{"id":690,"date":"2014-01-17T10:01:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T18:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=690"},"modified":"2014-04-27T14:40:50","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T21:40:50","slug":"kahane-and-andres-at-push","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/01\/17\/kahane-and-andres-at-push\/","title":{"rendered":"Kahane and Andres at PuSh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn-based Gabriel Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape<\/em>, a \u201clive playlist\u201d of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation. (photo by Josh Goleman)<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Gabriel Kahane describes himself as a \u201csongwriter, singer, pianist, composer, devoted amateur cook, guitarist and occasional banjo player.\u201d With the release of his sophomore album Where are the Arms<\/i> in 2011, the New York Times<\/i> called him a \u201chighbrow polymath,\u201d an apt description considering he dips his toes into multiple genres, plays several instruments and seems equally comfortable composing a pop song, a musical theatre work or a piece for chamber ensemble.<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn-based Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape<\/em>, a \u201clive playlist\u201d of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation: \u201cBach cantatas played alongside folk songs, pieces by their friends and colleagues, music by classical giants Schubert and Schumann, and songs and solo piano works by Kahane and Andres themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahane spoke with the Independent<\/i> ahead of the Jan. 27 and 28 concerts, part of the festival\u2019s Music on Main program.<\/p>\n

Growing up with pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane as a father meant early music immersion, but, even then, his interests were diverse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI began formal musical training at around the age of 4 on the violin, but switched to piano at age 7, in no small part because I wanted to be like my father, who was and is a concert pianist,\u201d Kahane said. \u201cI also sang from a young age in choruses, and found myself, through curious circumstances, singing in a handful of operas as a boy. My childhood was culturally peripatetic \u2013 I went from dusting off my parents\u2019 attic-consigned guitars one week to acting in plays the next, learning jazz standards on the piano for a time, all while doing the national junior chess circuit. I realize this makes me sound like a kid out of some Wes Anderson film, but it wasn\u2019t actually that bizarre…. In college, after transferring from conservatory where I\u2019d been studying jazz piano, I found myself writing a musical with a classmate of mine, which exposed me to the pleasure of permanence, as opposed to the more ephemeral arts I\u2019d been engaged in previously: improvisation, acting. When I finished college and moved to New York, I began both to study piano seriously for the first time (I had been a miserable student as a child) as well as to write songs \u2013 pop songs \u2013 if you will.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was 25,\u201d he continued, \u201cI had an idea to make a found-text song cycle with ads from Craigslist as lyrics, which caught the attention of some folks in the classical music world, which opened some unexpected doors toward my writing concert works. A few years later, I released my self-titled album of chamber-pop songs, which again had the inadvertent effect of getting me noticed by classical institutions like the L.A. Phil[harmonic], Kronos Quartet, etc. All of this is to say that my path to being a \u2018composer\u2019 really began with my efforts as a songwriter, which is where I am most at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahane plays guitar and banjo in addition to piano, but is \u201cmost at home singing while<\/i> playing the piano and, in a sense, I think of that compound as my instrument.\u201d<\/p>\n

That versatility has led to a prolific output. Aside from two albums, Kahane saw the release of the cast recording from the 2012 musical February House<\/i>. His music and lyrics for this Public Theatre-commissioned musical \u201cmove from mournful to antic,\u201d wrote the New York Times<\/i> in their review, which also referred to Kahane and his former classmate Seth Bockley, who wrote the book, as an \u201cimposing team.\u201d His biography recounts a partial list of his recent accomplishments without fanfare: \u201cKahane has been commissioned by, among others, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, the Caramoor Festival, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra\u2026. Other appearances \u2026 include performances of his orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest<\/i> with the Alabama and Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphonies, a recital with Timo Andres at the Library of Congress, and a two-night stand at Ann Arbor\u2019s UMS with the new music ensemble yMusic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Effectively managing priorities is key for such a kinetic career. \u201cI\u2019ve been very lucky to have a lot of different opportunities at a relatively young age,\u201d he explained, \u201cand it can be overwhelming. The period of 2011-2013 was tricky for me, and I got pretty overworked in those years, during which time my second album, Where are the Arms<\/i>, was released; my musical February House<\/i> premi\u00e8red at the Public Theatre; and I wrote and premi\u00e8red three fairly large works for orchestra and voice, along with a smattering of chamber music and various tours. It was just too much. So this last year, when Sony approached me about making some records for them, I made a decision to turn down a lot of work and just focus on that project, which I\u2019m just wrapping up now. I feel much more sane doing one thing at a time, though I\u2019m again starting to feel the itch of wanting more projects at once. I do have two other large projects in the pipeline, but I am, for the moment, committed to doing them one at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each project encompasses its own terrain, and is intellectually and psychologically distinct, he noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cWriting for oneself as a musician is maybe not dissimilar from how auteurs in the film world operate \u2013 they\u2019re writing the thing that they will then (sometimes) shoot and direct. There\u2019s a kind of internal, unspoken conversation going on about how the thing is going to be interpreted, and that often means that one uses a kind of shorthand. (A great example of this in music is Mozart\u2019s Coronation Concerto, where the left-hand part doesn\u2019t exist, because Mozart was just going to make it up. Incidentally, a radical completion of this piece is on Timo\u2019s latest album, and I think it\u2019s stunningly brilliant.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you write for someone else, you invariably have to put more on the page in order to communicate the totality of what you want expressed, and you\u2019re most likely less familiar with their instrument, whether it\u2019s a voice or a violin, and you have to invest in familiarizing yourself to the point where you close that gap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahane is forging his place in the American songwriting tradition and his libretto Gabriel\u2019s Guide to the 48 States<\/i>, for example, makes clear the reason. It\u2019s his ability to seamlessly shift between the American tradition and the Western classical tradition that affirms his seat at the vanguard of American new music.<\/p>\n

\u201cI certainly think of myself as coming out of the American songwriting tradition, but there are also Germanic roots in what I do, both genetically \u2013 my grandmother fled Germany in 1939 \u2013 and also musically. I think a lot of my concert music traffics in an attempt to reconcile the populism of the American Songbook with the modernist tradition of 20th-century Europe. And there\u2019s also a connection between the American Songbook and the 19th-century German lied tradition, a connection that Timo and I are, I think, attempting to tease out in our program for PuSh.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Mixtape<\/em>\u00a0is an eclectic and energetic collaboration and is a manifestation of the exploration of the intersections and (receding) boundaries between the American folk and the Western classical tradition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In fact, Mixtape<\/em> is an eclectic and energetic collaboration and is a manifestation of the exploration of the intersections and (receding) boundaries between the American folk and the Western classical tradition. Andres and Kahane have a similar sensibility and sense of creative adventure.<\/p>\n

\u201cTimo and I were really friends before we were collaborators. I think it\u2019s a pretty effortless collaboration in that 1) Timo is a brilliant pianist, 2) brings no ego to the table [and] 3) we have similar priorities as musicians, which is basically to play the stuff that we love and to organize it somewhat obsessively. I think the audience will find the evening surprisingly approachable, kind of like that first time you had sea urchin on pasta and were like, \u2018OMG, this is delicious,\u2019 even though you thought you hated uni.\u201d<\/p>\n

Defying categorization in a world of hyper-classification has its benefits, but it also proves complicated when it comes to marketing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, there absolutely are challenges,\u201d he said about his body of work. \u201cFirst and foremost, it\u2019s much easier to cultivate an audience that already exists, as opposed to one you have to cull from many corners. Creatively, I can\u2019t imagine my life any other way, but there is certainly a struggle in finding the audience that is interested in all these little dribs and drabs from various esthetic spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAs I mentioned earlier, my grandmother, and all of her immediate family, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles. The story of her flight by boat was the impulse for my piece Orinoco Sketches, which I wrote for the L.A. Philharmonic, using my grandmother\u2019s diaries as a basis for my own text. Inasmuch as Judaism is about a rejection of intellectual dogma, I definitely feel that my creative life is informed by being Jewish \u2013 constant renewal of ideas and spirit in pursuit of something newer and truer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kahane\u2019s Jewish identity informs this esthetic, as well. \u201cI definitely identify as Jewish, maybe more culturally and philosophically than religiously,\u201d he said. \u201cAs I mentioned earlier, my grandmother, and all of her immediate family, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles. The story of her flight by boat was the impulse for my piece Orinoco Sketches, which I wrote for the L.A. Philharmonic, using my grandmother\u2019s diaries as a basis for my own text. Inasmuch as Judaism is about a rejection of intellectual dogma, I definitely feel that my creative life is informed by being Jewish \u2013 constant renewal of ideas and spirit in pursuit of something newer and truer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahane spends his downtime in the kitchen. \u201cI absolutely love to cook, as does Timo, though I\u2019ve gotten too serious about it for it to be strictly enjoyable, i.e., I\u2019m nearly as critical of myself as a cook as I am as a musician. I tend toward the Italianate in that realm. I\u2019m also a pretty voracious reader, though more and more, I\u2019m doing these research-based projects that demand a lot of reading, which cuts down on pleasure reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mixtape, with Gabriel Kahane and Timo Andres, is on Jan. 27 -28, 8 p.m., at Heritage Hall. Visit pushfestival.ca<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn-based Gabriel Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape, a \u201clive playlist\u201d of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation. (photo by Josh Goleman) Gabriel Kahane describes himself as a \u201csongwriter, singer, pianist, composer, devoted amateur cook, guitarist and occasional banjo player.\u201d With the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[788],"tags":[212,208,213,211,209,210],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-february-house","tag-gabriel-kahane","tag-gabriels-guide-to-the-48-states","tag-mixtape","tag-timo-andres","tag-where-are-the-arms"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}