Sarah Cahill Honors International Women's Day With THE FUTURE IS FEMALE

Pianist Sarah Cahill will mark International Women's Day on Saturday, March 8, 2025 from 2-8pm with a six-hour marathon performance of music from her ongoing project The Future is Female presented by MetLiveArts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue), in the European Paintings 1250-1800 Gallery 609.

The Future is Female is Cahill's exploration of music for solo piano by women composers from the Baroque to the present day, which includes more than 70 pieces from around the globe, some commissioned by or for Cahill as part of the project. This is Cahill's debut performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sarah Cahill has been featured performing music from The Future is Female in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, as well as in eight-hour marathon performances at the Barbican Centre in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., both celebrating International Women's Day. In addition, Cahill recorded 30 works from The Future is Female on a three-volume set of albums released in 2022 and 2023 on the First Hand Records label, which included many world premiere recordings and was widely acclaimed by publications including in the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine, International Piano, The Wire, Gramophone Magazine, and more. BBC Music Magazine reported, “the American pianist [Sarah Cahill] takes us on a chronological journey that zips around the world, stitching together contrasting styles into an enjoyable musical patchwork,” while Textura notes Cahill's “ability to capture the essence of each piece and illuminate it with eloquent playing.”

Sarah Cahill began working on The Future is Female in 2018. She says, “For decades I had been working with many living American composers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but I felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe. Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive . . . The possibilities are, in fact, limitless.”

For her marathon installment of The Future is Female at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on International Women's Day this year, Cahill will perform music for solo piano by women composers written across five centuries from 1687 to 2020, encompassing the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern periods, including works such as:

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre: Suite in D minor (1687)

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was celebrated in her lifetime as both a composer and harpsichordist, an acclaimed musician in the court of Louis XIV, and one of only a few French composers to publish keyboard pieces in the 17th century. Jacquet de la Guerre's Suites speak to her boundless imagination and prodigious talents at the keyboard.

Hélène de Montgeroult: Sonata No. 9, Op. 5 No. 3 (1811)

Hélène de Montgeroult was a virtuoso pianist and composer. In a possibly apocryphal story, she saved herself from the guillotine by improvising variations on “Le Marsaillaise” during the French Revolution. Sonata No. 9 is one of Montgeroult's many works for keyboard.

Vítězslava Kaprálová: April Preludes (1937)

Vítězslava Kaprálová was one of the most brilliant young Czech composers to emerge between the two world wars. Before her death at age 25, she composed prolifically, and was the first woman to conduct the Czech Philharmonic. Her April Preludes were composed for the pianist Rudolph Firkusny.

Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru (1951)

Born Yewubdar Guèbrou, Emahoy Tsegué-Mariam Gebru (1923-2023), was an Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun who composed an abundance of works, predominately for piano, released several albums, and used her music in an effort to help educate of young children. She became a nun in 1944 and spent 10 years living in a hilltop monastery in Addis Ababa, taking the title Emahoy and the religious name Tsegué-Maryam. The homeless wanderer is a beloved piece of Gebrou's, the narrative of which she describes as such: “The homeless wanderer plays on his flute, while he worries about the wilderness around his life. At night in the mountains, when people and animals rest after the day, one hears the song of a flute which the little wanderer plays, alone and far from home. The wild animals and snakes do not dare approach him, but listen spellbound to the melody his flute produces, which becomes its protector through the power of the notes. This he loses his fear of the nocturnal visitors. They become his friends."

Margaret Bonds: Troubled Water (1967)

Margaret Bonds was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. Bonds is regarded as one of the first well-recognized Black composers and performers in the U.S.. Bonds was a prolific arranger of African-American spirituals and often collaborated with Langston Hughes. She was the first Black soloist to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Kaija Saariaho: Ballade (2005)

The late Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) was a leading voice of her gener­ation of composers, in her native Finland and worldwide. She studied compo­sition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she lived from 1982 to her death. Her studies and research at IRCAM, the Parisian center for electroacoustic exper­i­men­tation, had a major influence on her music, and her charac­ter­is­ti­cally luxuriant and myste­rious textures were often created by combining live performance and electronics.

Mary D. Watkins: Summer Days (2020)

Mary D. Watkins composed Summer Days for Sarah Cahill in 2020. Watkins is an eclectic composer as well as a pianist, arranger, recording artist, and record producer. Her music reflects many styles – jazz, gospel, country, rock, classical and pop. She says of the piece, “[the music] makes me think of children on a hot summer day freely playing in the water of a sprinkler, bouncing, running, wrestling, yelling, laughing, and screaming with delight.”

Additional composers featured on Cahill's March 8 marathon performance include Fanny Mendelssohn, Amy Beach, Regina Harris Baiocchi, Teresa Carreño, Louise Farrenc, Adelaide Pereira da Silva, Maria Szymanowska, Frangiz Ali-Zadeh, Mel Bonis, Julia Perry, Ann Southam, Fannie Charles Dillon, Valerie Capers, Theresa Wong, Viola Kinney, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, Marianna Martines, Reena Esmail, Grażyna Bacewicz, Zenobia Powell Perry, Chen Yi, Janice Giteck, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Meredith Monk, Marion Bauer, Anna Bon, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Tania León, Leokadiya Kashperova, Annea Lockwood, Gabriela Lena Frank, Aida Shirazi, Betsy Jolas, Ethel Smyth, Maria Corley, Johanna Beyer, Chiquinha Gonzaga, and Linda Catlin Smith.

Sarah Cahill has previously brought The Future is Female to venues across the U.S. including Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill, NC; Carlsbad Music Festival in San Diego, CA; the University of Iowa; Bowling Green New Music Festival in Ohio; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; North Dakota Museum of Art; the EXTENSITY Concert Series' Women Now Festival in New York; the Newport Classical Music Festival in Rhode Island, and more.

More about Sarah Cahill:

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. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. Keyboard Magazine writes, “Through her inspired interpretation of works across the 20th and 21st centuries, Cahill has been instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers.” She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).

Cahill enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for each performance. She researched and recorded music by prominent early 20th- century American modernists Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford and commissioned a number of new pieces in tribute to their enduring influence. Cahill has worked closely with composer Terry Riley since 1997, and for his 80th birthday, she commissioned nine new works for solo piano in his honor and performed them with several of Riley's own compositions at venues across the country. Cahill also had the opportunity to work closely with Lou Harrison and has championed many of his works for piano.

Cahill has performed classical and contemporary chamber music with artists and ensembles such as Jessica Lang Dance; pianists Joseph Kubera, Adam Tendler, and Regina Myers; violinist Stuart Canin; the Alexander String Quartet; New Century Chamber Orchestra; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many more. She also performs as a duo with violinist Kate Stenberg.

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 thirty compositions by women from around the globe, from the 17th century to the present day, and include many world premiere recordings.