Cliburn Sessions: Caroline Shaw & Gabriel Kahane

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 project currently in the works, to include a collaborative piece around Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.”