Gabriel Kahane: A Timeline (with notes & quotes)
Just before rehearsals began at Playwrights Horizons, I sat down with Gabriel Kahane to talk about his companion concert-plays, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, and how they fit into the context of his body of work as a composer, singer-songwriter, music director, and (now) playwright. In the course of a single hour, Gabriel shared with me the better part of his life story, which I pulled together into a timeline. Because he is so prolific, consider this a highlight reel (you can find his full catalog of music here).
1981: Gabriel is born! In a little bungalow in Venice Beach, CA, to two Jewish parents who met, at age ten, at a hippie summer camp in the upper reaches of Northern California, and later played in folk-rock bands that gigged at The Beverly Hills Public Library. His mother would go on to become a psychologist, his father a concert pianist and conductor.
1980’s-early ‘90s: Gabriel is learning how to sing and play several instruments; he performs “Happy Birthday” on the violin for Gian Carlo Menotti’s 75th birthday. Gabriel’s family moves around a lot during this time – to Boston, Rochester, and Santa Rosa. Along the way, Gabriel joins a Catholic boys’ choir (yes, he is Jewish), gets really into baseball, and becomes an exceptional competitive chess player. He also plays the role of Willie Marant in the opera Street Scene, based on the Elmer Rice play. He performs in a production in Ludwigshafen, Germany:
“My chaperone on that month-long trip was my grandmother Hannelore, who was my dad’s mom. She fled Germany in 1939 as a 17-year-old, and she hadn’t been back to the country since. I didn't understand that at all. And this was the trip when we really bonded.”
1995-1999: Gabriel goes to high school! He gets super into theater – despite having this early (relatable-for-theater-people) experience:
“There was an arts magnet program called Art Quest within an otherwise unremarkable public high school. I went to the open house for the theater department, and it was in this tiny little black box, very dusty with carpet on a raked house, probably 65 seats. And this guy in very baggy sweatpants – rail thin, shoulder-length hair, stubble, incredibly charismatic – he stands on this little stage and he says, ‘If there's anything you want to do besides theater, please leave now.’ He spent the entire hour of the info session trying to convince people to leave. And I was like, ‘Awesome. Let's do this.’”
1999-2003: Gabriel goes to college! He transfers from New England Conservatory, where he was studying jazz piano, to Brown University. He quickly joins their “theater mafia.” He loves music and he loves theater, but he does not love musical theater.
2003: In spite of his antipathy for the form, Gabriel writes a musical while in college. It receives an award from the Kennedy Center, which leads to an internship at the O’Neill, where he gets connected to Michael Friedman, who later becomes a mentor.
2006: Gabriel releases his song-cycle Craigslistlieder, a gorgeously unhinged, totally original composition of eight real ads from Craigslist (an excerpt appears in Magnificent Bird). It gets the attention of the classical world which leads to lots of commissions! It goes viral! Celebrities make covers! Audra McDonald sings excerpts on tour for several years!
2008: Gabriel releases a self-titled album, his first LP as a singer-songwriter. He also is starting to write the music for February House alongside librettist Seth Bockley, and he also is music-directing the world premiere of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson in LA alongside composer and lyricist Michael Friedman:
“I remember Michael handing me post-it notes in rehearsal [when we did the initial workshop and development at Williamstown], and I would stick them on this battered upright, and he’d just have some chords scribbled and a barely legible melody on a staff. And when I couldn’t make sense of what he’d written, he would scream at me, ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you an idiot?’ Which, of course, meant that he loved me.”
2009: Gabriel writes Django: Tiny Variations on a Big Dog for piano (commissioned by his father), and Pocket Concerto for solo trumpet, flute, clarinet, and string trio. He also performs his own songs in bars, an intentional choice for setting:
“The frame of a piece of art informs how we receive it as much as the art itself. So much of the challenge with art-music is that it has all this baggage that has to do not with the sounds, but with the room in which it's played. Many people, for various reasons, don't feel comfortable in [more formal] spaces. … I think more and more we just need to be with each other, and that was already very much the case before the pandemic transformed so many of our habits.”
2011-2012: By now, Gabriel has three careers going: theatermaker/singer-songwriter/composer. He is making a ton of music! Here are some highlights: his second LP, Where Are the Arms, a folk-rock–pop-classical album featuring performances by Chris Thile and Aoife O’Donovan, StorySound Records; Orinoco Sketches for chamber ensemble and soloist; Crane Palimpsest for baritone and chamber orchestra. February House has its New York premiere at the Public Theater.
2013: The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra plays Gabriel's Guide to the 48 States, a motor tour of the United States through the lens of WPA-era (and WPA-commissioned) travel guides at Carnegie Hall.
2014: Gabriel meets Annie Tippe, who serves as John Tiffany’s associate for The Ambassador at BAM! (“She’s funnier than I am, and a great joke doctor. She really leads from her heart. The emotional topography of a piece of theater is what’s driving her, and I think that’s totally right… I’ve never felt less defensive about someone getting up in my business and wanting to give me notes.”) Sony Masterworks releases the album version of The Ambassador, a yearning, luminous episodic song cycle about ten buildings in LA.
“When I’d gone back to LA in 2008 to do Bloody, Bloody, I had started to really fall in love with the city and to feel the ache of the city. I was driving to the airport at five in the morning, and I decided to take service roads instead of the freeway. And I was overwhelmed by the sadness in this city that is constantly selling this idea of glamor and celebration. And that was the moment that inspired me to make this inquiry into Los Angeles, which became The Ambassador.”
2016: The day after the presidential election, Gabriel takes a cross-country train trip, which inspires Book of Travelers. His intention is to slow down, get to know some strangers, take in their stories, and talk politics:
“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.”
2017: Gabriel performs Book of Travelers at BAM in a production directed by Daniel Fish. He also keeps writing lots more music!
“One of the things that I hope comes through in Book of Travelers, implicitly, is the failure of this tendency toward contempt, the lack of love in our politics, and the presumption of certainty about why people adopt beliefs and behaviors we disagree with, again, this projection of bad faith. And the tendency to superimpose our cosmology and worldview onto that person – and then from that place, having projected all of that onto them, decide they are a bad person when they don’t arrive at our ideological outlook. It’s a failure to imagine the world through a different lens.”
2018: Gabriel releases Book of Travelers with Nonesuch Records. The Oregon Symphony also premieres his commissioned, sweeping 13-part orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form – a confrontation with America’s epidemic of poverty and houselessness, sung by members of those communities. Gabriel's wife, Emma, gives birth to their first child!
“Being a parent shifts one’s priorities. It’s a cliche, but you start to think: ‘How is the way I’m spending my time going to inform what the future looks like for my children?’ … If we want to break out of this cycle of a shitty duopoly where nothing ever gets done and capital rules the world, [we need] some semblance of love.”
2019-2020: Gabriel takes a self-imposed, year-long break from the internet. He and his family move to Portland, OR. He writes Magnificent Bird.
“On some level, Magnificent Bird was me trying to understand what we can actually do about late capitalism and our obsession with efficiency. … Two months after our first daughter was born, the IPC Climate Report came out saying we have twelve years to get global temperatures under control or it’s game over. And I remember sitting at my kitchen table, staring at this phrase: ‘efficiency=debt.’ And I was thinking of how these invisible debts accrue when we enjoy instant gratification.”
2021: Emma gives birth to their second child!
2022: Nonesuch Records releases Magnificent Bird. Gabriel tours the US and Europe!
2022-2024: Gabriel continues touring!
2024: Playwrights Horizons premieres Book of Travelers and Magnificent Bird, directed by Annie Tippe, in our intimate Sharp Theater.
“The mode of performance [we are creating at Playwrights Horizons] is about dissolving the boundary between me and the audience. I am always looking for moments where I can make it explicit that we're all on the same plane, that I don't exist in a separate space. And that the purpose of us being in this room together is to be reminded of each other's humanity.”
