GABRIEL KAHANE

BIOGRAPHY

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BIOGRAPHY

Over the last fifteen years, Gabriel Kahane has established a diverse career that has brought him from rock clubs and concert halls to off-Broadway theaters and beyond, where he is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter with grace and complexity. His wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, a disc of chamber music, as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Andrew Bird, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council.

As a composer of concert music, Kahane is noted for dissolving the boundaries between vernacular and formal idioms, often mining his language as a songwriter in chamber and orchestral works. His music has been performed by dozens of orchestras throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and the United Kingdom. emergency shelter intake form, an oratorio addressing economic inequality through the lens of the homelessness crisis, was commissioned, premiered, and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, and has since been heard in London, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Other notable concert works include If love will not swing wide the gates, a clarinet concerto written for New York Philharmonic principal Anthony McGill; Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States, written for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; and Heirloom, a widely performed piano concerto composed for his father, the noted pianist and conductor, Jeffrey Kahane; that work was released in 2025 by Nonesuch Records, marking Gabriel’s third album for the noted label. More recently, Kahane has begun a career as a conductor, leading ensembles including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica, and the Oregon Symphony.

An avid theater artist, Kahane made his off-Broadway debut as a performer at Playwrights Horizons with the 2024 repertory run of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers. His album & stage spectacle, The Ambassador, a sprawling meditation on the mythos of Los Angeles, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.

Increasingly productive as a writer, Kahane’s prose has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Via the newsletter “Words and Music,” Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated in the spring of 2020 to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his family.