Gabriel Kahane

Book of Travelers

Sanders Theatre

Sun. February 1, 5:00 PM

The morning after the 2016 election, singer/composer and pianist Gabriel Kahane boarded a train from New York to Chicago, starting a 9,000-mile journey across America. In a climate of national division, Kahane listened to Americans’ stories: their hopes, hardships, and shared moments of faith and resilience.

From his thirteen-day experience came Book of Travelers, a song cycle for voice and piano that is part personal travel journal, part historical reflection, and part meditation on a fractured nation. Woven with echoes of his grandmother’s cross-country journey after fleeing Germany in 1939, the work’s compositional voice blends classical and folk traditions into a work that is both timely and timeless.

Everyday American stories become extraordinary when you experience Gabriel Kahane’s poignant, wise, and empathetic Book of Travelers.

“An exercise in lyric beauty… [Kahane] is one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day… Book of Travelers is a song cycle of unwavering seriousness, delivering snapshots of a broken and desperate nation. ”
The New Yorker