This performance is part of Roulette’s four-night series, Music for Two Pianos, which features new, historic, and reimagined compositions by some of the great composers of our time: Anthony Braxton; Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny; Henry Threadgill; and Julius Eastman.

Pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera present a two-piano celebration of the music of “Blue” Gene Tyranny (1945–2020) and Robert Ashley (1930–2014). Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny were opposites in many ways, but when they met in the early 1960s working with the legendary ONCE Group, while Tyranny was still a teenager, they forged a fifty-year collaboration and lifelong friendship.

This concert celebrates these two composers’ 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.

Praised in The Wire (UK) for his “instrumental athleticism, technical precision and conceptual lucidity,” and his “capacity to stretch limits and redefine horizons,” Joseph Kubera has been a leading new-music pianist for the past four decades. Recently he played at De Singel in Antwerp, at the “Christian Wolff at 90” celebration in New York, and recorded piano music by Laurie Spiegel, Daniel Goode, and Lejaren Hiller.  He has directed performances of Julius Eastman’s music in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and has worked closely with such luminaries as Morton Feldman, Julius Eastman, Robert Ashley and La Monte Young. Composers who have written works for him include Larry Austin, Michael Byron, Anthony Coleman, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny. A longtime Cage advocate, Kubera has made definitive recordings of Music of Changes and the Concert for Piano, and toured widely with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation.  He has worked with S.E.M. Ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, and myriad other ensembles in New York City.  In addition to his work with Sarah Cahill, he has collaborated with pianists Adam Tendler and Marilyn Nonken, and baritone Thomas Buckner. Kubera has been awarded grants through the NEA and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has recorded for Wergo, New Albion, New World, Lovely Music, Tzadik, and many other labels.

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, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Recent performances include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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 discography of more than twenty albums includes 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.