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GABRIEL KAHANE
 Composer/performer Gabriel Kahane defies classification through his sonically challenging, emotionally resonant, and deeply accessible work. Kahane's most well-known work is his Craigslistlieder, an eight movement song cycle which comprises settings of anonymous classified ads from craigslist.org. In addition to its many performances throughout the US by the composer, Craigslistlieder was heard in excerpt at Carnegie Hall this season, in a recital by critically-acclaimed baritone Thomas Meglioranza. The summer of 2008 will witness the premiere of Kahane's For The Union Dead, a new song cycle on poems by Robert Lowell for small ensemble, at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. Among his varied credits as a performer, Gabriel has appeared in recital with Grammy winning bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff throughout Europe, toured the Schumann Piano Quintet with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and accompanied violinist Hilary Hahn in the slow movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto in a dirty bar. He has shared the stage with indie-rock luminaries My Brightest Diamond and Luke Temple, and has recorded with Sufjan Stevens and former Nickel Creek front-man Chris Thile. Kahane's sprawling self-titled debut LP, to be released in October 2008, features twenty-odd musicians while deftly marrying dense harmony and counterpoint to tasty melodic hooks. Much in demand as a composer of chamber music, Gabriel is currently completing solo piano commissions for pianists Natasha Paremski as well as for his father, Jeffrey Kahane. An evening-length work exploring his family's genealogy and journey from Germany to the United States will premiere in the fall of 2009. An avid theater artist, Kahane has collaborated extensively with the Obie-winning New York City-based downtown theater company Les Frères Corbusier, serving as musical director for a number of their productions including Hell House, A Very Merry Unauthorized Scientology Pageant, and the Los Angeles production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Visit www.gabrielkahane.com for more information.
LISTEN TO THE MUSIC OF GABRIEL KAHANE |
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LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COMPOSER
Q. What was the first thing you did after you learned you'd been given this American Musical Voices Project: Next Generation grant?
A. I called my parents.
Q. Do you have any specific plans for your composition?
A. I have a dear friend in Chicago named Seth Bockley who is a singularly brilliant theater artist—writer, director, performer. He does a lot of work with a company called Red Moon in Chicago, and they do a lot of work with Toy Theatre in two dimensions. I was fortunate to have seen a stunning fifteen minute Toy Theatre opera that Seth wrote about Laika, the Doomed First Dog in Space, at the Great Small Works Festival at St. Anne's last month, and I'm very interested in exploring the medium of Toy Theatre for my piece for Signature.
Q. Are there any performers you are longing to work with?
A. The actor Henry Stram is a very dear friend of mine, and someone whom I've always hoped to work with — I'd like to write something for him, as well as for folks like Theresa McCarthy, Mary Testa, and a slew of others too numerous to name.
Q. How did your musical journey begin? When did you first begin playing music? Composing?
A. My father is a concert pianist and conductor who grew up playing in folk rock bands in the early seventies... so there was always music in the house, and a great variety of it. The record player would have a Brahms Symphony on one second, and then suddenly we'd be listening to Graceland. I began studying violin at the age of four or five, but quickly got piano envy — I would go into my dad's studio when he wasn't practicing and pick out the themes of concerti that he was working on with a chubby little finger. I studied without any particular degree of discipline from the time I was seven until the age of twelve, when I discovered my parents' two Martin guitars in the attic of our home (which was then in Rochester, New York). I taught myself basic chord shapes, wrote a few songs, but was never particularly serious about the guitar either. Somewhere along the way, I ended up singing a lot of opera (before my voice changed), traveling to Ludwigshafen, Germany to play Willie in the Houston Grand Opera production of Kurt Weill's Street Scene.
After moving to Santa Rosa, California, I split my time between acting in the weirdly serious conservatory-style program at my public high school – by weird I mean that we were doing Chekhov, Wilde, Caryl Churchill, and Tony Kushner plays at fourteen — and singing glorious choral music with our insanely fabulous concert choir and chamber singers. And indeed, the guitar was still looming in the wings, with many hours devoted to "transcribing" songs by Weezer, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and so on. At some point, I fell under the spell of jazz, and purely by virtue of having a classmate who was a ridiculously talented guitarist, I decided to return to the piano so as not to feel superfluous.
Skipping ahead — I spent one year in the jazz program (as a pianist) at the New England Conservatory, studying under Fred Hersch, before transferring to Brown University, where I resumed acting, and read a lot of books. At some point, a classmate asked me if I wanted to write a musical, and I was like, "I hate musicals," and he was like, "But this is going to be a musical for people who hate musicals," and I was all like, "MMMMkay. Sounds good." Sitting in rehearsal, I was immediately hooked by the notion that composing is, unlike acting, not ephemeral. And the idea of permanence became very appealing to me. We received an award from the Kennedy Center for Best College Musical for the show, and I found myself increasingly drawn to this idea of writing music.
When I moved to New York, I got serious about studying classical piano for the first time, and simultaneously began writing songs for myself to sing. I suppose that's how I became a singer-songwriter and composer.
Q. Do you have formal music training?
A. Yes and no. A lot of my musical training was through some sort of familial osmosis—my father is a truly brilliant pianist, conductor, and thinker (about music and all else)... he was certainly responsible for informing a lot aspects of my musical identity, and yet did so without ever being remotely overbearing. While I did study piano as a child, it was largely without discipline. I did study on and off with Fred Hersch for some years, who taught me invaluable things about using the piano orchestrally, and studied in the last five years with a couple of marvelous classical piano teachers. My only composition teacher is also a dear old family friend, the composer Kenneth Frazelle, whose music deserves to be heard more widely. I took probably ten or twelve lessons with him over the course of a few years, and they were immensely helpful to me in ways that continue to reveal themselves to me.
Q. Who are your biggest music inspirations?
A. Gyorgi Ligeti, for being such a human composer. You look at the narrative of his output, and it's truly glorious how much he grew over the fifty some-odd years he was publishing music. The early stuff is wonderful, but not particularly sophisticated or intricate. And then you look at the late work, the piano etudes, and it's still very much informed by these conceptual impulses, but the execution is SO stunning. And yet, as with Brahms, you can look at the score and see exactly what he's up to. I also find that now, at a time when music can be exceedingly ideological, that his music was incredibly un-ideological. And I think maybe the easiest way of explaining that is that the balance between concept/intellectual impulse and ear was never lopsided. He's always willing to let his ear lead him.
Thomas Adès, another great inspiration, strikes me as, well, less human. Like, just, a total genius. I don't know how he writes the music he writes, but he has found a way of truly trudging forward on the path to the new while making his music largely accessible, in my view. I appreciate the fact that he brings to his music the experience of living in his moment—he strikes me as being very much in touch with the present, not at all insulated in some sort of academic armor.
Finally, I'd have to say that my friend Chris Thile [formerly of Nickel Creek] is a great inspiration—he may be, as one of my friends put it, "our Mozart." Anyone who's not heard his latest record under the band name "Punch Brothers" is in for a serious, serious treat. But Chris is an inspiration not only for his music, but for his mode of music making—he is joyful, laidback, and capable of melding comfortably into any musical situation he finds himself in. The couple of hours I spent recording with him for my record stand as some of the happiest and most rewarding I've known.
Q. Who's on your iPod?
A. The above... Sam Amidon, Richard Swift, Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Sharon Van Etten, Deerhoof, Elliott Smith's Either/Or, Luke Temple, Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker, The Takács Quartet doing the Bartok String Quartets, Teitur, Vampire Weekend (yes, Vampire Weekend), the '55 Gould Goldberg Variations, Nico Muhly, some Mozart operas conducted by that insane genius Réné Jacobs.
Q. What current artist, besides yourself, of course, are you most excited about? Why?
A. Probably Sufjan Stevens. His creativity and integrity are to me, peerless. He has, more than anyone else I can think of, invented his own deeply personal sound world, and yet is never content to stop working toward something new.
Q. What's next for you? Any projects, beyond this commission, that you are working on currently?
A. I've got a handful of other commissions brewing, as well as some concert work. Just finished a cycle of Lowell poems called For the Union Dead, which I'll be doing this summer in Switzerland with an ensemble of six other players. Next thing up is some piano music for the very gifted Natasha Paremski, and then a fair amount of research for a piece about my family's history, before heading off on tour in November to support my record's release.
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