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.

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, OR 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.

August 2025 – Please do not edit without permission.