The Ambassador

PROGRAM NOTE

It was nearly two years ago that I decided to do a project about Los Angeles. L.A. is the city where I was born, but I’ve never identified as an Angeleno: my family moved East when I was two, and I have only the patchiest memories of my infancy spent in a small bungalow in then rough-and-tumble Venice. Starting in my late teens, I began to spend more time in Southland, as it’s sometimes called. Despite having grown up with the commonplace dogma that Los Angeles is hollow and superficial, I found myself in communion with the city—its aspiration, its spirit, its sadness—and wanted to dig deeper. 

As a songwriter, I’ve always been preoccupied by buildings, and the relationships we form with them. In February House, a musical theater piece I wrote for the Public Theater in New York, my collaborator Seth Bockley and I devoted an entire evening to the life and dissolution of a single row-house that once stood at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. That odd Victorian structure, which looked out over the East River onto the majestic skyline of lower Manhattan, housed, for a brief but vibrant interval during the Second World War, a staggering array of artists including W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Gypsy Rose Lee, all of whom were in the midst of significant transitions in their creative and personal lives.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the organizing principle for this collection of songs, which seek to give voice to LA’s pulse and pathos—its aging ingenues desperate to be recognized in the supermarket checkout line, its smudgy sunsets, its billboards that dwarf the buildings to which they are attached, its donut and hamburger joints, its seemingly infinite cache of neighborhood strip malls (each with obligatory dry cleaner and unusually good sushi joint), its 19th century real estate boosters whose efforts led to so much Westward migration, and the wonderment that we have all felt, first as children, and then again as adults, in the enveloping darkness of a movie theater where we fall under the spell of celluloid magic— finally, these are songs organized around buildings, one address per song. 

I’ve tried to come up with a different vantage point from which to view each of these buildings. Consequently, the songs have varying narrative approaches: in one song, I sing from the perspective of a doorman at the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel; in another, I take on the persona of James M. Cain’s iconic protagonist, the eponymous Mildred Pierce. Elsewhere, I sing critically about architecture, action movies, and airports. It’s my hope that in the multitude of voices, a sketch of Los Angeles emerges. And perhaps, within that sketch can be glimpsed the outlines of my own life: a self-portrait rendered in blinding sun, noirish shadow, the mythology of Hollywood, and its seedy, heartsick underbelly.

— Gabriel Kahane, February 2014

N.B. The Ambassador is modular. The full work is a 70-minute music-theater piece for an eight piece ensemble. A suite for string orchestra is also available, as is a full orchestral arrangement of “Empire Liquor Mart.” Many of the songs also exist in versions with string quartet accompaniment.

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