Caroline Shaw & Gabriel Kahane: Hexagons

Name: Caroline Shaw & Gabriel Kahane: Hexagons
Start: 2024-11-15T20:30:00-07:00
Location: Patricia Reser Center for the Arts

Schedule

Fri Nov 15 2024 at 08:30 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Patricia Reser Center for the Arts | Beaverton, OR

Both Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane are respected as performers and contemporary composers whose work exists at the intersection of art and social practice. Now, the two embark on their first large-scale collaboration after working together for more than a decade.
Hexagons is a new work inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this enigmatic narrative, Borges conjures a captivating and perplexing universe where the notion of infinity collides with the fragility of human understanding. Randomly arranged books, each containing exactly 410 pages, fill the Library of Babel’s infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, encompassing all knowledge that currently exists or may exist in the future while paradoxically offering no true enlightenment. Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.
Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller. Highlights of this season include duo tours with fellow composer/performer Caroline Shaw in the U.S. and Europe; the premiere of an orchestral oratorio, co- commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and Oregon Symphony, chronicling the aftermath of the 2020 Almeda Wildfire; a solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon; and his San Francisco conducting debut with Carla Kihlstedt’s Twenty-six Little Deaths. Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, Jeffrey Kahane, will be released this fall by Nonesuch Records. Gabriel has released five albums as a singer-songwriter, and has collaborated with artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Sufjan Stevens, Sylvan Esso, the Danish String Quartet, Anthony McGill, and Pekka Kuusisto, his bandmate in the duo ‘Council.’ Kahane’s writings on music, literature, and politics can be found at gabrielkahane.substack.com. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo Yo Ma, and she has contributed music to films and tv series including Fleishman is in Trouble, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and Beyonce’s Homecoming. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.