Wolfe, Maggi Payne, Mary Jane Leach and Cindy Cox — to write short pieces in tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger. I asked them to write pieces just a few minutes long, the length of Crawford's Preludes, and to relate them to her music in some way: to how she extended the sonorities of the piano, to her chamber music, or to her later folk song arrangements. I'll premiere them at New York's Merkin Hall on December 13, 2001 as part of their Interpretations series, and hope to play them at various venues across the country.
JS: How do you feel while playing Crawford's Preludes?
SC: They're very mystical — when you play them, it puts you in an altered state. Crawford was very influenced by the Transcendentalists, by Walt Whitman, by the Theosophist movement in the United States and by Scriabin. The Ninth Prelude is inspired by Lao-Tze; she has your hands at the extremes of the keyboard, which feels and sounds like a cosmic dialogue between heaven and earth.
Every time I play these pieces, I feel privileged. This music set the stage for most American music in the 20th century. Ruth Crawford forged the path for composers who got lots more recognition. In some ways it's a great tragedy that she didn't compose more. But she accomplished a tremendous amount with the rest of her life, especially in terms of the folk music revival.
JS: How has your playing evolved over the years?
SC: I pay even more attention to a composer's exact notation. Working with living composers has made it particularly clear that if a mezzo-forte or a crescendo or pedal marking is in the score, it's there for a reason. This also became clear from a four-hour lesson I had with Richard Goode. I was playing a passage in Beethoven's Sonata Op. 109 the way every other pianist plays it, but Richard, who has researched Beethoven's original intentions, showed me how Beethoven really wanted it. You have to have faith that the composer knows best, and make musical sense out of their notation.
More and more I've been able to access a heightened state of consciousness while performing. The best moments are when time stops and there's only the music suspended in the concert hall — just sound, creating a magical intimacy which the audience and I are sharing. To achieve that state, you have to be absolutely unapologetic about music that may be challenging, but ultimately delivers profound rewards.
More information on pianist Sarah Cahill, including a calendar of upcoming performances, may be found at her Web site, www.sarahcahill.com.
