GABRIEL KAHANE

BIOGRAPHY

Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall.

Highlights of the 2024-25 season include a return to the New York stage in a production at Playwrights Horizons of two solo works, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, which Gabriel performs in repertory. In addition, he tours as a duo with fellow composer/performer Caroline Shaw in the United States and Europe, including performances at the Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, and the Concertgebouw. This season also witnesses the premiere of a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill, a solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon, as well as Kahane’s San Francisco conducting debut in Carla Kihlstedt’s Twenty-six Little Deaths.

Gabriel’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, an oratorio exploring economic inequality through the lens of housing insecurity. That work, commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, has also been heard in San Francisco, Chicago, and London, with a New York premiere this season at Trinity Church Wall Street. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.

As a theater artist, Kahane made his off-Broadway debut with the score for February House, which received its world premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. He made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in 2014 with The Ambassador, in a production directed by John Tiffany. In 2018, he wrote incidental music for the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May.

Kahane maintains a diverse roster of collaborators from various corners of the musical universe, ranging from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Sylvan Esso, to the Danish String Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and Attacca Quartet. As a writer, he has been published by The New Yorker online and The New York Times; a newsletter and collection of essays on music, literature, and politics can be found at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

A two-time MacDowell Fellow, Kahane received the 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he serves as Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony.