Caroline Shaw, viola/singer/composer & Gabriel Kahane, piano/singer/composer
2024–2025 Cliburn Concerts
Date: November 12, 2024 8:00 pm CST
Venue: Tannahill's Tavern & Music Hall
It’s quite possibly the coolest collaboration imaginable in classical music.
Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work increasingly exists at the intersection of art and social practice. Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, he is known to haunt basement rock clubs and august concert halls alike, and has collaborated with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Thile, and Paul Simon. He has released five albums as a singer-songwriter and, as a composer, has been commissioned by many of America’s leading arts institutions—including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, LA Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Public Theater.
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’s written over 100 works in the last decade (for Anne Sofie von Otter, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Philharmonic, and many, many more) and has contributed music to films and tv series including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyoncé’s Homecoming, Tár, and Dolly Parton’s America.
Now these two artists combine their ingenious, enlightening minds for a new collaborative piece around Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.”
From the Composers:
“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.”
GENERAL CONCERT INFORMATION
Patrons must be eight years of age or older to attend Cliburn Concerts.
Seating will open one hour prior to concert time.
Photography and recording are strictly prohibited.
For further information on attending Cliburn events, please read our Patron Guidelines.