Blue + Bob

Other Minds welcomes pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera to present a piano duo recital of the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny (1945–2020) and Robert Ashley (1930–2014) on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland. Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny collaborated for decades, and both were iconic and beloved teachers at the Mills College Music Department. This concert celebrates their work with Tyranny’s two-piano gems Decertified Highway of Dreams and Letters from Home and Ashley’s Viva’s Boy and Details (2b), along with solo compositions by both composers. Kubera and Cahill worked on these scores with both composers, and will perform pieces that Tyranny dedicated to each of them, including The Drifter and Spirit. This concert is part of Other Minds’s PastForward series, presented in cooperation with the Center for Contemporary Music, Northeastern University and Mills Performing Arts.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Decertified Highway of Dreams (1991)

Robert Ashley

Sonata (1959)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

The Drifter (1994)
Spirit (1996/2002)
Nocturne With and Without Memory (1989)

Robert Ashley

Viva’s Boy (1991)
Details (2b) (1962)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

A Letter from Home (2002)

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 her include John Adams, Annea Lockwood, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Recent performances include The Barbican Centre in London, The National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and an NPR Tiny Desk concert. She recently premiered Viet Cuong’s piano concerto, Stargazer, with the California Symphony. Sarah’s recordings include Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan, recorded at the Cleveland Museum of Art with Evan Ziporyn, Jody Diamond, and Gamelan Si Betty, and Eighty Trips Around the Sun, a four-disc tribute to Terry Riley. Sarah’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm 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.

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Hailed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as one of “new music’s most valued performers,” Joseph Kubera has been recognized as a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past 30 years. He has been soloist at such festivals as the Berlin Inventionen, the Warsaw Autumn and Prague Spring, Miami’s Subtropics Festival and Berkeley’s Edgefest. He has been pianist in residence at the Ostrava Days New Music Festival since its inception in 2001. Mr. Kubera has been awarded grants through the NEA Solo Recitalist Program and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and was a Creative Associate with the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo in its heyday.

Mr. Kubera has had a long and committed relationship to John Cage and his music since the early 1970s. One of the few pianists performing the difficult chance-based, post-1950 works, he has recorded the complete Music of Changes and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and has toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation. In recent years, he has championed the music of his late Buffalo compatriot, Julius Eastman, reviving little-known piano works and directing performances of his multiple-piano pieces. Most recently, he has toured the remarkable new hour-long piano work Dreamers of Pearl by Michael Byron. Other composers who have written for Mr. Kubera include Larry Austin, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Howard Riley, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, among others.

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