Book of Travelers is a song cycle of unwavering seriousness, delivering snapshots of a broken and desperate nation.
The New Yorker
Finding inspiration on a train journey.
Gabriel Kahane is “one the finest, most searching songwriters of the day” (The New Yorker).
When he returns to Music on Main as Artist in Residence, he’ll invite audiences on his lyrical journey of Book of Travelers. The solo vocal and piano performance tells the story of attempting to rediscover and celebrate our collective humanity in the face of a broken and divided nation.
After the 2016 American presidential election, Gabriel went digital-less and travelled 8,980 miles by train and wrote songs about the personal connections he made with people along his journey. His song cycle is a series of intimate character studies from his trip while also drawing from his grandmother’s diary –written during her own solo train trip after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.
Gabriel’s “wrenching” Book of Travelers (The New Yorker) asks audiences to reflect on the scars of the past, while offering a seed of hope when we step outside of our digital lives. In this way, we may discover that we have common ground even in the face of political and cultural divide.
This concert is generously sponsored by Peter Stanley & Lynne Pomfret.
The Music on Main Artist in Residence program is supported by the Deux Mille Foundation.
As part of Gabriel’s residency, he also shares more musical storytelling with performance of Magnificent Bird on May 11.
