“Among all forms of mistake,” George Eliot writes in Middlemarch, “prophecy is the most gratuitous.” That said, what Sarah Cahill frames as a prediction in her project The Future Is Female is in truth entirely backward-facing. Consider the pitch: “Like most musicians, pianist Sarah Cahill grew up with an overwhelmingly white, male-dominated canon of classical music. In response, she’s investigating and recontextualizing the piano repertoire with The Future Is Female, a program featuring more than seventy compositions by women from around the globe. Join Cahill in The Met’s European Paintings 1250–1800 galleries for a marathon performance that explores the music which history has pushed to the margins, from the Baroque to the present.” The Future Is Female is also available as a three-CD series from First Hand, grouped into the themes “In Nature,” “The Dance,” and “At Play.” Cahill is renowned for her dedication to all sorts of composers who push the boundaries, regardless of their chromosome configuration. But can name-checking dozens of neglected, not necessarily all that distinctive voices, represented mostly by miniatures that are over almost before they begin, really move the music-historical needle? Or will everything just liquesce into Muzak? This much is for sure: unsuspecting gallery strollers are in for a nice surprise. —Matthew Gurewitsch