Magnificent Bird

suite or full evening with chamber orchestra

PROGRAM NOTE

On November 3rd, 2019, I put my iPhone in a drawer, slapped a cryptic auto reply on my email account, and quietly began a year-long hiatus from the internet: no social media, no email, no smartphone, no late-night binges on the Pasta Grannies YouTube channel.

In brief, this experiment in analog living was animated by profound anxiety about the ways in which our technological regime was wreaking havoc on society. As I saw it, the explosion of inequality, polarization, and a general atmosphere of smug contempt all had something to do with the extent to which our daily lives grew ever more reliant on our digital devices. Driving this trend was a kind of techno-fatalism: the belief that once a technology was introduced, it became ineluctably woven into society; resistance was futile. It may have been a fool’s errand, but I wanted to demonstrate that, contra the status quo, one could in fact resist. After all, we’d lived without smartphones for the first several millennia of human existence!

A few months into my tech sabbatical, the pandemic fell, marooning my family and me in Portland, Oregon, where we decided to stay. This had the effect of isolating me further: now, in addition to the technological barriers I’d erected, there was a gulf of thousands of miles separating me from many of my friends and colleagues back in New York. As a result, the experiment entered into an unexpectedly contemplative, even monastic phase.

The summer and fall of 2020 were, to put it mildly, chaotic in just about every respect. As the final month of my hiatus got underway, I decided to write a song for each day of October, a kind of aural brain scan at the end of the experiment. The album that resulted, Magnificent Bird, is drawn from the thirty-one short pieces I wrote during that fragile chapter of recent American history. In these songs, small domestic concerns—along with bursts of love, grief, joy, shame, and rage—are present, and yet they are often overshadowed by the increasingly quotidian terror that has become a commonplace in 21st century life.

— Gabriel Kahane, July 2022

N.B. Magnificent Bird is modular. It’s fullest expression is an 80 minute monodrama, which can be presented as a solo performance (voice/guitar/piano), as well as with string quartet or chamber orchestra. Shorter suites extracted from the work are also available upon request.

LISTEN

Magnificent Bird (Red Letter Days)

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