American composer Gabriel Kahane is something of a chameleon in the classical music sphere. He’s comfortable in many mediums, including musical theater, art song, acoustic/folk, as well as the avant-garde; look away from him for a second and glance back, and it’s unlikely he’ll be working on the same project as he was before. Whether it’s composing for theater, the concert hall, performing as a solo act, or managing creative projects with the Oregon Symphony, Kahane’s musical schedule keeps him quite busy.
Kahane first made ripples in the classical scene with his iconic song cycle Craigslistlieder, and as a singer myself, this was my introduction to him as well. Composed in 2006, the work consists of art songs composed with the text of Craigslist posts, and demonstrates a sincere wit and surprising sensitivity to a text never intended to be sung. This wit and textual sensitivity persists throughout the entirety of Kahane’s body of work, regardless of the assumed genre he’s working in.
Other standout projects include his musical theater work February House, which tells a quasi-fictionalized story of a real life World War II-era commune in Brooklyn that housed W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Paul Bowles, among others; his album Book of Travelers, an intimate and touching solo project composed on the heels of the 2016 election that recounts Kahane’s travels across the country and his experiences with fellow travelers; and Heirloom, a piano concerto composed especially for his father, the acclaimed pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane.
Regardless of the project, Kahane retains a distinct compositional voice, combining textual clarity and directness of expression with a sophisticated harmonic palette, a flair for the dramatic, and charming sensibility — and these qualities could not be more outspoken than they are in emergency shelter intake form.
emergency shelter intake form is a work that speaks to the many facets of the largely unaddressed housing crisis in America, and from a variety of perspectives. Eviction, the logistical challenges of being unhoused, the ridiculously bureaucratic and unforgiving process of acquiring low-income housing, and the necessary societal “inconvenience” of building more affordable housing all take center-stage in this genre-defying oratorio. Through this lens, Kahane deftly weaves together disparate musical elements to tell a story infused with genuine care for humanity’s wellbeing. Take the seemingly earnest track Certainly We Can All Agree, for example.
If you combined Oklahoma! with a Handel oratorio, and you threw in a hearty dash of Woody Guthrie for good measure, you might begin to approach the genre-play at hand in Certainly We Can All Agree. But it isn’t just to show off his compositional chops — Kahane astutely assesses one of the core issues of the housing crisis and effectively lampoons the NIMBY position, refusing to build more housing in one's own neighborhood, by comedically putting the listener in their shoes:
"Certainly we can all agree that we are in the midst of a housing crisis, for which the most effective solution is to build new homes at more affordable prices. The only nagging question that remains — the one that most nearly pertains — is where these units should be erected that we might keep protected our sun-drenched, gut-renovated, almost one-eighth-acre Victorian domains. And so we’ve written these refrains."
Are You Eligible for a Section 8 Voucher? presents a more grim musical take, this time on finding affordable housing.
An intense flurry of aggressive and percussive orchestral hits assault the ears, in tandem with a cold and glassy choral delivery with the opening lines “Are you eligible for a Section 8 or Housing Choice Voucher?” Kahane’s more avant-garde treatment for this movement is clearly intentional; jagged rhythms, shrill and squeaking strings, and a disconnected and emotionally distant delivery of the text present the vague, draconian, and unnecessarily frustrating process that is acquiring a Section 8 Housing Voucher:
"Are you on the waiting list for a Section 8 or Housing Choice voucher? Were you given an estimate on how long you’ll be waiting . . . Three to six months? Nine to twelve months? One to two years? Three to five years . . . Are you aware that despite having qualified for this voucher intended to help low-income, very low-income, extremely low-income families to acquire housing that you will have probably only a one in five chance of receiving it?"
Kahane lays bare the extremely dire odds that the average person has in finding housing through the Section 8 process — and the increasingly bleak closing number Thank You for Completing This Form doesn’t offer much more in the way of optimism:
"Thank you for your patience. Thank you for trekking from office to office. Thank you for enduring the long lines, the clutches of crying children, thank you. The downturned mouth of your case worker, thank you. The bad fluorescent lighting, thank you. Sleeping in chairs, middle of summer, way too much air conditioning, thank you for completing this form."
Accompanied by eerie and uncertain tremblings in the orchestra, a weary chorus sleepily intones these words in a thinly-veiled, corporate-apologetic dirge. Like oratorios of the past, Kahane uses the poetic voice of the chorus to convey the truth. Later:
"For enduring this and more, we are pleased to inform you that tonight we can offer in a concrete church basement, in the room to the right as you enter the door, an emergency shelter bed. You will need to be gone by six thirty am."
At the end of it all, our presumably unhoused protagonist is still left with no permanent solutions; only platitudes and a temporary place to stay.
Kahane is just as ready to poke fun at the ridiculousness of it all (and to great effect) as he is to point out the harsh and bitter reality for what it is – people need housing, and they aren’t getting it. What else is there to be said?