Gabriel Kahane Gets Political

“We often are preoccupied with trying to classify rather than dealing with craft. And I think that I don’t mind people using genre as a reference point if it’s sort of on the way to a discussion of the craft of the work itself.” Knowing that composer/songwriter/singer Gabriel Kahane is passionate about his craft meant that I knew we would have a fascinating conversation.

We did. There was a lot to talk about. The San Francisco Symphony is giving the local premiere of his emergency shelter intake form on Thursday and Friday of this week. This 50-minute oratorio that addresses poverty and homelessness had its world premiere in May of 2018 with the Oregon Symphony (who were lead commissioners of the work.) For this week’s performances Alicia Hall Moran, who sang with Kahane and others when emergency shelter intake form was recorded live in front of an audience later that year, will return. As will the composer himself.

In March there will be the West Coast premiere of Heirloom by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Kahane wrote this piano concerto for his father, Jeffrey Kahane, who will be the soloist. He’s also been touring behind his 2022 album Magnificent Bird. If that isn’t enough, last November the world premiere of his “folk opera in one act,” The Right to Be Forgotten, took place with the Oregon Symphony and in January the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed it.

Before the holidays I spoke with Kahane about the many works of his being performed, how his perspective has changed after spending a year without utilizing social media and about the absence of nuanced thinking he sees in the world. There’s a lot to digest. What follows are excerpts that have been edited for length and clarity.

Something that you’ve posted about and you’ve mentioned in interviews is the lack of nuanced thinking in the world today. What role do you think music can play in adding nuance to our world?

There’s so many ways to answer that question. I think there are all kinds of ways that artists can can approach being of value in the world. But I think that at a time when we are rather polarized, I’m increasingly finding, as someone with a lot of political convictions, that trying to open people’s hearts feels more politically useful than trying to convince people of something. In part because many of us are sort of ideologically calcified and increasingly our ideological silos are smaller and smaller and smaller. And the extent to which we’re willing to acknowledge difference, even within our tribes, seems to be waning.

One of the ways that we can achieve nuance is through spending time with each other one on one, rather than trying to communicate to a lot of people at once. I think one of the things that I’ve thought about quite a lot in the aftermath of spending a year off-line is the difference between doing what we’re doing, which is using technology to communicate one person to one person, versus the sort of incentives built by algorithms and technology companies wherein we’re rewarded for kind of lowest common denominator speech that appeals to what they call activating emotions.

It’s a difficult question to answer. I suppose the most distilled response that I can offer is to say that I think activating empathy in ourselves makes us better equipped to deal with opinions and experiences that are different than our own. If we can do that, then we can create a space in which dialectical thinking can flourish. Because we’re not terrified that we’re going to have our heads lopped off for, say, acknowledging the veracity of some aspect of an opposing opinion. 

We also live in a world where it just gets easier to identify people or to attempt to identify people by one thing. I know that one of the things that you shudder against is when people try to classify the work that you do by a genre. You had tweeted “Please stop talking about genre.” You did an interview with Zoë Madonna for Van Magazine in 2016 and you said “The more interesting question to ask is: Does the embrace of hybrid music by these institutions have to do with the decline of the audience for concert music? Or is it an embrace that comes from thinking that hopefully this is where the deepest music is coming from?” Do you have an answer to your own question six years later?

The thing that I object to, which happens a lot is and not just with my own work, but trying to put things in containers at the expense of grappling with craft. As far as what institutions are embracing and why, I think we’re having a very different conversation now in a post-2020 landscape. There’s no one size fits all answer. I think every institution is different. 

Coming out on top in this moment are the ones that were sort of ahead of the curve in thinking about how to serve their communities and serve artists in a more diverse way. In the classical music world, where institutional racism and sexism have been pervasive for such a long time, I think there was a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t [mentality]. Where your efforts are either going to seem ham-fisted and too-little-too-late or like not enough. The thing about hybridity also speaks to this sort of reassessment of how we think of or quantify greatness.

I’m a straight white guy and I was the beneficiary of institutions rethinking greatness – outside of the context of identity – just on a sort of purely esthetic basis. I think one of the most welcome things to come out of whatever we want to call the sort of post-2020 awakening in arts institutions is just realizing what a narrow conception of greatness a lot of institutions and individuals have had. I’m glad to see that there’s a kind of expansion of what we think greatness is and also whether greatness is even a useful term.

If we look at the first quarter of 2023 audiences are going to get exposed to a variety of things that you’ve done. What would you like them to understand about who you are as a composer and who you are as a person from these works which are all very different?

It’s an exciting moment for me to be able to sort of look at what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. I think what all of these works have in common, maybe Heirloom being the outlier which is an intensely personal piece dealing with family history and my current family, they’re all unified by an inquiry into the relationship between the individual and society and the individual and another person and how we conceive of other. In both Magnificent Bird and in The Right to be Forgotten, the relationship between humans and technology.

Somewhere in that thread of looking at technology is also thinking about inequality and the extent to which big tech companies are able to scale up without a lot of brick and mortar investment. That kind of hyper-scalability is also something that contributes to inequality. Then going back to 2018, emergency shelter, on its surface, is a work about homelessness. But really it’s a piece about inequality and homelessness is just a symptom of inequality. When you have these tech billionaires with one hand donating $100 million to study homelessness and then on the other hand lobbying congress to keep their taxes low, it’s like that is sort of a net neutral proposition. 

I’m a big fan of emergency shelter intake form and the writing you did for Alicia Hall Moran. I think she’s immensely talented and would love to see her get more attention than she’s been getting at this point. Did you write this with her in mind or did she become the singer who could bring it to life for you?

I also adore Alicia and thank you. I actually wrote the piece for Measha Brueggergosman, the Canadian soprano. For various reasons Measha had to leave the project shortly after the premiere and Alicia stepped in on one month’s notice for the recording. I should also mention that the album was her first ever performance of the piece. It was kind of trial by fire.

Our first child had just been born and I was introduced to Alicia, or made aware of Alicia, by the also great soprano, Ariadne Greif. So Alicia trekked out to Brooklyn where we were still living at the time. My daughter was five or six weeks old. I basically taught her the piece sitting at the piano and [she has a] fierce sense of pitch, sense of rhythm, sense of drama.

I really loved getting to know her and also getting to know her husband, Jason, who is an extraordinary pianist and composer. She’s a real activist, but also the daughter of one of the first, as she tells it, super successful Black men on Wall Street. She grew up with all the trappings of wealth. And yet that has not prevented her from really digging into the structural inequities in our society; whether they have to do with economics or racism.

That inequality that you talk about is at the core of emergency shelter. In Los Angeles it’s gotten worse. The inequality is far more pronounced, whether it’s in people who are homeless, people who OD on fentanyl, and it seems like there’s a genuine lack of political willpower. Certainly the not in my backyard thinking that you wrote about so beautifully in emergency shelter as to the collision of excuses leaving us with no progress.

I found something that the artist Barbara Kruger said really interesting. She said, “To me, these are the good old days, not because they’re good, but because we are alive to experience and to change them.” What role do you see art in general, and perhaps your art specifically, in being able to change situations?

I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think it’s necessarily direct. I’m sad to say the Oregon Symphony commissioned emergency shelter back in 2016. I had a whole internal opera about whether or not to write the piece and whether I was the right person to do it. Ultimately I said yes in no small part because I admired their courage in wading into a subject that kind of put a target on their back. They are downtown in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall where there are tent communities up and down the block.

There were some very beautiful things that came out of the premiere. One woman wrote to me and said that she had never realized the extent to which the mortgage interest deduction is a handout to rich people. Mostly this is in the movement about section eight housing and the way that we think conceptually in different ways about section eight housing. Vouchers, for those who are not familiar, are for low income folks to get subsidized housing. Yet they’re only available to something like one-fifth of the people who apply for them. Whereas the mortgage interest deduction, if you own a home, you write it off. 

That’s about as direct an impact as I could have hoped for. On the other hand, homelessness in Portland is worse now than it was four years ago when I wrote the piece. I guess the way in which I think of artists making a difference in a tangible way really has to do, or at least for me has to do, with the level of coalition building and the love and compassion and empathy that is required.

I think one of the weaknesses of progressive politics right now is that we have forgotten that in the word coalition it should be understood that we do not agree about everything. That in order to build electoral coalitions that can change the social safety net, make it more robust, change the tax code, we’re going to have to get into bed with people who we don’t agree with about everything. We have to have a big enough tent to make that possible.

Part of the reason that we can’t seem to make any progress on the housing crises that are mushrooming around the country and in Europe as well, as European democracies, weaken their social safety nets you have to change to tax code. I am not an economist, but there was plenty of great writing about ways to solve inflation that do not involve making working people suffer, which is what’s happening right now. 

His passion for political conversations is only matched by his passion for personal stories. In early March we will publish the second part of our interview with Gabriel Kahane in which we discuss the influence his family has had on his creativity and how those influences found their way into “Heirloom.”

All photos: Gabriel Kahane (Photos by Jason Quigley/Courtesy MKI Artists)