![\"Majel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/HLA-L-SNAPP-COL-0612-1-rotated.jpeg\")
Majel Connery plays a synthesizer last June 21 at the 2025 Garden of Memory event in Oakland\u2019s Chapel of the Chimes. Connery is scheduled to return this year. (photo courtesy of Keith Mattingly)\u00a0<\/p>\nBerkeley-based pianist Sarah Cahill has something in common with another musician with whom she\u2019s not often compared: jazzman Dizzy Gillespie, who, along with Charlie Parker, made bebop all the rage in the late 1940s.<\/p>\n
Dizzy didn\u2019t just play bebop; he appointed himself its ambassador (some would say missionary) to the rest of the world, turning people on wherever he went to the magic of this initially odd-sounding musical form. That describes Cahill too, though her music isn\u2019t bebop but New Music. What is New Music? It\u2019s not easy to define.<\/p>\n
For one thing, not all of it is new. Some of its classics were composed before bebop by people like Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete Seeger\u2019s mother), who is widely recognized as the most important American woman composer of the 20th century.<\/p>\n
Like Dizzy, Cahill is willing to go anywhere to spread the good news \u2014 even San Quentin prison, where for the inmates she played a piece by New Music composer Henry Cowell, who served a brutal stretch there from 1936 to 1940 for the \u201ccrime\u201d of being gay. The audience loved it.<\/p>\n
Yoko Ono also is a New Music composer. So is another Berkeleyan, John Adams, who like Giuseppe Verdi in the 19th century composes grand operas on historical themes, including \u201cNixon in China\u201d about changing East-West relations and \u201cThe Death of Klinghoffer\u201d about the never-ending conflict in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Majel Connery plays a synthesizer last June 21 at the 2025 Garden of Memory event in Oakland\u2019s Chapel of the Chimes. Connery is scheduled to return this year. (photo courtesy of Keith Mattingly)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Perhaps Cahill\u2019s greatest contribution to New Music happened 30 years ago, though, when she chanced upon North Oakland\u2019s Chapel of the Chimes on Piedmont Avenue and its columbarium (a repository for the ashes of the dead). Among those interred: Raiders owner Al Davis, bluesman John Lee Hooker and Giants shortstop Dick Bartell, aka \u201cRowdy Richard.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was designed by Julia Morgan, and if you\u2019ve ever been to the Berkeley City Club or Hearst Castle at San Simeon, you know what to expect: a festival of exquisite beauty featuring Gothic arches, vaulted ceilings, miniature gardens and cloisters and stained glass everywhere \u2014 and I do mean everywhere \u2014 infusing the atmosphere with a symphony of colors.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I meandered around the columbarium, I heard distant organ music and tried to follow the sound to its source through a labyrinth of magical gardens and Gothic alcoves with the afternoon light filtering through stained glass,\u201d says Cahill. \u201cI imagined putting musicians all around this maze, so that when you turn a corner you might encounter a string quartet or an electronic music installation or a Georgian choir. So that\u2019s what we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lineup constantly changes, and you never know what to expect. One year, the first thing I saw was a professional whistler named Jason Victor Serinus (he was the voice of Snoopy\u2019s pal Woodstock in the Peanuts TV specials) whistling Mozart arias and Schubert Lieder. In the alcove next door, four guys were playing a Haydn string quartet on little kids\u2019 toy instruments.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s lineup will feature Turkish composer Melike Yersiz playing \u201cThe Organism,\u201d an electroacoustic sound installation that continually morphs in response to audience participation. Passers-by can come up to stations at the table and play with everyday objects such as bells, rubber mallets, tuning forks and other toys that trigger various changes in the soundscape.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Joseph Bohigian will present his interactive sound installation \u201cStone Dreams,\u201d featuring a large stone hooked up to a contact microphone that visitors can touch to trigger fragments of Armenian folk songs collected in 1930s America from survivors of the Armenian genocide.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is memory preserved when physical sites of memory are destroyed?\u201d the installation asks. \u201cWhen collective memory is separated from a place, how can it be revived in a new context?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another artist, Bevin Blectum, is an electronic musician and multimedia composer who will use a laptop, a Moog sub-37, a hydra-synth explorer and a Teenage Engineering KO II sampler to respond to the environment and create sound meditations.<\/p>\n
You never know what you\u2019re going to get. Some of the musicians are holdovers from previous years; some are newbies. If any of the performances isn\u2019t to your taste, just walk over to the next room, where there will be something completely different.<\/p>\n
Garden of Memory is always held on June 21, usually the summer solstice and the year\u2019s longest day, to take maximum advantage of the light filtering through the stained glass. Tickets won\u2019t be sold at the door, so log on to gardenofmemory.com<\/a> to get them. The event begins at 5 p.m. and ends at 9. Hope you have fun. I always do.<\/p>\n