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Gabriel Kahane

vocalist and songwriter

Sunday Concert

In-person SOLD OUT. Livestream tickets available.

In-Person Sold Out. Livestream Tickets Available / Online / In-Person

In-Person Sold Out

 		   Buy Virtual Tickets

$15 for virtual tickets | $10 for members
Photo of Gabriel Kahane

Program

Selections to be announced from the stage 

In the fall of 2019, singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane embarked on a year-long hiatus from the internet in order to better understand our increasingly fraught relationship to technology. His intimate and achingly vulnerable solo performance, Magnificent Bird, is the culmination not only of that experiment, but of years of inquiry into the impact of machines on the human spirit. By turns irreverent and elegiac, Kahane’s marriage of story and song guides us through his digital sabbatical, and the interlocking crises—a pandemic, global protests, natural disasters, and a contentious presidential election—which intersected with his return to analog life. But whereas the year 2020 was one of extreme social isolation for Kahane, his 8,980-mile railway journey following the 2016 election—which resulted in 2018’s acclaimed Book of Travelers—was willfully social, an attempt to cut through the layers of media that have rendered the American body politic catastrophically polarized. At the center of the piece, then, Gabriel brings us into conversation with a number of the dozens of passengers he met aboard those trains, offering a window into their joys, griefs, and legacies, as well as a chilling chapter from his own family’s history. In sum, Magnificent Bird is a rhapsodic, novelistic, and spellbinding cry from the heart: for all the wonders of the digital age, it is only the living who are capable of love.

This event will be broadcast live from the Music Room on Sunday, January 22 at 4 PM. To reserve a ticket, follow the link above to register. All registered ticket holders will receive a link directing them to a livestream webpage where the performance can be accessed. Ticket holders will be able to watch this performance “On Demand” for 48 hours following the broadcast time.

Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work increasingly exists at the intersection of art and social practice. Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, he is known to haunt basement rock clubs and august concert halls alike, where you’ll likely find him in the green room, double-fisting coffee and a book.

He has released four albums as a singer-songwriter, including, most recently, the intimate Book of Travelers (Nonesuch Records), which Rolling Stone called “a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America.” As a composer, he has been commissioned by many of America’s leading arts institutions, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Public Theater, which in 2012 presented his musical February House.

In 2019, Kahane was named the inaugural Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony, following the premiere in Portland of his oratorio emergency shelter intake form, a work that explores inequality in America through the lens of housing issues. The piece was released as an album in March of 2020, and is scheduled for performance by half a dozen other American orchestras in the coming years.

Kahane’s discography also includes 2014’s The Ambassador, which received an acclaimed staging at BAM, directed by Tony and Olivier Award-winner John Tiffany; an album of chamber music, The Fiction Issue, with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and vocalist/composer Shara Nova; a recording with The Knights of his orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest; as well as the original cast album for February House.

A frequent collaborator across a range of musical communities, Gabriel has worked with an array of artists including Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Shaw, and Chris Thile. After nearly two decades in Brooklyn, Kahane relocated with his family to Portland, Oregon, in March of 2020. Their freakishly self-possessed cat, Roscoe Greebletron Jones III, when not under investigation for securities fraud, continues his fruitless attempts to monetize his Instagram account.

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