Heirloom
Short form:
Heirloom (concerto for piano & chamber orchestra) premieres with Jeffrey Kahane & the Kansas City Symphony under the baton of Michael Stern, September 24-26. Tickets are here.
I’ll play a solo show at Rockwood Music Hall on Tuesday, September 28th. My dear friend and colleague, Johnny Gandelsman, will open with a solo violin set. Johnny’s on at 7pm, I’ll go on around 8pm. Tickets are $20 and are here. This will be my only NYC appearance this year!
Applications for Luna Lab with Oregon Symphony are now open! If you are a female-identifying, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming composer between the ages of 12 and 18, and live in Portland or Southeast Washington, please apply for your chance to study for a year with the incredible Nathalie Joachim!
Long form:
Several years ago, my friend Eric Jacobsen started pestering me about writing a piano concerto for my father, Jeffrey Kahane. It was an intriguing (and natural!) idea, but I kept putting it off in large part because I’ve never felt comfortable with large-scale instrumental composition. I think of myself first and foremost as a songwriter, and while I love to write for instruments in the context of vocal music, I feel almost entirely unmoored when voice & text are taken away. But Eric was persistent, and, well, here we are. Next month, the Kansas City Symphony will open its season with Heirloom, after which the piece will be heard in the coming years in performances presented by the co-commissioners who’ve rounded out the consortium: the Oregon Symphony, the Aspen Music Festival, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Eric’s Brooklyn-based group, The Knights.
Heirloom is an aural family scrapbook, exploring, in its three movements, a series of inheritances. I’m incredibly excited to witness its birth September 24-26 in Kansas City. You can find the program note I’ve written to accompany its premiere at the end of this email.
The following Tuesday, September 28th, I will play my first concert in New York City since our lives were individually and collectively turned upside down by the pandemic. Most of the evening will be devoted to a new slate of songs drawn from thirty-one composed in October of 2020, the final month of a year-long, complete internet hiatus. Johnny Gandelsman, violinist of Brooklyn Rider, opens with what promises to be a ravishing solo set. Tickets are here.
Lastly, in 2019, I took on the position of Creative Chair with the Oregon Symphony. I’m very pleased to announce that this season, we’ve begun a partnership with Luna Lab, the brainchild of composers Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid. Luna Composition Lab offers mentorship and professional training to female-identifying, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming composers between the ages of 12 and 18. We at the Oregon Symphony are incredibly grateful to partner with Luna Lab to offer one student a year-long period of mentorship with Grammy-nominated flutist, composer, and songwriter, Nathalie Joachim, who happens to be one of my all-time favorite humans, and who will be giving the world premiere of Suite from Fanm D’ayiti with the Oregon Symphony in the spring of 2022. What makes this even more amazing is that another all-time favorite human, the violinist Pekka Kuusisto, will be playing Nico Muhly’s concerto Shrink, on the same program. Oh, but we were talking about Luna Lab. If you or someone you know wants to apply, you can find more info & the application form here; you just have to submit one score & a recording (MIDI is acceptable). I will be reviewing submissions along with Nathalie. Applications are due on September 7th.
Obligatory capitalism appeal: I know it’s been a while since I’ve put out new music. It’s coming. I promise. In the meantime, may I remind you about this gorgeous limited edition vinyl record?
That’s it for now, folks. Stay safe. Try to lead with love, even when it’s hard.
All my best,
Gabriel
Heirloom program note:
Tucked away in the northernmost reaches of California sits the Bar 717 Ranch, which, each summer, is transformed into a sleep-away camp on 450 acres of wilderness, where, in 1967, two ten-year-old kids named Martha and Jeffrey met. Within a couple of years, they were playing gigs back in L.A. in folk rock bands with names like “Wilderness” and “The American Revelation.” They fell in love, broke up, fell in love again. By the time I was a child, my mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music respectively. But they remained devoted listeners of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms. That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German musical tradition.
That tradition comes to me through the music I heard as a child, but also through ancestry. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature, and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask, how does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musician caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall?
The first movement, “Guitars in the Attic,” wrestles specifically with that last question, the challenge of bringing vernacular song into formal concert music. The two main themes begin on opposite shores: the first theme, poppy, effervescent, and direct, undergoes a series of transformations that render it increasingly unrecognizable as the movement progresses. Meanwhile, a lugubrious second tune, first introduced in disguise by the French horn and accompanied by a wayward English horn, reveals itself only in the coda to be a paraphrase of a song of mine called “Where are the Arms.” That song, in turn, with its hymn-like chord progression, owes a debt to German sacred music. A feedback loop emerges: German art music informs pop song, which then gets fed back into the piano concerto.
“My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg” picks up the thread of intergenerational memory. Grandma didn’t actually know Alban Berg, but she did babysit the children of Arnold Schoenberg, another German-Jewish émigré, who, in addition to having codified the twelve-tone system of composition, was Berg’s teacher. Why make something up when the truth is equally tantalizing? I suppose it has something to do with wanting to evoke the slipperiness of memory while getting at the ways in which cultural inheritance can occur indirectly. When, shortly after college, I began to study Berg’s Piano Sonata, his music— its marriage of lyricism and austerity; its supple, pungent harmonies; the elegiac quality that suffuses nearly every bar—felt eerily familiar to me, even though I was encountering it for the first time. Had a key to this musical language been buried deep in the recesses of my mind through some kind of ancestral magic, only to be unearthed when I sat at the piano and played those prophetic chords, which, to my mind, pointed toward the tragedy that would befall Europe half a dozen years after Berg’s death?
In this central movement, the main theme is introduced by a wounded-sounding trumpet, accompanied by a bed of chromatic harmony that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg’s musical universe. By movement’s end, time has run counterclockwise, and the same tune is heard in a nocturnal, Brahmsian mode, discomfited by interjections from the woodwinds, which inhabit a different, and perhaps less guileless, temporal plane.
To close, we have a kind of fiddle-tune rondo, an unabashed celebration of childhood innocence. In March of 2020, my family and I were marooned in Portland, Oregon, as the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Separated from our belongings—and thus all of our daughter’s toys, which were back in our apartment in Brooklyn—my ever resourceful partner, Emma, fashioned a “vehicle” out of an empty diaper box, on which she majusculed the words vera’s chicken-powered transit machine. (Vera had by that point developed a strong affinity for chicken and preferred to eat it in some form thrice daily.) We would push her around the floor in her transit machine, resulting in peals of laughter and squeals of delight. In this brief finale, laughter and joy are the prevailing modes, but not without a bit of mystery. I have some idea of what I have inherited from my ancestors. What I will hand down to my daughter remains, for the time being, a wondrous unknown.
Heirloom is dedicated with love, admiration, gratitude, and awe, to my father, Jeffrey Kahane.
