GABRIEL KAHANE

BIOGRAPHY

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BIOGRAPHY

Gabriel Kahane is a musician, writer, and storyteller.

Highlights of the 25/26 season include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth and Attacca Quartet; conducting debuts with Santa Fe Pro Music and the San Antonio Philharmonic; the world premiere of a new set of songs at the 92nd Street Y; the Carnegie Hall premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, a clarinet concerto written for Anthony McGill; and the release on Nonesuch Records of Heirloom, a piano concerto written for Jeffrey Kahane, who is, not coincidentally, Gabriel’s father. That work, recorded with The Knights and conductor Eric Jacobsen, has been heard widely throughout the United States since its premiere in September of 2021.

An avid theater artist, Kahane opened last season at Playwrights Horizons with the off-Broadway debut of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, the latter of which chronicled the composer’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. His album & stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.

Kahane is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter in his work with subtlety and grace, perhaps most notably in his orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form, which addresses economic inequality through the lens of homelessness and housing insecurity, and has been heard from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco and beyond. He is also increasingly productive as a writer, with prose appearing in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Via the newsletter “Words and Music,” Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

Gabriel’s wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, a disc of chamber music (with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider), as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated to Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 2020, where he lives with his family and serves as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, a post he has held since 2019.