‘Magnificent Bird’ in Concert with Present Music

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Music Features

Gabriel Kahane has been compared to Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens, and while he has collaborated with both, singer-songwriter is too small a label for his resume. He penned a piano concerto for classical pianist Natasha Paremski, was commissioned by Kronos Quartet for a string quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a large chamber work, among many other things.

Later this month, Kahane will perform his new album Magnificent Bird in concert with Milwaukee’s Present Music ensemble. 

Along with Wainwright and Stevens, Magnificent Bird bares comparison to the sophisticated harmonies and melodies of latter-day Elvis Costello. Kahane’s album is a song cycle inspired by his periods of online isolation when he separated himself from social media.

The seeds for Magnificent Bird were sown in 2016. Stunned as were many Americans by the presidential election, Kahane embarked on a cross-continent road trip, trying, he says, “to break out of my digital silo, and to understand with my own eyes and ears—rather than through the filter of media—what had created the conditions for such a sea-change in American politics. I left my phone at home and spent the better part of two weeks in conversation with strangers, many of whom I would never have encountered in my life in Brooklyn.”

Transformational Adventure

It was a transformational adventure for Kahane, “so much so that I filed away the notion that maybe I ought to spend a longer chunk of time away from the internet. In the years that followed, political polarization seemed to grow ever more extreme, with social media amplifying the most militant voices on both sides of the political spectrum, rendering anything dialectical [or] nuanced all but irrelevant.”

That road trip may have been inspirational for “To Be American” from Magnificent Bird. The song’s video is shot with the grainy consistency of cellphones and security cameras and the narrative is quietly unsettling in its implication that our society is “foreclosing on a grand old dream like a motorcade running on empty.” The video for “Sitting Shiva” is a multiscreen affair, the online response by a geographically separated family to a death announced by Zoom. “The connection wasn’t stable,” Kahane sings as family members lean to their laptops, separately trying to discern the meaning through the tinny sound.

“I also had questions about our obsession with efficiency and convenience, and whether there was an off-ramp from technological inevitability, and the fatalism that had us reflexively adopting every new technology without asking what its negative consequences might be,” Kahane explains. “I was the father of a young child, and increasingly felt that choices that I made in the interest of convenience and efficiency created unseen debts that would be paid back by my daughter’s generation. I’m thinking here, for example, of the ways in which e-commerce reduces the friction in economic exchange, thereby causing us to buy more things we don't need, thereby causing more things to be manufactured, thereby creating more pollution and more waste.”

For Kahane, the best way to understand our society’s relationship to technology was to make a clean break, and to do it for one year. He began and ended his digital hiatus, by design, on election days, 2019 and 2020.

“What changed most for me was the way in which I understand the creative engine of my life,” Kahane continues. “My digital hiatus intersected with the pandemic, thus I was without feedback online and in real life. In the absence of applause, clicks, likes and so on, I had the space to ask myself why it is that I do what I do. And I came away with the strong sense, after a period of contemplation, that what matters most to me is using music to create community in a room—that I’m a servant of the communal experience. And I came to understand that reciprocity—the act in which I perform, give a gift to the audience, and in return am re-gifted with the audience's presence and/or gratitude—occurs regardless of how many people are in the room. My creative coffers can be refilled just as richly by a single listener as by 1,000. That doesn't mean that I don’t still have an ego, that I don't want my music to be heard by lots of people. But it does mean that I have a deeper understanding of what actually fulfills me.”

Kahane’s digital disconnect was a reminder that the 24-hour news cycle is as much of a construct as the hour-long twitter news cycle. “In a year during which I took in my news from print media and radio only, I came to see how much time I’d wasted not only reading error-ridden news online, but also that so much of the palace intrigue that dominated legacy print media had no bearing on my life. It was entertaining fluff, and fundamentally a distraction from issues much more vital to the lives of everyday Americans.”

Gabriel Kahane and Present Music perform Magnificent Bird May 31-June 1 at Jan Serr Studio, 2155 N. Prospect Ave., and the Present Music Digital Stage. Composer-multi-instrumentalist Carla Kihlstedt will be the opening act. For tickets and more information, visit presentmusic.org.