2 Composer-Performers Merge Personalities In Rarefied Concert Fare

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Gabriel Kahane and Caroline Shaw have been touring the U.S. and Europe since 2024 with their new collaboration, ‘Hexagons.’ (Photos by Jason Quigley)

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and celebrated composer-singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, both also vocalists and instrumentalists, have been touring the U.S. and Europe since 2024 with their new collaboration, Hexagons, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ philosophical short story “The Library of Babel.” Shaw is beloved for her approachable new music, Kahane for his esoteric alt-indie songs; they converge on approximately the same plot of land, their talents overlapping as vocalists and complementing each other as collaborative composers.

Each was already fascinated enough by Borges’ story to individually consider developing it as an opera, but they put their plans aside to create this piece, co-commissioned by the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society after multiple visits by each on recent UMS concert series. Centering their vocals, with Kahane also on piano and a small bass synth and Shaw also on viola and an array of electronics, with original text by Shaw and Kahane, Hexagons meditates on Borges’ imagined library, a vast collection of hexagonal rooms, filled with volumes that comprise all combinations of letters, words, and nonsense. Their program note invites the listener “to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.”

Their Jan. 23 concert at Rackham Auditorium began with five selections from Shaw and Kahane’s individual compositional oeuvres. Kahane’s Winter Song kicked off the 70-minute program; his recognizable voice was in fine form as he passed from his warm, flexible pop baritone into an easy falsetto without a hint of trouble. His erudite lyrics, pop-inflected vocal delivery, and essentially pianistic, chord-based songwriting reminds me of an Elton John with one foot in the conservatory or a pop-soaked Ricky Ian Gordon. Next up was Shaw’s And So, composed for mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter with texts by Shaw, Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, and Billy Joel. These first two works highlighted the composers’ aesthetic similarities.

Shaw’s voice, shaped by ancient and contemporary one-on-a-part singing where precision is paramount, was clear and perfectly in tune, often whisper-soft but capable of rising into power. Sensitive to fine gradations of style and genre, Shaw adopted enough of a folk-pop inflection in her duet passages with Kahane to create dyads that sounded like a bisected single voice, while her accomplished viola playing matched the energy and striking musicianship of her vocalism. She next offered her solo viola piece in manus tuas, a postmodern, magical realist take on Thomas Tallis’ work, made of a kaleidoscope of High Renaissance sonorities. Two more Kahane selections followed, his solo song “Baedeker,” a detailed homage to the 1906 travel guide he studied throughout his country-wide train trip in 2016, and then “To Be American,” once again featuring Shaw and Kahane’s bell-clear harmony.

Will ‘Hexagons’ stand up to performance by others, or is it dependent on Shaw and Kahane’s unique constellation of skills and gifts to make it work?

Hexagons, the ten-movement focal point of the evening, was enigmatically listed by its title only under the heading Shaw and Kahane; leaving every other detail unmarked was perhaps a cunning nod to the theme of the unknowable in Borges’ story. Books figured prominently, of course, as Shaw and Kahane began by reading passages, presumably by Borges, about the unifying feeling of reading a library book and concerning the experience of Borges’ blindness, while seated at small reading tables lit by green library lamps. Later, they read voraciously from boxes of books, one line per book, first alternating and then overlapping into a wild counterpoint of sentences that hinted at (but did not quite capture) the piece’s theme of information overwhelm.

Hexagons proceeded in accordance with the writing and performing styles established by the introductory pieces on the concert, with sonically delicate, modest music that invited careful attention. And as with the five pieces that preceded the main event, Hexagons was performed with what appeared to be a combination of fixed media and live electronics, including, mostly delightfully, the vocoder/synthesizer that seamlessly split Shaw’s one voice into intriguing harmonies she played on the synth’s small electric keyboard.

Hexagons is a readily enjoyable listen, although it gets bogged down in slow pacing at times, particularly in the final movement, “The Blind Librarian.” I hope they continue to tinker with it, as it comes across somewhat as a work in progress; more vocalists, more instrumentalists, more staging, and even some set design could benefit the piece. As it is now, I can’t help but worry for its future: Will it stand up to performance by others, or is it dependent on Shaw and Kahane’s unique constellation of skills and gifts to make it work? Will its sparseness and weak ending be forgiven if Shaw and Kahane aren’t on the stage to accept applause for this and their previous work at the same time? Or is it meant to live on as an album, as in Kahane’s pop-informed singer-songwriter realm, where the recording itself is the version that will stand the test of time, not subsequent performances by others as in classical practice? The music itself doesn’t determine the answer here.

After Ann Arbor’s audience immediately stood for three curtain calls, Shaw and Kahane performed a gorgeous encore, an early Shaw piece that involved the satisfied listeners in harmony by inviting us to hum an unyielding drone throughout. The piece, with a presumably bespoke text of self-talk about the difficult work of creation, showed an inviting glimpse of Shaw the composer, calling upon allusions to medieval music as she mused on the struggle to faithfully follow where a new piece leads.

No one who loves Caroline Shaw or Gabriel Kahane’s work departed the concert unhappy. Still, I am left longing to hear them explore their artistry beyond Hexagons’ familiar horizon.

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Jennifer Goltz-Taylor
Jennifer Goltz-Taylor is a soprano, music theorist, music educator, and multi-genre multi-instrumentalist. She has performed new chamber music and opera in Europe and across the US as a founding member of the new music ensemble Brave New Works and with Milwaukee-based Present Music, the Muse Ensemble, and Klangforum Wien, among many others, and can be heard on Naxos, Albany, Centaur, MSR Classics, AMP, and Blue Griffin Records. Her recording of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Brettl-lieder (MSR) with the Los Angeles-based ensemble Inauthentica was hailed by Gramophone as "captivating" and "brilliant… a voice full of subtle allure and sprightly energy." She fronted the popular Klezmer band Into the Freylakh in the early 2000s and now appears with an accordion and a mic with the band Klezmephonic. In addition to degrees in Vocal Performance, Jennifer holds a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Michigan; she has published on narrative in film scores and the history of Sprechstimme, and served as a reviewer for Opera News until 2023. She headed the voice area and taught music theory at Scripps College in southern California and now teaches voice, music theory, and courses about music within the humanities at the University of Michigan Residential College.