A sought-after composer of concert works, Gabriel will appear in the 2022/2023 season with the St. Louis Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Virginia Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony, which will present emergency shelter intake form, Kahane’s 2018 oratorio exploring inequality through the lens of housing issues. He returns this fall to the Oregon Symphony, where he has served as Creative Chair since 2018, as soloist in his new song cycle The Right to Be Forgotten, a further exploration—begun with Magnificent Bird—of the increasingly fraught relationship between technology and humanity.

Gabriel Kahane’s fifth LP, Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch Records), brings to life a trunk of songs written in self-imposed isolation—a full year off the internet—with the help of a dozen-and-a-half colleagues, including Andrew Bird, Chris Thile, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. The resulting album, hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a gorgeous, intimate collection of ten musical snapshots,” finds the songwriter shuttling between the quotidian mundane and a series of overlapping national and global crises: a portrait of life in the roiling chaos of the 21st century.

Previously, the day after the 2016 presidential election, Gabriel boarded a train at Penn Station and traveled 9,980 miles around the continental U.S., talking to dozens of strangers in an attempt to better understand his country and fellow citizens. The resulting album, Book of Travelers (Nonesuch Records) – hailed by Rolling Stone as “a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America” – is at once a prayer for empathy and reconciliation, as well as an unflinching examination of the complex and often troubled history of the United States.

Gabriel made his major label debut with The Ambassador (Sony Masterworks), a meditation on the underbelly of Los Angeles seen through the lens of ten street addresses: one song per address. The album was recognized for its “rapturous uneasiness” by The New York Times, and as “one of the year’s very best” by Rolling Stone. Named for the demolished hotel that housed early Academy Awards ceremonies and where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, The Ambassador is a song cycle based on life in Los Angeles from the 1920′s to the dystopian future. Earlier albums have included The Fiction Issue with My Brightest Diamond and Brooklyn Rider, Crane Palimpsest with The Knights, and his widely-admired song cycle Craigslistlieder.

Gabriel has written pieces about his work, political activism, and commentary on modern society for The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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.

October 2024 – Please do not edit without permission.