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.”
Program notes by © Susan Halpern 2025