Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A Sweeter Music

Sarah Cahill is a justly celebrated classical pianist known for her passionate and beautiful performances of American compositons, and for championing oddball American experimentalists. A recent profile in the Village Voice noted her "phenomenal technique, her instinctive command of recent aesthetics, and quite possibly the most interesting repertoire of any pianist around.”

Over the course of 2008, Cahill completed a long-term project in which she commissioned eighteen leading composers to write new works on the theme of peace. The astonishing list reads like a who's who of great living composers, including Meredith Monk, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Pauline Oliveros, the Residents, Paul Dresher, Phil Kline, Mamoru Fujieda, and the list goes on. Video projections, also commissioned for this project, were created by John Sanborn, known for his work with such diverse artists as Bill T. Jones, Adrian Belew, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The project, titled "A Sweeter Music" after Martin Luther King’s statement that "we must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war," will have its world premiere this Sunday, January 25, as part of the Cal Performances series in Berkeley. Cahill then takes the project around the world, arriving in Seattle on May 8 at the Good Shepard Center Chapel Performance Space.

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