Dec. 21: Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration Featuring the Music of Terry Riley – Presented by the San Francisco Public Library
L-R Sarah Cahill, Terry Riley
Photo of Sarah Cahill by Kristen Wrzesniewski available in high-resolution at jensenartists.com/artists-profiles/sarah-cahill
Pianist Sarah Cahill in Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration
Featuring the Music of Terry Riley
Presented by the San Francisco Public Library
Sunday, December 21, 2025 at 2pm
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, CA – Pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, will be presented in concert by the San Francisco Public Library on Sunday, December 21, 2025 at 2pm. Cahill will perform a program dedicated to the music of Terry Riley. The concert will take place in the Latino Room of the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin Street). The performance is free and open to the public.
Sarah Cahill honors the artistry of Terry Riley in a special program celebrating the American composer for his 90th birthday. Riley, a California native from the Sierra foothills, became well known and celebrated for his cutting edge, experimental and minimalist styles of composition. Cahill has worked closely with Riley for three decades and commissioned six compositions from him. Cahill 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 of this special program honoring Terry Riley:
“It's such a great pleasure to celebrate Terry Riley at the San Francisco Public Library, a welcoming community space 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 the album that 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 acoustic resonance of the piano 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: When Sarah [Cahill] and I discussed the possibility of writing a piece in celebration of Terry Riley’s 80th birthday, I was both thrilled and daunted. To be honest, as I’m writing this, just a few hours away from the double bar line, I still feel a bit at sea regarding what this piece is about. 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.”
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, is presented in concert by the San Francisco Public Library. Cahill will celebrate Terry Riley's ninetieth birthday year with his music combined with works composed by Samuel Adams and Danny Clay in honor of Terry Riley.
Concert details:
Who: Pianist Sarah Cahill - Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration
Presented by the San Francisco Public Library
What: Music by Terry Riley
When: Sunday, December 21, 2025 at 2pm
Where: San Francisco Public Library (Latino Room on the Lower Level), 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
More information (Free and open to the public): https://sfpl.org/events/2025/12/21/performance-terry-riley-90-piano-celebration