Sarah Cahill: I actually went to a little library recently and found a book by Willa Cather and brought it home and then read the back cover and it says, you know, one of the foremost women writers of the 20th century and I, I threw the book across the room I was so mad.
[Theme Music starts: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
Majel Connery: This is A Music of Their Own, an interview podcast about women in music. And we hear stories of survival and perseverance, and we explore why being a woman in music is so different from being a man. The women I interview here are extraordinary because they are making it. And as a woman in music myself, I want to understand what they are doing that's different that makes them stand out. I'm your host, Majel Connery. And in this first season, we've been meeting women in classical music where the number of men vastly exceeds the number of women. This is A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. We'll be right back.
[Theme Music ends: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature ends]
Majel Connery: Welcome back to A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. I'm Majel Connery.
[Music starts: “Un Rev Em Mer”]
Majel Connery: My guest on this final episode is Sarah Cahill, a pianist, producer, radio host and artist advocate. Many composers have dedicated works to Sarah, including Yoko Ono, John Adams, Terry Riley, Julia Wolfe, Pauline Oliveros and Fredrik Chayefsky. Sarah is in the middle of a massive project called The Future is Female, which involves playing and commissioning the works of 70 female composers living and dead. She's also on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and hosts the radio show Revolutions Per Minute on KALW.
[Music up: "Un Rev En Mer"]
Majel Connery: To begin with, we're going to talk about Sarah's Future is a Female project. You're hearing some of it right now. This is "Un Rev En Mer Op. 28" by composer Theresa Carreno. And Sarah is playing the piano. Sarah has spent years digging up piano works in the archives by largely forgotten women composers of the past. She also commissions living female composers of today, and she's compiling all of this music into a three album recording project. This work Sarah does, especially the archival stuff, could be seen as a kind of rescue operation, and that potentially plays into an old stereotype about women needing to be saved. So I start by asking Sarah whether she consciously fights this stereotype.
Majel Connery: Do you find Sarah that you have to present these pieces in a way that does not highlight, Oh, how sad for this person that their works never came to light. How unfortunate that this brother of hers didn't encourage. I mean, I imagine there's a lot of that. Yeah, but you have to actively fight against simply to present them as the great artists they are.
Sarah Cahill: It's true that there's this sense of, you know, the victim of Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn especially. We hear these stories like, Oh, the poor thing. You know, even looking at their pictures, right? I mean, we look at the picture and we already feel sorry for her.
Majel Connery: True, that's a good point.
Sarah Cahill: You have to respect the composer and treat each one like I mean, I hate to say it, but like you would talk about a male composer, you would never say, oh, poor Beethoven. He had such a hard time. It's just he would never introduce a Beethoven sonata that way. Right. I mean, even though he, you know, did have a lot of struggle in his lifetime. But nobody says poor Beethoven.
Majel Connery: Beethoven is actually an interesting example because you're exactly right. Rather than saying, oh, poor Beethoven as he was going deaf, gosh, guy must have had a hard time, we say, because he was going deaf. Isn't it all the more remarkable that he managed to create the works he did? It's almost like we celebrate this kind of weakness or deficiency in men when they're able to overcome it. But for women, we cart out pity instead. It's strange. Yeah, I actually think it's a very interesting point you make about the portraits too, and tell me if I'm misinterpreting this. But I think what you're saying is women composers are often depicted as looking kind of small or looking kind of wan, looking kind of sad, looking kind of pinned up and hemmed in like they don't look very comfortable. They certainly don't look like they're having a good time. Is that what you mean by that?
Sarah Cahill: Oh, that's exactly what I mean. And I think they are portrayed that way. And you look at pictures of Louise Farrenc and. Exactly. She looks sort of wan and sad and like she won't have long to live and, you know, and you immediately feel a lot of pity for her. And in reality, she was a powerhouse. I mean, for instance, she fought for equal pay, for equal work at the Paris Conservatory where she was teaching. She noticed that her male colleagues were getting paid much more and she won. I mean, she worked at it and she got equal pay. It is important as you say, I mean, it's just so important to put the stress on the music itself and say, you know, here are these incredible etudes by Louise Farrenc. And they're adventurous and they're ahead of their time. And not to say, here's this sad, neglected person.
Majel Connery: Yeah, well, one of the most brilliant demonstrations I have ever seen of this is a thing you do, Sara. So I wonder if we could actually talk about this in your future. As female presentations, you often will bring in front of an audience two pieces. One is by Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn's sister, and one is by Felix Mendelssohn. And you say to the audience, I'm going to play these two pieces. I'm not going to tell you who wrote which. I leave that to you to decide. And it illustrates two really important points. One is that while you're playing these pieces, we find ourselves scanning for sexual attributes. We can't help it. We're listening for softness or weakness or less talented ness. And when we realize that we are doing it, it's a sort of horrible revelation. The other point that it makes is that at the end of the day, you cannot tell these two pieces apart. They're both really good and for good reason because probably Felix. And Fanny were equally talented. It's just an awesome exercise and I wonder if you could talk more about it. I think that you said you originally got this from a beloved high school teacher of yours.
Sarah Cahill: Yes, he was Mr. Kennedy at Berkeley High School, and he would cover up the names of the writers of the sonnets. And one was the Shakespeare sonnet, and one was by some lesser Elizabethan poet. And then you'd have to judge the work purely on the sonnet itself and the writing, because we all have biases, we all make assumptions, we all be like, Who? Shakespeare? Of course it's going to be better. It's by Shakespeare. And we don't think, Well, maybe Shakespeare wrote a couple crappy sonnets and maybe Anonymous wrote some really great sonnets. Right? So, I mean, it's the same way with this music. And I think in so many cases, Fanny Mendelssohn comes out ahead.
[Music up: "Larghetto"]
Majel Connery: You're listening to the “Larghetto” from Fanny Mendelssohn's "Lieder for Piano Opus 8.” We'll hear more from Sara Cahill right after this break. Stay with us.
[Music up and end: "Larghetto]
[Music starts: "Au Sein de la Nature le Murmure Des Bles"]
Majel Connery: Welcome back to A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. I'm Majel Connery. This piece is called "Au Sein de la Nature le Murmure Des Bles," which is French for the murmuring of the wheat in the bosom of nature. The composer is Leokadiya Kashperova with Sarah on piano. One of the points that Sarah makes very often is that when we discover an older piece by a woman, sometimes our first impulse is to compare it with something we already know and then inadvertently end up calling it derivative. Like this piece sounds like Ravel. So was Kashperova copying Ravel? But music, like all art forms, is built by a network of many people working together at the same time to create the sound of an era. So we could say that Kasparov sounds like Ravel, but we also need to say that Ravel sounds like Kashperova.
Majel Connery: In this next segment, Sarah and I uncover a surprising autobiographical parallel between Sarah and Fanny Mendelssohn. Sarah's dad was a professor of art history at Berkeley, who, until his death in 2014, was considered one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese art. He also had a rare records program on the radio. Sarah's dad had a huge influence on Sarah's career. He may also have had a role in holding her back, if not for Sarah's own resolve.
Majel Connery: You mentioned your dad a lot. You don't talk a lot about your mom. And I was wondering, just in the context of this conversation, about what it means to be a woman in music, whether your father is a more important figure to you than your mom from an artistic perspective.
Sarah Cahill: I mean, my relationship to music when I was growing up was much more with my father, and it was a way of experiencing music, which I don't think people do so much anymore. I don't think people sit their kids down on a sofa and say, Now we're going to listen to Mahler's Fifth Symphony and we're going to sit here and listen to the entire thing and just just listen, which is, you know, which is a great thing to do. But if I had done that with my daughter, I think she would have rebelled. And I don't know how exactly my father was able to do that, but it was just there was no question that we were going to sit there and listen to that Mahler Symphony. My relationship to music was always sort of with my father, and there was a moment when I was 12, when I played a Brahms intermezzo, and he said he realized then that I was going to be a pianist.
Majel Connery: By the way, Sarah, did I hearing you correctly just say that your father determined that you would become a pianist?
Sarah Cahill: There was a moment when he said I would be a pianist, but there was also a message that I wasn't destined necessarily for a conservatory, that it was more like I would get a liberal arts education, but play the piano. I mean, but there was an understanding that maybe, you know, like Carnegie Hall was not necessarily in my future.
Majel Connery: So he both determined that you would have a serious hobby as a pianist and predicted your eventual demise as a professional pianist.
Sarah Cahill: I know it was a little bit like I think of it as like Fanny Mendelssohn's father in a way. He was a great father and a complicated father. And I think that's a sort of classic story of the demanding and, you know, withholding approval kind of father. And I think that's, you know, very much of his generation. And he was at the top of the field. And why couldn't I be at the top of the field? And if I showed him that I was written up in The New Yorker, he'd say, Oh, why are you so tiny? Why isn't it bigger?
Majel Connery: Wow. And your mother, Sarah.
Sarah Cahill: And my mother was always much more quiet and sort of the traditional housewife. That was my view of husbands and wives. And it did affect the way I thought about powerful men and diminutive women or sort of women who did not have a position of power. I just realized that when I met my first piano teacher, Sharon man, when I was seven or eight, you know, that was life changing because she was a powerful, dynamic woman. And my mother my mother was just the kind of person who just sort of vanished and and just took care of things and kept the house tidy and so on. I am so incredibly grateful to have her now. To have her still with me. Because if I had lost her earlier in my life, I think I would have had. A much different picture of her, but having a relationship with her in these later years and when, you know, my father left and then she was unhappy and then suddenly she was just a really happy person. And I think getting out from being her own person and being away from that sort of dynamic was really, really good for her. Just one little personal note is that he died on February 14th, 2014, and her birthday is February 14th. And at the time I just said that his one last act of overshadowing her own time, dying on her birthday, so that forever now February 14th, won't only be my mother's birthday, but it will be my father's, you know, anniversary of his death. Here's something I can do that will make her life a little bit more difficult.
Majel Connery: So how did this help you shape who you are and your view of what it means to be a woman?
Sarah Cahill: Watching my mother give up what she loved made a difference to me when my daughter Miranda was born, and I was determined to keep playing concerts and find a way to do that. And of course, you know, being able to afford childcare helps. But I took her to Chicago when she was three months old. We took her to Albuquerque when she was six months old. I just took her with me. And it was hard, but I thought I need my daughter to grow up with the image of a woman, the image of a mother who loves her, who loves her, and will do anything for her, but who also loves music and keeps doing it no matter what. I think it's made a difference to her to grow up with a more balanced view than I did of a mother and a father and what they do and how their work figures in their lives. It makes me think of the great composer Ruth Crawford. You know who in her diaries and letters and journals she says, I'll get back to composing after I finish this book. I'll get back to composing after I raise my children or get back to composing after this, you know. And she had been, you know, one of the world's greatest avant garde composers in her twenties and early thirties. And then she got back to composing in 1952. She wrote her woodwind quintet, and she died a year later from cancer.
Majel Connery: Oh, gosh.
Sarah Cahill: At the age of 53.
Majel Connery: So what do you think the lesson is?
Sarah Cahill: The lesson is to do it now. The lesson is to not wait. Whatever your creative pursuit is or whatever, whatever you need to do. Do it before it's too late.
[Music starts and under narration: "Allegro Moderato"]
Majel Connery: This is the “Allegro Moderato” from Fanny Mendelssohn's "Lieder for Piano Opus 8" from Volume One of Sarah's The Future is Female Project. If you were listening to this piece just in the car, on the radio, would you stop and think, hang on, is this by a woman? My guess is no. And that seems critical to me, because if we tell our brains to scan for traces of sex in music, we might start to hear it or think that we do. But is that real or imagined? In the final part of this episode. I want to address this issue head on. This is a podcast about women, but we don't say A Music of Her Own. We say A Music of Their Own because once that “woman” idea enters the room, it can change how we listen. It can suggest that the important thing is the woman part and not the music part. To talk about this, I asked Sarah for her thoughts on a phrase that is supposed to remedy this problem. And that phrase is artists who happen to be women.
Sarah Cahill: I think that phrase composers who happen to be women or artists who happen to be women probably originated because people didn't want to say women artists, women composers. And so they're saying, these are five composers we chose and they just happened to be women. I actually went to a little library recently and found a book by Willa Cather and brought it home and then read the back cover and it says, you know, one of the foremost women writers of the 20th century and I, I threw the book across the room. I was so mad because it's yeah. To always have to qualify things this way in concert series that say here's a women composers concert. There's this subtext of, okay, now we'll get back to the real music. You know that we've gotten that out of the way. It's a scene with composers of color like let's do this special, you know, auxiliary concert, and then we'll get back to the real season or something like that, which, which is a terrible way to think. And of course, the ultimate goal is to integrate all these composers on the program and not call attention to them. And things are changing gradually. And it's very gratifying to see the San Francisco Symphony having a program of Dvorak and Kaiji Saariaho and, you know, Sibelius or whatever. And just not saying ding, ding, ding. Woman Composer But just this is great music. Or I played recently a concert with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, which is such an incredible organization. And it was a concert of music by Teresa Wong, Pamela Zee, Tania Leon and Bobby McFerrin. And hear these teenage singers and they're not being told, Hey, here's a concert of all composers of color. Three of them are women. One is a man. It's not about the checking off the boxes. It's just really great music. And we're not calling attention to the gender or race of these composers.
Majel Connery: Then let me ask the question to you in a different way. You think there is any damage done in doing it this way, the way that the San Francisco Girls Chorus did their program? Do you think we do a disservice to women by not highlighting that they're women, or is this maybe a better approach?
Sarah Cahill: You know, no woman composer that I know of wants to be called a woman composer. She wants to be called a composer. Right. I mean, yeah, no one wants that qualifier in front of what they do. So I think about this project that I'm doing and I think, well, am I doing a disservice to these composers? And maybe, maybe so. But on the other hand, if a piano student comes to the concert and this has happened a couple of times, then they say, oh, I really you know, I love that she meant a fair score. Do you have a copy of it or. Elizabeth Sharkey, Lake Erie. Never knew about her before. If that happens, then it's all worth it.
Majel Connery: Yeah. Sara, thank you so much for saying what you just said, because you're really putting your finger on something. Right now, I'm in this world where I'm a being these two options. One is we say it's a woman. It's a woman as loudly as possible. And because we're being loud about it, we're going to create change or we stop saying it and just do it. But you are pointing out a really important issue, which is pedagogy. And a broken pedagogical chain that has to be altered well before students ever get to college or graduate school. We actually need to be teaching five, six and seven year olds about all the amazing woman composers in the world, so that by the time they get older, it just seems self-evident rather than being this radical discovery.
Sarah Cahill: I think that's true. And what I'm hoping is that the perpetuation of the cycle of teacher and student and that we study music and our teachers pass on the music that they think is important. And then the students become teachers and they pass on the music that they think is important. And if we can just get in there and say, here are worthy pieces for consideration and get past some of these biases, then we can sort of change that cycle. And so I think that's a lot of where the work has to happen. And I love working with students at the San Francisco Conservatory who say, Oh, yeah, you know, this great singer, Batsheva Quartet, this is so much better than, you know, the string quartet that we were just given by so-and-so and we would much rather play this. So we're going to suggest this to our chamber music coach, right?
Majel Connery: So that's great.
Sarah Cahill: Yeah, things like that where it's just exposure and saying this is worth your time.
[Music starts: "In C too"]
Majel Connery: This is "In C too" by Elena Ruehr and played by Sarah. It's a spin on Terry Riley's famous "In C" and it's from Sarah's album 80 Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley. I found this conversation with Sarah really enlightening because it proposes an approach to thinking about women and music that is totally unambiguous. When you call a project, The Future is Female, you are not hedging. This is not some semi apologetic artists who happen to be women type-of-thing. This project is loudly proclaiming that this here is female music. What is female music? Let's explore that. It leaves me thinking, Wow, what if. To write music as a woman could mean to write in a way that is thoroughly, proudly female by design. This is the final episode of this season, and it's about time I answered my own questions. What is it about these six women that makes them different? That makes them stand out? Honestly, I think the answer is staring us in the face. The music I've been playing on these episodes is really good music, but it's also totally unique. Each of these women has invented a music of her own. It is like nothing else. And the self-knowledge it takes to get to this place creatively is not something everyone can figure out these women did.
Majel Connery: There's one last thing I want to say, and it's about me as a kid. I wanted to be a singer. And then through a series of very weird accidents, I stopped singing for a decade because I just lost my nerve. And then I met one of the women on this podcast. I'll spare you the details, but when I heard her music, I knew that I could do what she was doing because she was like me. We model ourselves on people who are like us. And as a result of this particular meeting, I started singing again. The point I want to make is that no man could have done this for me. So another thing that makes these women different, that makes them stand out is that they are women. And as women, they have a special power to reach 50 percent of the people on this planet in a way that no man can. They certainly reached me.
[Theme Music starts: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
Majel Connery: This is A Music of Their Own, from CapRadio. I'm Majel Connery, and I'm sad that this is the end of this podcast, but please follow us, follow us, follow us and I will see you next time.
[Theme Music up: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
Majel Connery: A Music of Their Own is a CapRadio production. Interviews were engineered and produced by me, Majel Connery and edited by Kevin Doherty. Paul Conley mastered the mix. Sally Schilling is our executive producer with production assistance from Jen Picard. Chris Hagan is our digital editor. Chris Bruno is in charge of marketing. Our designs were created by Marissa Espiritu. Renee Thompson is our digital projects manager and our social media is run by Emmy Gilbert and Emily Zentner. The theme song for A Music of Their Own is called “We Need a Room,” and it's by my band Sky Creature. You can find the song and Sky Creature on all major audio platforms. Don't forget to follow A Music of Their Own wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and a review so others can find this podcast, too. To find out more about the guests on our podcast, go to the show notes or visit capradio.org/amusicoftheirown. Thanks for listening.
[Theme Music ends: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
