Final Cahill Survey of Women Composers

courtesy of Jensen Artists

This coming Friday First Hand Records will release the last of the three volumes that pianist Sarah Cahill prepared for her The Future is Female Series. Readers that have been following these releases know that each album had its own title: In Nature for the first and The Dance for the second. The title of the final volume is At Play. Once again, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders; and, again as of this writing, the album will be available only for digital download. [added 4/25, 4:15 p.m.:  Fortunately, the physical CD is being sold through a Barnes & Noble Web page, which will process pre-orders prior to this coming Friday.]

Another “once again” is that Cahill begins her “program” in the seventeenth century. This time her selection is the third sonata in the Opus 5 collection of keyboard sonatas composed by Hélène de Montgeroult. There is a bit of fortuitous serendipity here where Cahill’s agenda is concerned. The week after I wrote about The Dance I wrote an article about Montgeroult prompted by the release of Clare Hammond’s album of the 29 études that Montgeroult had composed. On that occasion I cited the Grand Piano album that Nicolas Horvath had recorded of the complete set of Montgeroult sonatas. (There were only nine of them, and Cahill’s selection for At Play was the last of them.)

Another similarity that At Play shares with The Dance is that there is only one selection from the nineteenth century. This time the composer is Cecile Chaminade; and the selection is her “Thème varié,” which she composed in 1898. Where my own listening is concerned, I find this track to be more consistent with the sense of “play” suggested by the album title; and the music differs refreshingly from Clara Schumann’s Opus 20 set of variations included on The Dance.

The remainder of the album consists of three tracks of twentieth-century compositions, followed by four works completed in the current century. Two of those latter compositions are multi-movement suites. The first of these is Hannah Kendall’s On the Chequer’d Field Array’d, and the second is Regina Harris Baiocchi’s collection of four pieces under the title Piano Poems. Kendall’s intention was to depict the three stages in a game of chess (opening, middle-game, endgame). I have to confess that I have not yet managed to get my head around this suite, leaving me wondering if composing music about chess is in the same league as dancing about architecture.

I have to say that my biggest surprise turned out to be also a favorite selection. My past experiences with Pauline Oliveros involve works that have more to do with activities than with the interpretation of notation. I still remember her remark about going out into the desert in the middle of the night. She could then lay on her back to look at the stars, which would then enable her to perform John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis” by reading the “original score!”

The full title of her contribution to At Play is “Quintuplets Play Pen: Homage to Ruth Crawford.” The music is polyrhythmic, making considerable use of five-notes-to-a-beat quintuplets. Oliveros describes the piece as “a playful polyphonic dance;” and both the sense of play and the intricate Web of polyphony can be grasped by the attentive listener with little difficulty. I hope she enjoyed creating this piece for Cahill, because it means that she might give a few more tries to working with conventional notation! [added 4/25, 4:07 p.m.: I wrote that last sentence unaware of the fact that Oliveros died on November 24, 2016, a painful reminder of how little news about her I had managed to follow.]