May 9 & 24: Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration – Performances in Oakland and San Francisco
L-R Sarah Cahill, Terry Riley
Photo of Sarah Cahill by Kristen Wrzesniewski available in high-resolution here
Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration
Dresher Ensemble Studio in Oakland: May 9, 2026
San Francisco Public Library: May 24, 2026
Saturday, May 9, 2026 at 7:30pm
Dresher Ensemble Studio | 2201 Poplar Street | Oakland, CA
Tickets and More Information
Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 2pm (Rescheduled from December 2025)
San Francisco Public Library (Latino Room on the Lower Level)
100 Larkin Street | San Francisco, CA
Free and Open to the Public | 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 & Oakland, CA – Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, gives two Bay Area concerts dedicated to the music of Terry Riley in honor of his recent 90th birthday. On Saturday, May 9, 2026 at 7:30pm she performs at the Dresher Ensemble Studio in Oakland (2201 Poplar Street) and on Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 2pm she performs at the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin Street) in the Library’s Latino Room (rescheduled from December 2025, due to the power outage). The program will include Keyboard Studies, Be Kind to One Another, The Walrus in Memoriam,Fandango on the Heaven Ladder, and The Great Beauty, along with Circle Songs by Danny Clay and Shade Studies by Sam Adams, both composed in honor of Terry Riley's eightieth birthday in 2015.
With these performances, Sarah Cahill honors Terry Riley's artistry in a special program celebrating the American composer on his 90th birthday. Riley, a California native from the Sierra foothills, became well known and celebrated for his cutting-edge, experimental, and minimalist compositional styles. Cahill has worked closely with him for three decades and commissioned six compositions from him. She also commissioned eight younger composers to write music in tribute to Riley for his 80th birthday. The resulting works were recorded by Cahill, and fellow pianists Regina Myers and Samuel Adams in 2017, as a 4-CD set entitled Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley (Irritable Hedgehog Music).
Cahill says, “It's such a great pleasure to celebrate Terry Riley at the Dresher Ensemble Studio and the San Francisco Public Library, both welcoming community spaces with a long history of supporting innovative new music, with a program ranging from his 1964 Keyboard Studies to new works written in his honor.”
Of the works found on Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley which will be part of this program, Allan Kozinn writes in the Wall Street Journal, “[Fandango on the Heaven Ladder] explore[s] Mr. Riley’s fascination with the harmonic gauziness of Impressionism, and the Fandango. . .embrace[s] Latin rhythms filtered through, and altered by, Mr. Riley’s free-ranging sensibilities. Be Kind to One Another (2008, revised 2014), a work composed for Ms. Cahill, tells us something about [Terry Riley’s] passion for jazz – he is a freewheeling improviser – by gradually transforming a sweet, gracefully ornamented melody, at first couched in a late-Romantic salon style, into several varieties of ragtime and stride. Minimalism is represented by only a single selection, Ms. Cahill’s own combined edition of ‘Keyboard Studies Nos. 1 & 2’ (1965) with elements from each study superimposed (at Mr. Riley’s suggestion).”
The Walrus in Memoriam is based on tunes written by The Beatles and was commissioned by Aki Takahashi for her Hyper-Beatles project. Samuel Adams’ Shade Studies examines the counterpoint between the piano's acoustic resonance and sine waves. The music is quiet and built of cadences, silences, and repeated gestures. As the work unfolds, the two resonance systems engage through masking and illumination, creating a brief exploration of musical “shade.” This work was generously commissioned by Russ Irwin and is dedicated to Sarah Cahill and Terry Riley.
Danny Clay says of Circle Songs: “I don’t know Terry personally, and yet I owe him a tremendous debt musically – his sounds, his ideas, and the warmth of his music have seeped into my subconscious (and, when lucky, my music) in ways that I am just now beginning to unravel. I think what I’ve ended up writing is ultimately a set of love songs. The more I think about it, the more I feel like there may not be any other kind of tune worth writing. The sheer act of composing is about falling in love, after all – whether it be with a sound, an idea, or a feeling of indescribable warmth. That's ultimately what I thank Terry and Sarah for the most – bringing to the world of music a seemingly endless wealth of all these things, especially love.”
Riley wrote The Great Beauty in 2016, in celebration of the life of composer Pauline Oliveros. A brief composition of only 85 seconds, the work can be performed by solo piano or multiple performers. Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley met in 1956 while taking the same composition class. The two developed a close and lifelong friendship. Oliveros performed as part of the premiere of Riley’s iconic In C, and each of them made key innovations at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
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, spanning 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 8 pm 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, gives two Bay Area concerts at Paul Dresher’s Studio on May 9 and the San Francisco Public Library on May 24 celebrating Terry Riley's ninetieth birthday year, performing a program featuring his music combined with works composed by Samuel Adams and Danny Clay in honor of the Bay Area composer.
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration
Presented by Dresher Ensemble Studio
What: Music by Terry Riley, Samuel Adams, and Danny Clay
When: Saturday, May 9, 2026, at 7:30 pm
Where: Dresher Ensemble Studio, 2201 Poplar Street, Oakland, CA 94607
More information: https://dresherensemble.org/Cahill-Terry-Riley-at-90
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration
Presented by the San Francisco Public Library
What: Music by Terry Riley, Samuel Adams, and Danny Clay
When: Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 2pm (Rescheduled from December 2025)
Where: San Francisco Public Library (Latino Room on the Lower Level), 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
More information: https://sfpl.org/events/2026/05/24/performance-terry-riley-90-piano-celebration