Blue + Bob

Other Minds welcomes pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera to present a two piano 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. 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.

Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny were both iconic and beloved teachers at the Mills College Music Department. They 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.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, born Robert Nathan Sheff in San Antonio, Texas, performed a diverse repertoire throughout his career, from the piano music of John Cage and Charles Ives to collaborations with Laurie Anderson and Iggy Pop. Following his involvement with the ONCE Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he taught and worked as a recording studio technician at Mills College in Oakland from 1971–1982, later moving to New York.

After co-founding the ONCE Group in his native Ann Arbor, Robert Ashley directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College from 1969–1981, before also moving to New York. He was known for his experimental approach to opera, a fruitful source for his collaborations with Tyranny, notably in Perfect Lives.

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.

For more information, listen to Liam Herb’s 2019 interview with “Blue” Gene Tyranny, broadcast on Music from Other Minds on KALW.

“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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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.

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