GABRIEL KAHANE

“When we discuss musical talent, we too often concern ourselves with innate physical, aural, or imaginative ability, at the expense of the unsung skill that allows those other qualities to flourish: namely, work ethic.“

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“Tour is… so many things. It’s mainlining a hot chicken sandwich in the parking lot of Popeye’s, air-conditioning on blast against the numbing heat of Central California, your stomach beginning to ache before you’ve finished—that’s how brutally efficient you’ve become at bisecting a seven-hour drive with a protein bomb. Tour is gas station bathroom breaks, overly sweetened iced coffee, and identical burritos procured from identical Chipotle franchises. It’s the acute sadness of two-star hotels on the outskirts of midwestern college towns, hotels you access in waning late-afternoon light through a labyrinth of service roads etched into strip mall complexes. It’s the odor that filters into your nostrils as you make small talk with the teenager who’s checking you in at the front desk: some combination of cleaning product, waffle batter, and death.“

“Is it possible that the flattening of culture, architecture, and commerce, into a sterile, agglomeration of sameness—in addition to a panoply of political & historical factors—makes it more difficult for us to embrace and celebrate difference? Does not a society, in which all traces of quirk and character have been studiously rubbed away—from its strip malls, its hotels, its coffeehouses and sandwich shops and car dealerships—become a cold room, a laboratory for suspicion, activated by difference in human likeness? And does not this cold room become a theater in which fear and grievance are expressed mercilessly, callously, violently?”

"Few devices have done more to obscure the efforts of human labor than the smartphone. Fewer still have vacuumed out of our lives as much human interaction as has been lost to our oblong, digital assistants.” 

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I’ve started a newsletter as an alternative to surveillance-based social media. I encourage you to read this post, admire this cat, and smash the subscribe button. 

In the aftermath of a year off the internet, I’ve become low-key obsessed with Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, in which he argues that the movement of a gift—or a work of art—from one individual to another helps to define the community in which the gift or artwork circulates.

Today, my fifth album, Magnificent Bird, is released into the world, and it is, for me, most fundamentally, an expression of my community. There are no hired guns: only musicians whom I cherish as much for their humanity and friendship as I do for their artistry. So I thought it would be appropriate to mark the unveiling of this project with a little history & chronology of a dozen-and-a-half musical relationships that have made this record possible.

1989 - At our respective homes in Rochester, New York, Ted Poor and I play boogie-woogie duets: me on piano, Ted on drums. We’re also on the same Little League team; he often plays first-base, I’m over at shortstop for a quick 6-3 on a ground ball to the left side of the infield. Twenty-five years later, he plays drums in The Ambassador, my first piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ted was so incredibly generous on this project, recording 3,287 versions of “Hot Pink Raingear” before we arrived at the approach heard on the album. His sense of rhythm lights a room, and he is my oldest friend — not just on this LP, but in life.

2006 - The Nickel Creek bus drops Chris Thile (as well as Sean and Sara Watkins) at my parents’ house in Santa Rosa, California. We start playing music at around 1am. Fifteen years, hundreds of cups of coffee, and dozens of alcohol-fueled arguments about the “correct” approach to rhythm in the music of J.S. Bach later, Chris is one of my closest friends, and also a hero. We all know what a monster, once-in-a-generation talent he is. What is maybe less apparent is the insane work ethic that undergirds his seemingly effortless command of his instrument, an ethic I got to witness up close while opening some 60 shows for Punch Brothers. The only person whose approach to rhythm is as continually mind-boggling as Ted Poor’s is Chris’, hence the mando-drums on “To Be American.”

2007 - I meet Alex Sopp through her new music ensemble, yMusic. I will forever be spoiled by the fact that she’s the first flutist I work with: her tone singing, her sense of phrase totally intuitive and poetic. Over the course of fifteen years, we share with each other many, many, many photographs of our cats. Her collaborative spirit was evident in her work on this album: for “Hot Pink Raingear,” I asked if she could play a synth riff on some “messed up whistles and flutes,” and she sent back, thirty-six hours later, fourteen different tracks of various antique wind instruments. I wish I had kept all of it for you to hear, but sometimes less is more.

2008 (part one) - I hear Elizabeth Ziman sing at a tiny cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am instantly in love with her voice and songwriting. I would happily listen to her sing tax returns or technical manuals or the transcripts of municipal water supply hearings; she is magic. Somehow, after an almost fifteen year friendship, this is the first time we’ve worked together on record; her singing on “Sit Shiva” is, for me, what makes the song.

2008 (part two) - Outside a rural elementary school in Switzerland, I am approached by a young man, who, seeing my banjo case, announces that he “plays folk music, too.” It’s Paul Kowert, who that autumn would join Punch Brothers as its bassist. Years later, we travel around the country while I’m opening for his band, playing chess over coffee, getting lost on long walks in unfamiliar cities, talking endlessly about music. He is a one of the most supremely gifted bass players of our time.

2009 - Holcombe Waller and I are set up on a West Coast co-bill tour by a friend who warns me that Holcombe is extremely flamboyant. I write to Holcombe, and in a postscript, mention—sort of in jest, sort of not—that I’m 18% gay. He writes back, “I’ve worked with less.” A friendship is born. Need help understanding obscure financial instruments or fledgling cryptocurrencies? Ask Holcombe. Need a quick tutorial on the history of energy policy in the Northwest? Ask Holcombe. Need the most sublime falsetto (but also booming bass-baritone) you’ve ever heard? Ask Holcombe. Happily, we now live less than a mile from one another in Northeast Portland. Holcombe, can I borrow some sugar??

2010 (part one) - I’m playing a gig in upstate New York accompanied by a string quartet. At soundcheck, one of the violinists mentions that she “writes a little music, too.” Next thing I know, that kind and quiet musician—Caroline Shaw—has won the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, we email with eccentric frequency about Lunchables (can’t remember how that one started), and have occasionally appeared together in concert. What I admire most about Caroline is the absolute honesty of her music. Many of us work for years building up artifice, then tearing it down. Not Caro: she knows, and seems always to have known, who she is. When I first heard her overdubs for the record, I cried.

2010 (part two) - Casey Foubert and I have known each other for a few years when he begins to mix my second album, Where are the Arms. Working on that record reveals to me the uncanny depth of Casey’s musical knowledge, spanning, as it does, obscure 60’s piano-driven folk-pop to free jazz. One of the most versatile and multivalent artists I’ve ever encountered, Casey is the only musician who has played on all of my records (with the exception of Book of Travelers, which is just me). He’s also a profoundly curious person, and a super generous spirit. He now lives with his family in rural Illinois, and I love that there’s a bit of that energy on this album.

2011 - It’s a dark and dreary evening in Peterborough, NH, when I find myself sitting at the piano in a little cabin, singing standards with a young woman named Amelia Meath. We keep in touch here and there, and then a few years later, I hear a band called Sylvan Esso and think, that voice sounds familiar! Over the last few years, Amelia and I have had long, deep phone calls about everything from literature to TikTok to systemic racism to the music biz. She encouraged me, while we were working on “Linda & Stuart,” to embrace the cognitive dissonance between the cheerful groove and the sense of grief that pervades the lyric.

2014 (part one) - Driving from the Denver Airport, Chris Morrissey tells me that he does a great BBC newscaster impression. I immediately try to one-up him. (Mine is better.) Every year on his birthday, to commemorate my small victory of superior British dialect, I leave Chris a three-minute voicemail in a preposterous BBC voice. Chris is a complete musician, and a complete human. One of the things that drew me to him when we first met was how emotionally available he was. So glad he’s on this joint.

2014 (part two) - A recording studio in New Jersey. yMusic has a new cellist on the session. We get through one take of my arrangement of Beck’s “Mutilation Rag,” for the Song Reader album, and Gabriel Cabezas, maybe 22 years old, says, without a trace of attitude or ostentation, “oh, this is a twelve-tone row, right?” What a punk! One memorable night years later ends drunkenly at my house, where we cook both carbonara and cacio e pepe after a long conversation about how the best pasta sauces are emulsified using the cooking water.

2014 (part three) - I’m not sure that the classroom at the fancy private school in Laguna Beach, California, was where I first met Joseph Lorge, but it sticks out in my memory for some reason. He’s there with a friend of his, a songwriter, who performs two beautiful songs as part of a master class that I was giving. By 2017, Joseph has become indispensable to my process as a studio artist. He records and mixes Book of Travelers, and acts as mix engineer and house psychologist during this project. He is tall and shy, quietly hilarious, with a heart of gold. His ears and imagination are astonishing; without him, this record would not exist.

2015 - In the lobby of the newly opened Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, I am accosted by a blonde man with a cheerful face and intense eyes. “I have a question to ask you,” he says, betraying the slightest hint of a Northern European accent. “On your song ‘Charming Disease,’ from your album Where are the Arms, is it three clarinets or one claviola that appear suddenly in the second verse?” This was Pekka Kuusisto, a true magician of the violin, and one of my dearest friends. I have fond memories from 2019 (“the before times”) of walking down to the water—his house in Finland sits against the Baltic Sea—in nothing but towels, freezing our asses off before retreating to the warmth of his wood sauna, which I guess is what Finns do in February? When his violin enters halfway through the tune, I feel the chill of that numinous, Scandinavian wind insinuate itself into the harmonic field.

2016 (part one) - St. Paul, again! Sam Amidon and I have known each other for a decade by this point, but it’s over burritos at Chipotle that we bond for real, talking about our shared love of Herman Melville and obscure jazz records. If I’m reading a great book, Sam is often the first person I want to tell. In a world brimming with highly individualized voices, Sam’s artistry—from his singing voice to his banjo and fiddle playing—stands out for its idiosyncrasies and emotional depth.

2016 (part two) - On a tour bus somewhere in Montana, Andrew Bird and I get to talking about how folk and orchestral music can coexist. A few years later, we work closely on Time Is A Crooked Bow, a cycle I orchestrated comprising six of his songs. Getting to hear him sing every night was a real master class. Andrew has magnetic rock star energy, but he is also a kind, gentle, quiet and deeply thoughtful soul. And no one plucks the violin quite the way he does. When I wrote the riff he plays on “To Be American,” I knew it had to be him.

2017 - From time to time, I head uptown to hear the NY Philharmonic. One evening, I’m hypnotized by a sound—serene, expressive, otherworldly— emanating from from the principal clarinet chair. Eventually I muster the nerve to write to Anthony McGill and tell him what I huge fan I am. It’s thrilling when he tells me that he knows my music and would love to do something together. And now, at last, we have.

2019 - Nathalie Joachim sends me mixes of her album Fanm D’ayiti. It is so damn gorgeous. We’ve been casual acquaintances for five years at this point, but now I am *a fan*. Over the course of the pandemic, we talk more frequently, counseling each other about the various challenges of being an artist in these confounding times. She joins the Creative Alliance with the Oregon Symphony, where I serve as Creative Chair. This June, the Oregon Symphony will present the world premiere of an orchestral song cycle drawn from Nathalie’s album that made such an impression. The combination of Nathalie & Alex on the title track, along with Holcombe’s vocal feature, has me feeling that my cup truly runneth over.

Appendix A:

Tony Berg is a joyous contrarian whom I’ve known for a dozen years, during which time he has shown me only generosity of spirit, resources, and wisdom. He co-produced Book of Travelers (which we recorded at his old home studio in LA), and was an indispensable early sounding board for the songs on this album. And now he’s got a dog named Bing-Bong. How about that?

Having said all that, may I remind you that tour begins on Monday?

The workings of the music business are murkier than ever, but the bottom line is that even an art-house oasis like Nonesuch can’t afford to keep putting out interesting music if no one is paying for it. I’m so grateful to all of you for your continued support, and hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of the record in one format or another if you’ve not yet done so.

All my best, and hope to see you at a gig in the next few months,

Tucked away in the northernmost reaches of California sits the Bar 717 Ranch, which, each summer, is transformed into a sleep-away camp on 450 acres of wilderness, where, in 1967, two ten-year-old kids named Martha and Jeffrey met. Within a couple of years, they were playing gigs back in L.A. in folk rock bands with names like “Wilderness” and “The American Revelation.” They fell in love, broke up, fell in love again. By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music respectively. But they remained devoted listeners of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms. That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.

That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask, how does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?

The first movement, “Guitars in the Attic,” wrestles specifically with that last question, the challenge of bringing vernacular song into formal concert music. The two main themes begin on opposite shores: the first theme, poppy, effervescent, and direct, undergoes a series of transformations that render it increasingly unrecognizable as the movement progresses. Meanwhile, a lugubrious second tune, first introduced in disguise by the French horn and accompanied by a wayward English horn, reveals itself only in the coda to be a paraphrase of a song of mine called “Where are the Arms.” That song, in turn, with its hymn-like chord progression, owes a debt to German sacred music. A feedback loop emerges: German art music informs pop song, which then gets fed back into the piano concerto.

“My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” picks up the thread of intergenerational memory. Grandma didn’t actually know Alban Berg, but she did babysit the children of Arnold Schoenberg, another German-Jewish émigré, who, in addition to having codified the twelve-tone system of composition, was Berg’s teacher. Why make something up when the truth is equally tantalizing? I suppose it has something to do with wanting to evoke the slipperiness of memory while getting at the ways in which cultural inheritance can occur indirectly. When, shortly after college, I began to study Berg’s Piano Sonata, his music— its marriage of lyricism and austerity; its supple, pungent harmonies; the elegiac quality that suffuses nearly every bar—felt eerily familiar to me, even though I was encountering it for the first time. Had a key to this musical language been buried deep in the recesses of my mind through some kind of ancestral magic, only to be unearthed when I sat at the piano and played those prophetic chords, which, to my mind, pointed toward the tragedy that would befall Europe half a dozen years after Berg’s death?

In this central movement, the main theme is introduced by a wounded-sounding trumpet, accompanied by a bed of chromatic harmony that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg’s musical universe. By movement’s end, time has run counterclockwise, and the same tune is heard in a nocturnal, Brahmsian mode, discomfited by interjections from the woodwinds, which inhabit a different, and perhaps less guileless, temporal plane.

To close, we have a kind of fiddle-tune rondo, an unabashed celebration of childhood innocence. In March of 2020, my family and I were marooned in Portland, Oregon, as the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Separated from our belongings—and thus all of our daughter’s toys, which were back in our apartment in Brooklyn—my ever resourceful partner, Emma, fashioned a “vehicle” out of an empty diaper box, on which she majusculed the words vera’s chicken-powered transit machine. (Vera had by that point developed a strong affinity for chicken and preferred to eat it in some form thrice daily.) We would push her around the floor in her transit machine, resulting in peals of laughter and squeals of delight. In this brief finale, laughter and joy are the prevailing modes, but not without a bit of mystery. I have some idea of what I have inherited from my ancestors. What I will hand down to my daughter remains, for the time being, a wondrous unknown.

Heirloom is dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe, to my father, Jeffrey Kahane.

Short form:

March 8: The 2nd single from Magnificent Bird is out today. It’s called “To Be American”—some of you may have heard a quasi-demo version I released last fall—and features Andrew Bird on violin, Paul Kowert on bass, Chris Thile on mandolin, Caroline Shaw on vocals, and Ted Poor on percussion. You can watch the video here and/or pre-order the album here (you’ll get this and one other track now; the record is available in LP, CD, and digital formats.)

March 12-14: I’ve made some revisions to Heirloom, the piano concerto I wrote for my father; he’ll give the revised/West Coast premiere this weekend with the Oregon Symphony at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets are here. The third performance, on Monday, March 14th, is being live-streamed; tickets are here.

March 15: The following day, Tuesday, we’ll be doing the rescheduled Open Music with Missy Mazzoli at Mississippi Studios. I’m super stoked for this concert, which features music by Bach, Britten, Tania León, Missy Mazzoli, Shelley Washington, plus a special reading by Karen Russell!

March 25: Magnificent Bird is released!

March 28: Tour begins in Boston at City Winery! Full routing & tickets here.

Long form:

Two years ago today, my family and I flew to Portland, Oregon, for what was to have been a week-long visit. The pandemic arrived; tours were canceled; we decided to stay, and now, here we are. I knew then how lucky we were to be able to make such a decision, but the extent of our privilege has been thrown into stark relief in the last ten days. I don’t have much to add about this new era in which we find ourselves: it’s senseless, tragic, and terrifying.

It feels fitting—to the extent that anything is fitting when we’re all gripped by existential dread—that the song released today is one that holds nostalgia up to the light for an honest examination. You’ll hear, in order of appearance, Paul Kowert on bass, Andrew Bird on violin, Chris Thile on mandolin, Ted Poor on percussion, and Caroline Shaw on vocals. Go on, give it a spin.

This coming weekend brings the West Coast premiere (or, if we’re splitting hairs, the revised world premiere) of Heirloom, the piano concerto I wrote for my father, Jeffrey Kahane. He’ll be playing it with the Oregon Symphony under the baton of David Danzmayr, our new sheriff in town. As I described last autumn around the premiere in Kansas City, this is a piece that deals with inheritance and intergenerational memory. I won’t belabor the reasons it feels apt; you can find the program note at the bottom of this post. Performances are March 12-14 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland. Tickets are here. For those not residing in the Pacific Northwest, I’m pleased to inform you that Monday’s concert is being live-streamed.

After we wrap up those performances, it’s straight on to Open Music with Missy Mazzoli at Mississippi Studios on Tuesday, March 15th. I remain incredibly excited about this concert, which was rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances. We’ll hear members of the Oregon Symphony perform music by Bach, Britten, Tania León, Shelley Washington, Zola Saadi-Klein, and of course, Missy Mazzoli, whom I’ll be interviewing onstage. Last but not least, we’ll have a special appearance by the writer Karen Russell, who will read from her story “Proving Up,” which was the source material for Missy’s opera of the same name. Tickets are here.

Then it’s time for Magnificent Bird to spread its wings and fly! As I am using social media less and less, I want to ask y’all a favor: if you know someone in one of the cities I’m visiting, please don’t hesitate to forward this page along. Think of it as a 1990s-era retweet. I’m grateful in advance.

March 28 • Boston, MA • tickets

March 31 • Marlboro, NY • (free)

April 4 • Atlanta, GA • tickets

April 5 • Philadelphia, PA • tickets

April 7 • New York, NY • tickets (new date!) *

April 8 • New York, NY • tickets

April 14 • Beaverton, OR • tickets

April 15 • Beaverton, OR • tickets

May 11 • Stanford, CA • tickets

May 12 • Los Angeles, CA • tickets

May 13 • Denver, CO • tickets

May 18 • Minneapolis, MN • tickets

May 21 • Chicago, IL • tickets

May 22 • Ann Arbor, MI • tickets

May 24 • Nashville, TN • tickets

May 26 • Columbus, OH • tickets

*=WNYC Soundcheck Live @ The Greene Space

Hope to see you at a show very soon, and again, be liberal with that 90’s-era retweet (a.k.a. email forward). Speaking of which, please feel free to sign up for my email newsletter by sending a note with subject line “add” to gabrielkahanelist at gmail dot com.

That’s all for now, folks. Thank you as always for your support.

Howdy folks! Happy to share that tickets are now on sale for all shows for the upcoming tour in support of Magnificent Bird, due out via Nonesuch Records on March 25. Get Involved here.

You can also pre-order the record via bandcamp; I still have a few dozen signed prints to accompany LP & CD orders.

In the final month of my year off the internet—no email, no smartphone, no texting, no web browsing, no social media, no Pasta Grannies YouTube binges—I decided to write a song every day, a sort of aural brain scan at the end of this experiment. My new album, Magnificent Bird, which arrives via Nonesuch Records on March 25 and is now available for pre-order, brings together ten of those songs, recorded at home, with the remote help of a dozen(ish) of my dearest colleagues: Sam Amidon, Andrew Bird, Gabriel Cabezas, Casey Foubert, Nathalie Joachim, Paul Kowert, Anthony McGill, Amelia Meath, Chris Morrissey, Ted Poor, Chris Thile, Caroline Shaw, Alex Sopp, Holcombe Waller, Elizabeth Ziman, and last but not least, Joseph Lorge, who both mixed the record and kept me from losing my mind while we were making it.

The paradox isn’t lost on me: a batch of songs written in self-imposed isolation, brought into the world with the help of friends whose contributions were made possible through the very technology I’d shunned. The truth is that after the often hermetic experience of living extremely offline (the last eight months of my tech sabbatical coincided with the onset of the pandemic), I just wanted an excuse to get in touch with my friends. In that sense, this album is very much an expression of community. And it’s also, in its way, a companion piece to—or an extension of—Book of Travelers, which also grew out of time spent away from the internet.

Today, you can hear the first single from the album, a song called “Sit Shiva,” whose title comes from the Jewish ritual of mourning. I’ll leave it at that.

Why, you might be wondering, did I quit the internet? For me, there’s this fallacy of technological inevitability, of techno-fatalism: the notion that the march of technological progress is ineluctable. For years, I bitched about how awful Twitter was, on Twitter. I couldn’t find the exit, in part, because of that sense of technological inevitability.

Too often, I think, we adopt these machines and new bits of software without asking whether they improve our lives, without asking whose interests they serve. At the same time, our devices reinforce the fiction that convenience and efficiency have intrinsic value. That fiction serves not us, but the tech barons who profit from our addiction to ease, to frictionlessness, to instant gratification. That addiction, in turn, has implications with respect to climate crisis, to inequality, to our (in)ability to see ourselves in each other, to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to make a more just world. And so, I wanted to leave it all behind not as a further expression of techno-pessimism, but in search of a positive alternative.

Oh, right, this is supposed to be a marketing email! Magnificent Bird comes out, as I said before, on March 25th. It’s my second album for Nonesuch Records, and I’m so grateful to them for their continued commitment to my work. You can pre-order the record through Bandcamp or Nonesuch; pre-orders via either of those platforms will include a signed (by me) print featuring John Gall’s gorgeous artwork, while supplies last.

I will be heading out on tour and would be delighted to see you at one of the following dates. Almost all of these shows will be on sale by the end of this week; the City Winery dates may not be on sale til next week!

(Additional dates TBD!)

3.28.22 Boston, MA City Winery

3.31.22 Marlboro, NY The Falcon

4.4.22 Atlanta, GA Ferst Center for the Arts

4.5.22 Philadelphia, PA City Winery

4.8.22 New York, NY Rockwood Music Hall

4.14.22 Beaverton, OR Pat Reser Center for the Arts*

5.11.22 Palo Alto, CA Bing Concert Hall

5.12.22 Los Angeles, CA Gold Diggers

5.13.22 Denver, CO Swallow Hill

5.18.22 Minneapolis, MN Parkway Theatre

5.21.22 Chicago, IL Constellation

5.22.22 Ann Arbor, MI Kerrytown Concert House

5.24.22 Nashville, TN City Winery

5.26.22 Columbus, OH Natalie’s Grandview

* with the Oregon Symphony

That’s all for now. Thank you all so much for your patience. Hope you dig the song, and can’t wait to share the whole album with you soon!

All my best,

Hello,

Winter, again. Not much daylight. I hope you all are safe and sound. A few things to tell you about this month: I’ve long been meaning to publish a corrected edition of Craigslistlieder, which I wrote 15 years ago. It was one of the first pieces of music I ever wrote down; as such, there were some basic things about music notation I didn’t fully grasp at the time. Life intervened, and it took, well, quite a while to correct, proof, etc. Rather than put it out on its own, I’ve decided to pair it with twelve of the highly silly Twitter songs (Twitterkreis) I started posting on social media back in 2018. So in this single volume, you’ll find all eight movements of Craigslistlieder, newly engraved, plus “God’s Perfect Killing Machines,” “Marie Kondo,” “Fleischlied für Mitt Romney,” and so much more. It’s the perfect gift for anyone who enjoys singing weird found text art songs, which, I assume, since you are reading this, means YOU. Snag your copy here.

I am so unbelievably excited about the Open Music concert with Missy Mazzoli on January 4th at Mississippi Studios in Portland. (For those of you just joining us, Open Music is a series that I run as part of my Creative Chair position with the Oregon Symphony.) Not only will Missy be in the house, we’ll have a special reading by Pulitzer-finalist Karen Russell, whose story “Proving Up” was the basis for Missy’s opera of the same name. There’ll be music by Tania León, Shelley Washington, J.S. Bach, Benjamin Britten, Missy Mazzoli, and the premiere of a new arrangement of a song that Missy wrote for me TEN YEARS AGO, which I’ll sing alongside a string quartet of Oregon Symphony musicians. Missy, in addition to being one of the most dynamic composers working today, is a fascinating and deeply intelligent human being. I’m thrilled & honored to get to spend a night in conversation with her and the music that moves her. Seating is extremely limited, so get tickets now!

Back in March of 2020, just as the world shut down, I was supposed to travel to Orlando, Milwaukee, and Detroit, in consecutive weeks to participate in performances of emergency shelter intake form. While Milwaukee and Detroit are still working to reschedule their performances, I’m thrilled that the Orlando Philharmonic will be performing the piece on January 8th. The brilliant Aaron Diehl will be playing the Gershwin Concerto in F on the first half. Tickets are here. A new feature of this newsletter! A few things that I’ve been listening to/reading that have moved me of late. Sound: Caroline Shaw/Sō Percussion - Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part Sam Sadigurksy - The Solomon Diaries Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Sings Newman

Text: Karen Fields & Barbara Fields - Racecraft Lewis Hyde - The Gift George Packer - Last Best Hope Emmanuel Carrère - Lives Other Than My Own In case you missed it, I released a new song last month. You can stream/download it here. (Free/name your price.) I can assure you that more music is on the way… Thank you as always for your support. I’m grateful to each and every one of you. Please follow me on bandcamp and/or sign up for my newsletter by sending an email to gabrielkahanelist at gmail dot com. (I'm trying to limit my engagement w/ surveillance capitalism, but very much want to be in touch with you!)

Best wishes,

Hello Folks,

For the first time in several years, I have a new song to share. Let’s call it an aperitif… more to come, soon. It’s available exclusively on bandcamp with a name-your-price model.

In other news—

• Saturday, November 6th, I’ll be playing a solo concert featuring a dozen new songs at Meany Hall in Seattle. Tickets are here.

• Sunday, November 14th, at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the extraordinary Attacca Quartet will give the world premiere of my dopily titled String Quartet No. 1 “Klee,” inspired by five works of Paul Klee. For those keeping score, yes, I’ve written works for quartet before, but this one feels like a new beginning. The concert is being live-streamed; physical & virtual tickets are available here.

• The following Sunday, November 21st, at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, The Crossing will give the world premiere of Choral Music: a memoir, which is a musical reflection on my time as a high school choral singer. Tickets are here.

• Last but not least, I am *insanely* excited about the second installment of Open Music, presented by the Oregon Symphony, which will occur on January 4th at Mississippi Studios. The evening is curated by the incomparable Missy Mazzoli, whom I’ll be interviewing on stage. There’ll be music by J.S. Bach, Benjamin Britten, Tania León, and Shelley Washington, as well as a good dose of Missy’s sleek, gothic sound world. What’s more, the fiction writer (and Pulitzer Prize finalist) Karen Russell, whose story “Proving Up” provided the source material for Missy’s opera of the same name, will be making a cameo appearance. I’m giving y’all a heads up now, as tickets are *super limited*. Get involved!

That’s all for now, folks.

All the best, and thank you as always for your support,

Gabriel

Hearing a new piece is always thrilling and terrifying. A couple weeks back, I had an experience of an altogether different order, witnessing the premiere of Heirloom, the piano concerto I’d written for my dad, and a piece which serves as an aural history of our family, from my grandmother’s escape from Nazi Germany to the first years of my young daughter’s life. The Kansas City Symphony, returning to full orchestral performances for the first time in eighteen months, sounded fabulous—their Mahler 1 under Michael Stern’s baton was at once full of humor and portent—but more importantly, they were kind and generous at a time that feels fragile and uncertain for all of us. And my dad — what can I say — he played beautifully and with ferocious intensity; I was moved to tears. Those in the Pacific Northwest can book tickets now for the next performances of the piece, which will occur this coming March with the Oregon Symphony.

Then it was onto New York to play my first show in the city since the pandemic began. I sang a dozen new songs, and am so grateful to all those who were there for their generosity of spirit as I tried out new material. I’ll be offering up a similar set at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts in Seattle on November 6th. I’d love to see you there.

Before I forget, I should mention that tomorrow evening, Wednesday, October 6th, at 7:30pm, is the first installment of Open Music, hosted by me, presented by the Oregon Symphony at The Old Church in Portland. I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful composer Kenji Bunch, and we’ll hear music by Béla Bartók, Morton Feldman, inti figgis-vizueta, Johannes Brahms, Johnny Cash (sort of), Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, and Kenji himself. Tickets are $20 and are available here. (Vaccine cards or negative COVID test required; all must be masked!)

Last but not least, two pieces of choral music to tell you about!

On October 16th, VocalEssence will give the premiere of a new choral work, We are the Saints, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Tickets are here.

On November 21st, The Crossing will give the premiere of another new choral work, Choral Music: a memoir, at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philly. Tickets are here.That’s all for now folks!

All my best,

Too Old for TikTok. (2021, for seven bassoons and fixed electronics)

Hi folks!

Brief digest of goings on for the next month:

1. This weekend will witness the premiere of Heirloom, a piano concerto written for my dad. If you’re in striking distance of Kansas City, come check it out. (It’ll pop up in a few other places in the coming seasons.) Tickets.

2. I’m playing a solo show this coming Tuesday, September 28th, at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC. Johnny Gandelsman opens w/ glorious solo violin at 7pm; I’m on at 8pm playing a passel of new songs. Tickets. 

3. On October 6th, the Oregon Symphony and I are launching Open Music at the Old Church in Portland, OR. I’ll be hosting an evening of music by Brahms, Bartók, Kenji Bunch, Morton Feldman, Inti Figgis-Vizueta, and more, during which I will pepper Kenji with questions about cooking, composing, and being a dad. I might also sing a song! Tickets.

4. Last but not least, I did a podcast interview w/ Ben Folds a couple weeks back. We talked in equal measure about my time off the internet and the (mostly unrelated) challenge of orchestrating pop songs. Ben is a truly lovely human, and it was a pleasure and an honor to spend time with him (virtually). Pod.

I think that’s all for now! Hope that you’re all staying safe and sane in this difficult time.

All my best,

Gabriel 

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