NO UGG BOOTS! NO LONG ISLAND!

Gabriel Kahane is one of those musicians that I’ve been following for a while. I think I first found his existence through his song cycle, Craigslistleider. As just as ridiculous as it sounds, Craigslistleider is a cycle of songs for voice and piano that takes its text and inspiration from strange strange craigslist ads. The assless chaps for sale. The (possibly very ill) gentleman who can’t stop putting ice cubes down peoples shirts. You’ve got it all. Perhaps my favorite song is about a man begging for the name of a relish he found two years ago (he doesn’t know the name of the relish because, as the name of the song tells, “Some Dipshit Through [sic] My Bottle” of it. I think the “sic” is what kills me there). But enough talking. Listen to the man himself!

The whole song cycle is quite a gem- a great example of a composer taking an absurd text and making something really valuable out of it. I have a bit of a problem taking contemporary poetry and setting it to music, because it seems like the music isn’t really adding anything to the text. If anything, the music is forcing the music of spoken language into a constrained box of singing. But all of this is to say is that I think Gabe Kahane gets it very right here. He takes a moderately amusing text and turns it into a hilarious and very successful song cycle.

But Gabe Kahane is not one to be put in a box himself. In addition to his work in *ahem* contemporary classical music, he’s also a pop musician, and a damn good one at that.

But this is trying to put a label on something that he does, and I really don’t like that. When Kahane comes up in the media, he seems to be always billed as that guy who is stretching the boundaries of genre and bridges a gap between pop/rock music and classical music. I don’t find a lot of redeeming qualities in that argument, save the unlikely scenario that you are ever held at gunpoint and demanded to describe Gabriel Kahane’s work in a phrase or less.

That line of thinking seems reductive, it seems to put classical music as this thing that is diametrically opposed to popular music (and that just isn’t true), and it seems to put his music in a box of mixing genres (if you shake the box enough, all the classical dressing will get around to everything for the optimal music eating experience).

I think the really engaging thing about Kahane’s work is that it exists simply as very intelligent music. It is emotionally and intellectually satisfying, and that’s really all I need. The lyrics are some of the most resonant that I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s lyricism that is smart (“Modern’s a stillbirth/that was born before it died/in 1939/or was it ’45?”) and tragic (“Our hotel room was too small/For our luggage and our arguments/So we left them in the hall/And went to bed. Went Straight to bed.”), but above all, true. And that truth is what resonates the most with me, not the sense that he is referencing classical music, or that he uses traditionally “classical” instruments, or that he uses pop (or classical) rhythms in his classical (or pop) music. To misquote Gertrude Stein, An art is an art is an art is an art. Check out his music (two albums and a musical!) here.

And you should go see this man perform, it will be well worth it. UMS is bringing him here this Thursday and Friday at the Arthur Miller Oddslot Theatre. Grab tickets! Yours truly will be there Thursday night in the back live-tweeting the experience, so if you wanna jump on that, my twitter will be anxiously awaiting you. See you there!