Oct. 17: Pianist Sarah Cahill Presented by the Other Minds Festival – Performing World Premiere of New Work by Samuel Adams in Tribute to Ingram Marshall
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Pianist Sarah Cahill Presented by the Other Minds Festival
Performing the World Premiere of Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright
by Composer Samuel Adams
A Tribute to Ingram Marshall Commissioned by Sarah Cahill
Friday, October 17, 2025 at 8pm
Brava Theater | 2781 24th St. | San Francisco, CA
Tickets and More Information
“As tenacious and committed an advocate as any composer could dream of”
– San Francisco Chronicle
Watch Sarah Cahill’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert
San Francisco, CA – Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, will perform as part of Night 2 of the 29th annual Other Minds Festival on Friday, October 17, 2025 at 8pm. Cahill will give the world premiere of Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright by Samuel Adams. The concert will be held at Brava Theater (2781 24th St).
Commissioned by Cahill, Adams’ solo piano work is a tribute to composer Ingram Marshall (1942–2022). A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ingram Marshall’s work has greatly influenced a number of composers and musicians from the area, including Adams – who studied with Marshall and considered him his mentor – and Cahill, who has frequently performed Marshall’s music, as well as commissioned other works by the late composer.
“I was seventeen when I met Ingram Marshall in San Francisco, and he had a tremendous influence on me,” says Cahill. “He wrote his great piano piece, Authentic Presence, for me and composed his four-hand work Five Easy Pieces for [pianist] Joseph Kubera and me. In 2008, I commissioned a piece from him called Movement: Deep in My Heart. Along with a small group of fellow musicians, I presented memorial concerts for Ingram at New Sounds Live in New York City and with San Francisco Performances. Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright is part of a larger project of a group of homages I'm commissioning from various composers titled "No Ordinary Light.”
Of this new work and his own connection to Ingram Marshall, Samuel Adams says, “[Ingram Marshall] and my father, John Adams, share a long history that dates back to the early 70s, when they were part of the small but vibrant contemporary music scene in San Francisco. I remained extremely close with Ingram until his passing in May 2022. Like many others he touched over the years, I remain indebted to his quietly prophetic musical sensibility—an almost opiate-like quality that imbues his work with a mystery and sadness that still resonates with me. Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright pays tribute to Ingram’s free-form, unpredictable sense of structure and highly impressionistic, almost ambient musical surfaces. His music often embraced the idea that form can be gradual and elusive—like late Sibelius—with the secrets of a piece only occasionally appearing close to its surface, like sunken cathedrals.”
In addition to Cahill’s world premiere performance, the evening’s program will feature additional solo and chamber works by Adams, including Sundial performed by Friction Quartet and percussionist Haruka Fujii, Violin Diptych performed by violinist Helen Kim and pianist Conor Hanick, and Études performed by pianist Conor Hanick. Libby Van Cleve will also perform Ingram Marshall’s Dark Waters on English horn.
Composer Ingram Marshall lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in Washington State, where he taught at Evergreen State College, until 1989. He studied at Lake Forest College, Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts, where he received an M.F.A., and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In the mid-seventies he developed a series of "live electronic" pieces such as Fragility Cycles, Gradual Requiem, and Alcatraz in which he blended tape collages, extended vocal techniques, Indonesian flutes, and keyboards. He performed widely in the United States with these works.
The Other Minds Festival is a beloved and well known presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. An annual presentation of many different artists and many different styles of music, the Other Minds Festival has been an annual staple of new music since the first event in 1993. Sarah Cahill has been a steadfast figure in the festival’s activities over the years, going as far back as the festival’s third year in 1996 when she performed George Lewis' solo piano suite Endless Shout, which she later recorded for the Tzadik label, under Lewis' supervision. Since that time, Cahill has also given several performances during different years of the festival, including most recently as 2024 when she performed RCSC by New Zealand born, American composer Annea Lockwood.
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. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).
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, from 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 8pm 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.
For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.
For Calendar Editors:
Description: Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, performs as part of the 29th annual Other Minds Festival on October 17, 2025 at 8pm. Sarah will give the world premiere of Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright. The work, commissioned by Cahill, is a tribute to composer Ingram Marshall (1942–2022) written by composer Samuel Adams. The evening’s program will feature additional solo and chamber works by Adams, including Sundial performed by Friction Quartet and percussionist Haruka Fujii; Violin Diptych performed by violinist Helen Kim and pianist Conor Hanick; and Études performed by pianist Conor Hanick. Libby Van Cleve will also perform Ingram Marshall’s Dark Waters on English horn.
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Sarah Cahill
Presented by Other Minds Festival
What: World premiere of Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright – a tribute to Ingram Marshall
When: Friday, October 17, 2025 at 8pm
Where: Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
More information: https://www.otherminds.org/other-minds-festival-29/