Roomful of Teeth & Gabriel Kahane
Biographie Roomful of Teeth & Gabriel Kahane
Gabriel Kahane
is a musician, writer, and storyteller. Highlights of the 25/26 season include collaborations with Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, and Jeffrey Kahane; conducting debuts with Santa Fe Pro Music and the San Antonio Philharmonic; composer-in-residence posts with the University of Iowa and the Charlotte Symphony; the world premiere of a new set of songs at the 92nd Street Y; and the Carnegie Hall premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, a \ clarinet concerto written for Anthony McGill.
An avid theater artist, Kahane opened last season at Playwrights Horizons with the off-Broadway debut of two solo pieces, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, the latter of which chronicled the composer’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. His album & stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014, under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. A musical, February House, written with the playwright Seth Bockley, received its New York premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. In 2018, Kahane made his Broadway debut with the score for Kenneth Lonergan’s play The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May, Lucas Hedges, and Michael Cera.
Kahane is known for tackling politically thorny subject matter in his work with subtlety and grace, perhaps most notably in his orchestral oratorio, emergency shelter intake form, which addresses economic inequality through the lens of homelessness and housing insecurity, and has been heard from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco and beyond. He is also increasingly productive as a writer, with prose appearing in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Via the newsletter “Words and Music,” Kahane publishes bi-weekly essays on a variety of topics, all of which can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.
Gabriel’s wide-ranging discography includes five albums as a singer-songwriter, several orchestral projects, a disc of chamber music (with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider), as well as various other collaborative albums. He has worked with an array of artists spanning the aesthetic gamut, from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to the Danish String Quartet, Caroline Shaw, and Pekka Kuusisto, with whom he plays as the duo Council. The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kahane relocated to Portland, OR in the spring of 2020, where he lives with his family and serves as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, a post he has held since 2019.
Roomful of Teeth
is a Grammy Award-winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Gabriela Ortiz, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.
Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Paris Philharmonie, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place in London, and the Barbican. The group has also performed commissioned works for Roomful of Teeth and orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and have also moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus.
Roomful of Teeth discography includes their eponymous first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble’s album Sing Me Home which won the 2016 Grammy for Best World Music Album, and 2 EPs: The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Teeth's recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. Their latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic; and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on Rough Magic, was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
