bright & fair

four songs from Book of Travelers

PROGRAM NOTE

On November 9, 2016, I left New York to travel the country by rail in the aftermath of a presidential election that had exposed deep wounds in the body politic. Over the course of thirteen days and 8,980 miles, I spoke to dozens of strangers in the Amtrak dining car about their families and their lives. The resulting evening-length work, 8980: Book of Travelers, for solo piano & voice, was presented in December 2017 at the BAM: Next Wave Festival. It had been my intention for this piece to write an instrumental suite drawing from the themes of that work, but quickly realized that the texts were crucial, and could not be omitted. So instead, I decided to orchestrate a set of four songs, as follows:

I. Singing with a Stranger

II. Baltimore

III. Model Trains

IV. What If I Told You

— Gabriel Kahane, 2018

PURCHASE