Sarah Cahill’s Harrison House Recital

Sarah Cahill playing at Harrison House (screen shot from the Vimeo video recording being discussed)

This past August pianist Sarah Cahill gave a recital at Harrison House as part of its Sunday Morning Listening Room series. Located in Joshua Tree, Lou Harrison and his partner William Colvig built the straw bale structure (with a little help from their many friends) on land they had purchased in Joshua Tree. The structure now hosts Harrison House Music Arts & Ecology, supporting residencies in the three disciplines enumerated in that extended name under the direction of Eva Soltes. Cahill performed her recital as part of her tenure as Artist-in-Residence; and her recital was planned to be live-streamed. Sadly, the streaming process fell afoul of technical difficulties. Fortunately, a video recording of the entire recital was directed and produced by Soltes, who uploaded it to Vimeo about two months ago.

As expected, Cahill performed a generous selection of Harrison compositions. These were interleaved with music by two contemporary composers, whose works reflect many of the spirits that had inspired Harrison. One of them, Mamoru Fujieda, has devoted his life to a project he calls Patterns of Plants, and Pinna Records released a recording of Cahill playing a selection of compositions resulting from that project in September of 2014. The other composer on the program was Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, who, in addition to composing, set up a foundation to help needy children in both Africa and the District of Columbia study music.

All three of these composers developed their own unique approaches to making music. Nevertheless, when Cahill had them share a single program, it almost seemed as if the program itself had a unifying theme. That theme amounted to a study in the wide variety of techniques of embellishment that could be engaged. This was particularly evident in the four Guèbrou selections, each of which involved a relatively straightforward theme, usually with one or two bluesy chromatics. That theme was then subjected to highly elaborate and rhythmically eccentric embellishments, almost challenging the listener to keep track of the theme as all of those embellishments unfolded.

In a somewhat similar vein, the opening Harrison composition was the third sonata from his 1943 Six Sonatas for Cembalo. In introducing this piece, Cahill observed that the influences behind this collection included both Domenico Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla. Thus it was no surprise that many of the embellishing techniques one encounters in Scarlatti’s prolific collection of keyboard sonatas could be found in Harrison’s music (with his own personal twists on Scarlatti’s techniques, of course).

Fujieda’s case is somewhat different. When I wrote about Cahill’s album for Examiner.com when it was released, I provided the following “technical details” behind his approach to composition:

That project was inspired by the Plantron, a device created by Yūji Dōgane, a botanist who is also a practicing artist. The Plantron was designed to measure electrical fluctuation on the surface of the leaves of plants. Fujieda used the Max programming system to convert data streams of such measurements into sounds. He would then occupy himself with intense listening to those resulting sounds in search of musical patterns, transcribing them into conventional notation when he encountered them. He would subsequently compose short pieces around those patterns, arranged as collections.

As Cahill observed, Fujieda has kept the details of his transcription techniques to himself. Nevertheless, her approach to execution tended to guide the ear through distinctions between Fujieda’s underlying patterns and the techniques he engaged to embellish those patterns. At least that would be one viable hypothesis. Another, which I raised when discussing Cahill’s album, is that, in the spirit of John Cage and Morton Feldman, Fujieda’s “marks on paper” provided the performer with a background against which a foreground of embellishment could be developed at the player’s discretion. Thus, Cahill is one of several performers to have recorded Fujieda’s music; and there is a strong possibility that every act of performance emerges from its own unique approach to interpreting the composer’s manuscripts.

Mind you, where all three of these composers are concerned, all of the above may be merely personal speculation. More important was the compelling sense of rhetorical expression that Cahill evoked in each of her performance selections. Lasting about 70 minutes, the entire recital was an engaging journey of discovery, even when several of the offerings were familiar. Soltes’ video work in capturing the performance facilitated how a listener could make that journey, meaning that the recording escalated the act of listening beyond sit-still-at-a-concert behavior to a level in which sight and sound mutually reinforced each other.