Berkeley pianist, radio host, writer, and new-music champion Sarah Cahill first wandered into the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes at the top of Oakland’s Piedmont Avenue in 1995, when she was researching a story about the best public bathrooms for the East Bay Express. As she tells it, “The bathroom itself was unexceptional, but the place opened a whole other world. I heard music coming from some distant place and thought how enticing it is to try and find the music, getting lost in the maze-like structure, and encountering surprises along the way.”
At the time, New Music Bay Area — of which Cahill was a board member — was looking for creative venues, and Cahill felt she’d found the right spot. The Garden of Memory concert was born.
Returning this year on June 21, the annual event celebrates the summer solstice in the space’s historic, labyrinthine surroundings. Opened in 1909, Chapel of the Chimes is a crematory and columbarium that contains remains and ashes of the dead. Morgan oversaw the expansion and reconstruction of the building in 1928, infusing it with ornate Moorish and Gothic-style arches, niches, gardens, fountains, skylights, and soothing blue-and-turquoise tiles.
Composer and media artist Pamela Z began appearing at the event in the late 1990s and is scheduled to be back this year. She said she has fond memories of performing with fellow composer and violinist Carla Kihlstedt; they met when Cahill paired them. “We’d improvise together. Since we’re in the house of the dead, I’d recite people’s names I read off their urns and loop them. Carla joined in, harmonizing with the names I was speaking,” Z remembered.
As the Garden of Memory grew in popularity, it garnered more attention and support in the community. For the 10th anniversary in 2005, the concert drew a record 2,400 people.
Around 2009, Lucy Mattingly began helping Cahill with the event’s logistics. She implemented a formal application procedure, which expanded the pool of performers to a younger generation and in turn drew a younger audience (while still honoring Cahill’s generation). “We don’t always like everyone we pick in the end, but it gives all of us a chance to try something new,” she explained.
Cahill said Mattingly’s work has helped attendance grow to 3,000. “It sells out,” said Cahill. So no surprise that the concert has again this year, though volunteer opportunities are still available in exchange for admission.
One of this year’s highlights is sure to be Majel Connery performing Elderflora, her oratorio about the life and death of a tree. The composer and vocalist is traveling from New York and explained that she couldn’t believe the Garden of Memory existed when she first played it in 2018. “I’d see people rounding the corner, and their mouths would drop open,” she said. “The sensation of performing here is addicting. It’s like this medicine I need for the rest of the year. There’s no other place like it on the planet. I perform for four hours and lose my voice every year.”
The element of unpredictability is a huge factor in the concert’s popularity. “You’re walking through this labyrinth, and you don’t know what you’ll encounter. It’s so unique and special,” said performer Sidney Chen.
In recent years, Chen has been working with mechanical music boxes that he developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To make them, he punches holes in scrolls that he can then hand-crank on a cylinder resting on a box that resonates intimate, expressive sounds within a 30-note range. “I have a music-box petting zoo,” he said. “Parents and kids can punch their own boxes in a side room. I hear this tinkle of music boxes in the other room that is always so sweet.”
For her part, Cahill is set to play piano music by Terry Riley in honor of the pioneering minimalist composer’s 90th birthday. She’s picked, among other works, his Keyboard Studies (1964) and Be Kind to One Another, which she commissioned from Riley in 2008.
Mattingly relishes the variety of musical genres that the team has curated this year: experimental, acoustic, electroacoustic, jazz, and new music from 60 different singers, violinists, cellists, brass players, choirs, and orchestras. “We try to have something for everyone no matter what their tastes,” she said.
Some years back, Brenda Hutchinson and her dailybell ensemble began the tradition of ringing handbells at sunset as the concert begins to wind down. And people use their clinking keys to join in. It’s become a ritual and even continued in Hutchinson’s absence last year. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” said Mattingly.
What makes the event even more appealing, Cahill said, is that people experience Garden of Memory as more than just a concert — it becomes an interactive exploration, with kids often attending too and guiding their parents to what they want to hear in this building filled with light on the longest day of the year. “It’s a celebration of new life, even among the ashes of those no longer living,” Cahill said. “We remember our friends and loved ones and meet new friends along the way.”
