Pianist Sarah Cahill instructions a close to godlike standing amongst followers of up to date classical music. She’s commissioned dozens of recent works from in the present day’s high composers together with John Adams, Julia Wolfe and Terry Riley. However when she sat down on the piano behind Bob Boilen’s desk, she was targeted not a lot on new music however as an alternative the plight of girls composers.

Whereas compositions by girls are being heard barely extra usually in live performance halls over the previous three years, traditionally the numbers have been pitiful. (Within the 2018-19 season, each the Philadelphia and the Chicago Symphony Orchestras introduced music by 55 completely different composers — none have been girls.)

Cahill is doing her half to treatment the scenario. For this efficiency, she affords a sampler of The Future is Feminine, her multi-volume challenge that collects piano music by a staggeringly vast swath of girls composers over a four-century span.

A spirited prelude by the short-lived Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová opens the set. She managed to jot down some 50 works earlier than her loss of life in 1940 at age 25. What a distinction to the fascinating, quirky music of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the Ethiopian nun who lived to age 99. Poised for a profession as a live performance pianist, she turned to non secular life and later wrote music in a singular type that features off-kilter waltzes, odd syncopations, Ethiopian Orthodox chant and whiffs of blues.

Cahill appears again to the seventeenth century for dance music by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a favourite of Louis XIV, and caps off the set with a bit she commissioned from the Chicago-based composer Regina Harris Baiocchi, a bittersweet poem for piano titled “a candle burns time.”

In an age when the typical particular person would nonetheless be hard-pressed to establish a single lady classical composer, Sarah Cahill has loads of necessary names to select from.

(“Presentiment,” by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, courtesy of the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Basis, a self-financing non-profit that funds music schooling for underserved kids within the U.S and Ethiopia.)

SET LIST

• Vítězslava Kaprálová: April Prelude No. 1
• Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: Presentiment
• Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre: Suite No. 1, Sarabande & Gigue
• Regina Harris Baiocchi: Piano Poems, “a candle burns time”

MUSICIANS

TINY DESK TEAM

• Producer: Tom Huizenga
• Director/Editor: Joshua Bryant
• Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin
• Artistic Director: Bob Boilen
• Collection Producer: Bobby Carter
• Videographers: Joshua Bryant, Maia Stern
• Audio Assistant: Kwesi Lee
• Photographer: Michael Zamora
• Tiny Desk Crew: Suraya Mohamed, Kara Body, Ashley Pointer, Hazel Cills
• VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann