Gabriel Kahane | In the Garden of the Gift
In the eighteen months since emerging from my year-long internet hiatus, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with community. This no doubt has something to do with the disconnect I felt from my friends and colleagues, both as a result of the pandemic as well as my protracted absence from digital spaces. But it’s also a function of my encounter with Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift, which has funda- mentally changed the way that I understand my relationship to art, to my audience, and to the other artists who make up my creative universe.
The animating thesis of Hyde’s book is that art lives in two economies: a gift economy and a market economy. Art can exist without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art. What he means by this is that in the absence of reciprocity, of the gift exchange between artist and audience, in which the audience’s gratitude nourishes and replenishes the creator, art will wither and die. I’ve found this observation tremendously useful for any number of reasons, but it’s another insight of Hyde’s that more directly informs this project: the notion that, as a gift circulates through a com- munity, it articulates the community. This has ramifications both for the concert-going experience, in which we can say that community is created and expressed within the room where music is performed, but also for the relationship between artists.
After I’d recorded my most recent album, Magnificent Bird, which was an outgrowth of my digital sabbatical, I realized that the dozen-and-a-half musicians I’d invited to appear on it were all artists whom I love and admire as much for their humanity as for their musicianship. All three of the indi- vidual artists who’ve agreed to participate in this project were involved in the recording of the album (although the tune Ambrose was featured on didn’t make the final sequence). The conversations we had in conjunction with that LP were illuminating as much for what wasn’t discussed as for what was: rather than talking about notes and rhythms, we talked about character, spirit, ideology, theater, and storytelling. When collaborative relationships are able to live in the realm of metaphor, there is a register of joy, of weightlessness, of possibility, that comes into play. Joy, weightlessness, possibility: an apt set of descriptors for the energy I experience in my encounters with these artists.
Each of them, along with the two ensembles who’ve agreed to participate in this project, exemplify, in my view, a simultaneous respect for, and restlessness toward form and tradition. And as an expres- sion of one diverse swath of my musical community, they offer to audiences a way of transcending the “lone genius” myth propagated and perpetuated by our society, and to witness instead a rich and fertile ecosystem of artists teaching each other, supporting each other, challenging each other to change and grow.
That respect for, and restlessness toward form and tradition is an anchor for this project worth dwelling on for a moment. For the last two years, artists and arts organizations have been wrestling and reckoning with questions of greatness, of gatekeeping, of tradition (and the canon). What ex- cites me about these artists, taken individually and collectively, is the way that each one proposes a different path forward with respect to these questions. I hope that, in its totality, this project will enrich that crucial, ongoing discourse that informs our artistic spheres: how decisions are made within and without institutions, which projects artists choose to devote themselves to, what subjects and themes artists choose to center in their work.
—Gabriel Kahane, August 2022