Nuance

Touring with Chris Thile. Singing Schubert with A Far Cry. Writing for the Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many others. For a while, it seemed I couldn’t turn around in the contemporary music sphere of the Internet without tripping over the name Gabriel Kahane. After seeing him perform in Boston with AFC, I followed him on Twitter, and I found myself frequently clicking the heart button on his contributions. They were random. (“Pro tip: in iMessage, certain polyrhythms become cat emoji if you use a colon to describe the ratio. Just saying.”) They were funny. (“I’m such a lapsed Jew that when I saw a friend’s Instagram caption about ‘giving up grains’ I became incensed that she’d gone gluten free.”) They held nothing back. (“GOP senators, there’s no way to say this politely: you are geriatric shit seeping out of an adult diaper.”) He touched issues that many artists wouldn’t dare to poke, such as Hillary Clinton’s support of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he never seemed self-righteous. Having observed such public candor to be rarer in the world of concert music than in pop music, I contacted Gabriel to talk about speaking his mind as a genre hybrid. However, just as in his music, nothing was as straightforward and easily definable as it seemed. When I spoke to him via phone, he was at his home in Brooklyn, his cat Roscoe was curled up asleep on the floor, and he was enjoying a Twitter-lite life without the mobile app.