Journeys of Discovery

Considering how much interesting content unfolded in response to Sarah Cahill’s Facebook post regarding my account of her Flower Piano Recital, I felt a need to clarify the context and consider a broader issue. First of all, I would like to set the record straight on a minor he-said-she-said issue. Cahill made the following assertion:

If Steve, who goes to hundreds of concerts a year, can hear ninety minutes of music composed between 1811 and the present day and declare that it's all unknown to him primarily because the music is written by women, then there is a clear need for us musicians to keep bringing this repertoire to light.

My issue has to do with the use of “because” in that sentence. The text of the assertion that Cahill had in mind was the following:

Each composition had its own stamp of uniqueness; and all of them were unfamiliar to this writer (and probably just about everyone else in the audience this morning).

The compositions were unfamiliar to me not because of the gender of the composer but because, with the exception of Teresa Wong’s “She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees,” I had neither heard nor heard of any of them through reading or conversation. (Just to be clear, I knew that Fanny Mendelssohn composed; but, prior to Cahill’s performance, I knew nothing about what she had composed.)

The fact is that many of the concerts I attend involve “first contact” experiences, if not for all of the program than for a significant portion of it. One of the reasons I try to get to as many Cahill performances as I can is because I expect to have such experiences. For that matter, she is far from the only performer I approach this way. Other examples that quickly come to mind are Friction Quartet (which, readers of my preview pieces may recall, will share an Old First Concerts program with Cahill on August 16), The Living Earth Show, Areon Flutes, and the A/B Duo. The fact is that there is so much original programming in concerts in San Francisco that coming up with examples is a bit like eating potato chips! (Don’t get me started on enumerating composers, many of whom are, indeed, female.)

However, the selections listed on the program are only the surface structure of any listening experience. What sustains me through those “hundreds of concerts a year” is not whether the repertoire is new or familiar but whether the listening experience bears its own unique stamp of originality. When, at the beginning of this month, I took issue with the recent release of an “Educational Edition” of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, it was because there have been any number of performances of those four concertos that made me sit up and treat them as first-contact experiences, none of which involved “educational” background about the music or the poetry behind the music. Every performance has the potential to be a journey of discovery, and whether or not such a journey is experienced depends more on the performer than on the composer.

From that point of view, Cahill’s qualities as a performer go beyond her choices of repertoire and her approaches to execution. At her Flower Piano recital the attention she put into introducing each piece of music was as important as her presentation of the music itself. Truth be told, it was because of her attention that I found myself following up on many of her points during my writing, seeking out the knowledge serving as background for her remarks and occasionally venturing down a path or two of my own. As a result, while many of my journeys of discovery leave me overwhelmed by the sheer volume of novelty when I then have to write about the experience, I found that I could approach Cahill’s program as a “charted landscape,” through which I could easily set myself a clearly-defined path.