An American composer, singer-songwriter, and music director, Gabriel Kahane is the son of a psychologist mother and the concert pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane. As a child, Gabriel Kahane learned how to sing and play several instruments, and he performed “Happy Birthday” on the violin for Gian Carlo Menotti’s 75th birthday. Kahane attended New England Conservatory, where he studied jazz piano, before he transferred to Brown University, where he wrote his first musical and graduated with a B.A. in music.

In 2006, he released his song cycle Craigslistlieder, a composition that includes eight ads from Craigslist, which captured the attention of the classical world and led to many commissions. Audra McDonald sang excerpts on tour for several years. In 2008, Kahane released his first album as a singer-songwriter. In 2011, his second release, Where Are the Arms, a folk-rock-pop-classical album, featured performances by Chris Thile and Aoife O’Donovan.

Kahane composed songs about his family’s flight from Europe to America during World War II. His family’s salvation also inspired Kahane to write a piano concerto for his father. Kahane is not only a composer influenced by classical music, but also a keen interpreter of his own music, in which he includes many genres and styles. As a songwriter, his dominant style is often compared to that of Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens, and he has collaborated with both of them.

In 2019, in a column in The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross wrote: “Gabriel Kahane, a Brooklynite singer-composer who sways between pop and classical worlds, has taken the idea of the concept album to rarefied heights.” In 2024, Playwrights Horizons premiered Book of Travelers.

Currently, Kahane is the creative chair of the Oregon Symphony.

“Port of Hamburg” from Book of Travelers, composed in 2018, took its inspiration from a trip Kahane took in 2016. The day after the presidential election, Gabriel boarded a cross-country train, an action which inspired Book of Travelers. His intention was to slow down, get to know some strangers, take in their stories, and talk politics. He wrote that he “packed a suitcase and boarded Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited bound for Chicago. Over the next 13 days, I talked to dozens of strangers whom I met, primarily, in dining cars aboard the trains that would carry me some 8,980 miles around the country. The songs on this album are intended as a kind of loose diary of that journey, and as a portrait of America at a time of profound national turbulence.” In this work as well as his others, Kahane is an astute critic of society. He has explained that his motivation for the trip was to consider what he then thought to be an abruptly altered America as a result of Donald Trump’s first presidential victory:

What’s the endgame of a politics in which we have decided that a huge swath of the public is irredeemable? I think you can only arrive at such a politics when you treat a population as a monolith. … Applying bad faith reasoning to the actions of our ideological opponents may give one a feeling of tidy moral superiority, but it’s no way to build a coalition. I’m thinking about Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, and the beloved community. The tactics that we use to achieve the beloved community have to match the ethos of the society that we want to achieve.

Scored originally for voice and piano, Book of Travelers was later adapted for piano, voice, and orchestra as Pattern of the Rail: Six Orchestral Songs from Book of Travelers. The adaptation is divided into three sections of two songs each, of which the third duo is the most personal: “What If I Told You (October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg).” In this selection, Kahane remembers his grandmother, who escaped Nazi Germany on “a steamship from Hamburg to Havana / six months on an island / then New Orleans / then a train to Los Angeles / where she keeps a diary …”

Kahane’s subsequent creation has been similarly, decidedly eclectic. Ross remarked that Kahane is one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day. “Heady as Kahane’s work can be, it is, first and foremost, an exercise in lyric beauty. He sings in a warm, resonant, melancholic baritone, which coasts upward into a plaintive falsetto. … His music is suffused with idiosyncratic, enriched tonal harmony.” Ross remarked that one can hear various influences that inform Kahane’s style, “from Schumann and Debussy to Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. For the most part, though, he is in possession of his own musical language.”

Richard Strauss’s father, Franz, a distinguished musician, played horn in the Court Orchestra of Munich. With a dogmatically conservative attitude towards the music of his time, he raised his son on a diet of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, not allowing him to become acquainted with the music of such “radicals” as Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, let alone Liszt and Wagner. Sons, however, frequently have a way of defying their fathers; Strauss not only became intimate with the music of the 19th century, but also became one of the composers to whom his father would not have given approval. Strauss was to become one of the 20th century’s most distinctive composers, often using the tone poem as his chief vehicle of musical expression.

In 1945, Strauss produced some remarkable and affecting music. In Metamorphosen, he looks backward to the style of an earlier time with great mellowness and depth of feeling. The circumstances surrounding Metamorphosen’s composition were not happy and are reflected in the work. “Perhaps sorrow and despair make us babble on too much,” Strauss wrote to a Swiss critic, “but the burning of the Munich Court Theater, where Tristan and Die Meistersinger had their first performances, where I first heard Freischütz 73 years ago, and where my good father sat at the first horn desk for 49 years … was the greatest catastrophe of my life. There is no possible consolation.” (Many people wonder why Strauss never spoke up against the events of World War II that led to the bombing of Munich.) Strauss sketched a composition to be called Sorrow for Munich, which was never completed, but became part of Metamorphosen.

Metamorphosen was commissioned by the Collegium Musicum of Zurich and its conductor, Paul Sacher. Strauss composed it quickly in the spring of 1945. Sacher’s orchestra premiered Metamorphosen on January 25, 1946, but it was not until 1990 that a short score was discovered in Switzerland and acquired by the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany. Its discovery gave rise to the theory that Strauss originally conceived the piece for seven strings and then changed his mind when he received Sacher’s commission intended for a larger string group.

Metamorphosen consists of a set of transformations of three or four themes or thematic fragments. The principal theme, played by the viola after eight introductory measures, bears a striking resemblance to a phrase from the “Funeral March” in Beethoven's “Eroica” Symphony. Strauss said that while composing, he was virtually unaware of the likeness, but slowly, the literal quotation from the Eroica fashioned itself out of his theme. Strauss' other thematic references may not have been unconscious; the clearest is from King Marke's monologue in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, undoubtedly an allusion to the bombed out Munich Court Theater. There are other Tristan references too, and recollections of Strauss's own Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ariadne auf Naxos.

Structurally, Metamorphosen has one long movement, subdivided into three sections. The first and third are slow, both elegiac and marked Adagio, while the middle one is a more animated Agitato. Throughout, Strauss weaves polyphonic threads in constantly changing textures into a deeply moving composition.

In 1953, Samuel Barber received a commission from the Detroit Chamber Music Society for a work for the symphony orchestra’s first-chair players. The commission would commemorate the orchestra’s tenth season.

The summer of 1954 found Barber working on the opening scene of his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Vanessa. In Maine, a performance of the New York Woodwind Quintet impressed him, and he asked if he could soon show them part of a new sextet(!) he was composing. Though he visited them in New York the next January, it was not until the summer of 1955 that he notified them of his new woodwind quintet, which they read for him in November. Flutist Samuel Baron reported in his journal, “We were completely gassed! What a wonderful new quintet conception….The piece is very hard, but so far it sounds just beautiful to us.” The New York ensemble wished to play it, but Barber reserved the premiere (March 20, 1956) for the Detroit group by whom it was commissioned.

Afterwards, Summer Music became the domain of the New York Woodwind Quintet, which helped Barber polish the music and performed it extensively in locations as diverse as Boston and South Africa (15 performances). In a review of that ensemble’s 1959 recording of Summer Music, Oliver Daniel praised Barber’s work as “a soothing contract to the more naughty world of many of his dodecaphonic confrers…its title is apt and the seeds of lyricism here are more those of a summer’s languor than of academic agitation.”

Cast loosely as a rondo, Summer Music’s single movement stands apart in the woodwind quintet literature. Although it owes something to the 20th century neo-classic French approach to woodwind writing (e.g., Jen Francaix) Barber’s music has a unique rhapsodic character that reflects his romantic personality. In an interview about Summer Music, Barber was adamant that its languor should not be interpreted as sluggishness:

“It’s supposed to be evocative of summer –summer meaning languid, not [clapping hands loudly] killing mosquitos…but all I can say about Summer Music is that everybody plays it too slowly which leads certain charming colleagues of mine to come up with real mean remarks. Two of them…once told me they heard a performance that dragged so, it should have been called Winter Music.”

Tucked away in the northernmost reaches of California sits the Bar 717 Ranch, which, each summer, is transformed into a sleep-away camp on 450 acres of wilderness, where, in 1967, two 10-year-old kids named Martha and Jeffrey met. Within a couple of years, they were playing gigs back in L.A. in folk rock bands with names like “Wilderness” and “The American Revelation.” They fell in love, broke up, fell in love again. By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music respectively. But they remained devoted listeners of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms. That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.

That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask, how does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?

The first movement, “Guitars in the Attic,” wrestles specifically with that last question, the challenge of bringing vernacular song into formal concert music. The two main themes begin on opposite shores: the first theme, poppy, effervescent, and direct, undergoes a series of transformations that render it increasingly unrecognizable as the movement progresses. Meanwhile, a lugubrious second tune, first introduced in disguise by the French horn and accompanied by a wayward English horn, reveals itself only in the coda to be a paraphrase of a song of mine called “Where are the Arms.” That song, in turn, with its hymn-like chord progression, owes a debt to German sacred music. A feedback loop emerges: German art music informs pop song, which then gets fed back into the piano concerto.

“My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” picks up the thread of intergenerational memory. Grandma didn’t actually know Alban Berg, but she did babysit the children of Arnold Schoenberg, another German-Jewish émigré, who, in addition to having codified the twelve-tone system of composition, was Berg’s teacher. Why make something up when the truth is equally tantalizing? I suppose it has something to do with wanting to evoke the slipperiness of memory while getting at the ways in which cultural inheritance can occur indirectly. When, shortly after college, I began to study Berg’s Piano Sonata, his music—its marriage of lyricism and austerity; its supple, pungent harmonies; the elegiac quality that suffuses nearly every bar—felt eerily familiar to me, even though I was encountering it for the first time. Had a key to this musical language been buried deep in the recesses of my mind through some kind of ancestral magic, only to be unearthed when I sat at the piano and played those prophetic chords, which, to my mind, pointed toward the tragedy that would befall Europe half a dozen years after Berg’s death?

In this central movement, the main theme is introduced by a wounded-sounding trumpet, accompanied by a bed of chromatic harmony that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg’s musical universe. By movement’s end, time has run counterclockwise, and the same tune is heard in a nocturnal, Brahmsian mode, discomfited by interjections from the woodwinds, which inhabit a different, and perhaps less guileless, temporal plane.

To close, we have a kind of fiddle-tune rondo, an unabashed celebration of childhood innocence. In March of 2020, my family and I were marooned in Portland, Oregon, as the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Separated from our belongings—and thus all of our daughter’s toys, which were back in our apartment in Brooklyn—my ever-resourceful partner, Emma, fashioned a “vehicle” out of an empty diaper box, on which she majusculed the words vera’s chicken-powered transit machine. (Vera had by that point developed a strong affinity for chicken and preferred to eat it in some form thrice daily.) We would push her around the floor in her transit machine, resulting in peals of laughter and squeals of delight. In this brief finale, laughter and joy are the prevailing modes, but not without a bit of mystery. I have some idea of what I have inherited from my ancestors. What I will hand down to my daughter remains, for the time being, a wondrous unknown.

Heirloom is dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe, to my father, Jeffrey Kahane.