after the silence, a change of scene

The last time I posted here was in November of 2019. Needless to say, that was a different era. A few weeks after I shared that cryptic photograph with a post office box address, I began an extended digital hiatus, about which I’ll have more to say in the coming months. In the meantime, I wanted to say hello. There has been a whole lot of grief, loss, and trauma around the world, in our country, in our cities, in our communities, and within our families. And it continues. Three people very dear to me have died in the last year, and I imagine that many of you have experienced similar losses. I hope you’re all doing okay, and I send all my love. And with that…

Two Concerts in San Francisco; a world premiere

Next week, I will play my first concerts since the pandemic began. If you happen to be in the general vicinity of San Francisco, I will be appearing at Herbst Theater on July 17th and 18th as part of a new summer festival presented by San Francisco Performances.

On Saturday the 17th, at 7:30pm, I will give a solo concert featuring a dozen new songs written in October 2020, drawn from thirty-one composed that month. The program will be rounded out with selections from Book of Travelers, The Ambassador, and Where are the Arms. Tickets may be purchased here.

The next afternoon, at 2pm, I’ll join (as pianist) the wonderful tenor Nicholas Phan in a wide-ranging survey of song, including music by Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Esperanza Spalding; a whole lot of Schubert; and the world premiere of Final Privacy Song, an eighteen-minute work I’ve written for tenor and piano on a new poem by Matthew Zapruder. Tickets are here.

A New Publication

Ten years ago this September, I released my sophomore album, Where are the Arms. Yesterday, at long last, several boxes of piano/vocal scores for those songs arrived at my doorstep. I’ve arranged them all for piano & voice as I play them, with chord symbols for guitar where appropriate. They will begin shipping out today, and you can pick up a copy here. And for the cellists & violists in the room…

emergency shelter intake form

Just as the pandemic ensnared the world in its vice grip, I was preparing, alongside soloists Alicia Hall Moran, Holland Andrews, and Holcombe Waller, to bring emergency shelter intake form to the Orlando Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, and the Milwaukee Symphony.

While it was disappointing to see those concerts go up in a puff of smoke (in addition to performances planned by the San Francisco Symphony and Louisville Orchestra), I am happy to share a video of the entire piece (found t the bottom of this post), captured in Portland in August of 2018 during a free community concert presented by the Oregon Symphony, which, along with the Britt Festival, commissioned the work.

On its face, emergency shelter intake form is a piece that addresses homelessness. But at its heart, it’s a cry against inequality, not only the kind that results from ruthless, unregulated capitalism, but also the sort that manifests when we close our hearts to other human beings, treating them as if they exist in some discrete universe of misfortune distant from our own. If nothing else, I hope that esif shrinks that distance, and may help us to recognize that we, too, might be one medical emergency or job loss away from having to make wrenching decisions about how to devote our limited material resources.

Oh, and there’s an album, too.

Thanks to the generous support of members of the Portland community, we were able to document the aforementioned performance of emergency shelter as an album. The physical object, which has the feel of a hardcover book, was designed, along with its stunning cover, above, by the stupidly gifted composer-pianist-graphic designer-bean cooker Timo Andres, and includes a forty page booklet with the compete libretto. The album, in physical and digital form, is available for purchase here.

In Conclusion

My time away from digital spaces was intended, in part, as a diagnostic for my not-always-super-healthy relationship to the internet. Those who follow me on social media may (or may not!) have noticed that I’ve been silent on those platforms since late 2019. It’s my hope going forward to use them sparingly (if at all), and to communicate more frequently through bandcamp’s messaging platform, which, because it is not an ad-based service, is not wrapped up in surveillance capitalism, its pernicious algorithms, and/or the attendant destruction of democracy, etc. And of course, I will continue to post here from time to time.

Thank you as always for your support,

Gabriel

Two Years…

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on where we are, where we’ve been, and where we may be headed:

Two years ago today, in a mental state that swung between shock and grief, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Penn Station in New York City, thus beginning an 8,980 mile listening tour throughout the U.S. I think the vast majority of you who follow this page know what followed: I spoke to dozens of strangers over the course of thirteen days, primarily in the dining cars of Amtrak trains, and then wrote an album and stage piece, “Book of Travelers”, about the experience. (https://gabrielkahane.bandcamp.com)

As I reflect on what’s occurred in the last two years, I feel equal doses of optimism and despair. I am in awe of the hundreds of Americans, many of them women, who, in the face of creeping autocracy, willful ignorance, and hate-slathered rhetoric, chose to run for office for the first time. I am proud to live in a country that elected Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland, Jared Polis, Christine Hallquist, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and so many others. I am proud to live in a country where thousands of my fellow Americans and I were able to demonstrate peacefully at JFK in protest of this administration’s first Muslim ban. I am proud to live in a country where immense pressure in the form of phone calls, sit-ins, town halls, and demonstrations resulted in the failure of the GOP’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I am exhilarated and energized by the fresh ideas that our new congressional majority in the House will bring to the floor, and in particular, by the notion of a Green New Deal that could tackle climate change head-on through the creation of green jobs. And I’m excited for Beto O'Rourke to run for president.

And yet as I write this, two gubernatorial races (Florida, Georgia) that instantiate the festering legacy of Jim Crow hang in the balance, and will likely reward candidates who sought, if not illegally, then unethically, to prevent hundreds of thousands of people of color from voting. With the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act clearing the way, this week’s elections served as a playground for desperate and cynical advocates of voter suppression, and as a reminder that we have much more work to do if we are to truly become a representative democracy. The only solace on that account, perhaps, was the will of the people of Florida in restoring voting rights to 1.4 million formerly incarcerated people.

In the broader sense, what troubles me most is that for every groundbreaking progressive candidate who was elected, there has been an equal and opposite force of retrenchment in the form of candidates like Steve King in Iowa, Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Brian Kemp in Georgia. These are men who play on the fears of their constituents, using scare tactics that are drawn straight from the 19th century.

We are, in a word, more divided than ever. And I want to propose a subtle corrective to some of the discourse that I see around me in the digital space. For example, yesterday I saw a tweet— retweeted some 30,000 times— that read:

“Here’s the thing about America: it’s racist.”

While I totally get the spirit of the sentiment, statements like that only divide us further, not because I believe we need to tiptoe around ugly truths, but because they lack the specificity necessary to reach the 10 to 15 or even 20 percent of the country that I imagine do not harbor active racial animus but who nevertheless support (perhaps reluctantly) the current administration either because of social or economic conservatism. I would argue that if we want a more enlightened body politic, we can best fight for racial justice by being more exacting in our critique.

It’s useful, for example, to point out that Brian Kemp’s attempts to disenfranchise voters in Georgia through purges, exact match laws, etc., are the inheritance of Jim Crow; it’s useful to talk about implicit bias, and the myriad ways in which it causes daily humiliation to people of color (I’m thinking here of the African-American physician whose qualifications were repeatedly questioned by flight attendants during an in-flight medical emergency last week); it’s useful to talk about housing and mortgage loan discrimination; it’s useful to talk about police violence against unarmed black men; it’s useful to talk about the disproportionate eviction rate among black women in the rental market—and there are, sadly, so many other areas in which structural racism is as present as ever.

It’s less useful, I would argue, to make general proclamations — and I see them all the time — that I suspect feel more weaponized than constructive to those folks in this country whom I believe could come around to our side, but haven’t yet had a eureka moment around their own privilege.

One of the problems with digital spaces like Facebook, and even more so with Twitter, is that they function like public spaces, but without the ability to see who it is you’re speaking to. This leads to what is perhaps the most grievous pitfall of online discourse, which is the belief that we know who we’re talking to when we type into the void, when in fact, our audience is, to a certain extent, unknowable. When we make a statement to our “in group”, and then it’s amplified through shares or retweets outside of our “in group”, our rhetoric may become alien & alienating. It’s for this reason that I think there’s value in trying to visualize our audience when we’re engaging online.

When I’m contemplating a post about racism, or privilege, I often think of the truck driver (USPS in North Dakota, then for a bakery in Florida, then the USPS again) with whom I had breakfast on the Empire Builder two years ago. White man in his sixties, lived just north of the poverty line his whole life. He was a super sweet guy, played upright bass in a family band with his two sisters. Talked about the beauty of the landscape of North Dakota. I don’t know if he voted for Trump or not. I think about him, and I think about how I would make the case to him. I think about the context of his life. I try to envision being at once empathetic and unapologetic.

The guy from North Dakota, who was only able to take the train to his aunt’s 90th birthday party because his sisters bought him a ticket, makes me think more broadly about the structural shift in our economy since 1980, and the roles that Reagan and Clinton played in setting us on a path to the kind of inequality that is rampant today. The kind of ethno-nationalism that’s flourishing in America right now is not a new phenomenon, and historically speaking, it tends to take root under certain economic conditions. Wages have hardly budged in real dollars since 1980, huge sectors of the economy are contracting rapidly, and full employment simply has not translated into a livable quality of life for millions of Americans. It’s under these conditions that a kleptocratic ruling class need a scapegoat (or two or three) to distract citizens from the fact that the economy is structured to widen the gap between rich and poor.

I am not for a moment suggesting that economic vulnerability is an excuse for subscribing to racist ideas, but I am suggesting that it’s worth thinking about the circumstances in which we experience, as a nation, the metastasis of hate. I’m also well aware that plenty of people who were extremely well off voted for Trump. Those folks, the ones who believed they could pick and choose the elements of his platform that they liked (“pro-business, yay; racism, not so much, but I want my tax cut”) — it’s really hard for my to find an iota of empathy for them, but I think again it’s worth mentioning that in the same way that structural racism is baked into our system, so too is structural greed: when you have a tax code that allows the very rich to make off with 80 or 90 cents on the dollar ad infinitum, it incentives greed. (Read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” for more on that.) We should make it a priority to restore sanity to our tax code so that folks don’t have the *option* of making morally bankrupt decisions like the ones they made in 2016.

This leads to my final point, which is that if we want to reunite the United States, I would argue, as I’ve argued here before, that equality must transcend (or at least accompany) identity, and that we must remind ourselves that without economic justice, there can be no racial justice. I understand that these arguments, coming from a straight white guy, may rankle to some, but know that they come from someone who wants nothing more than to see a truly just and equitable society. Let’s stay energized as we move toward 2020.

Help fund “8980: Book of Travelers”

Hi y’all. We’re just $14,000 shy of our $50,000 budget necessary to fully fund my new song cycle at BAM. These funds will cover everything from design fees to our videographer’s train tickets and equipment rental, which enabled us to capture footage for the piece, as seen below… if you have even $10 to spare, it would be most welcome. You can make a tax deductible contribution right here.