Performer Biographies

Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall.

Highlights of the 2024–25 season include a return to the New York stage in a production at Playwrights Horizons of two solo works, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, which Gabriel performs in repertory. In addition, he tours as a duo with fellow composer/performer Caroline Shaw in the United States and Europe, including performances at the Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, and the Concertgebouw. This season also witnesses the premiere of a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill, a solo debut with the Orchestre National de Lyon, as well as Kahane’s San Francisco conducting debut in Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths.

Gabriel’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, an oratorio exploring economic inequality through the lens of housing insecurity. That work, commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, has also been heard in San Francisco, Chicago, and London, with a New York premiere this season at Trinity Church Wall Street. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.

As a theater artist, Kahane made his off-Broadway debut with the score for February House, which received its world premiere at the Public Theater in 2012. He made his Brooklyn Academy of Music debut in 2014 with The Ambassador, in a production directed by John Tiffany. In 2018, he wrote incidental music for the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, starring Elaine May.

Kahane maintains a diverse roster of collaborators from various corners of the musical universe, ranging from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Sylvan Esso, to the Danish String Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and Attacca Quartet. As a writer, he has been published by The New Yorker online and The New York Times; a newsletter and collection of essays on music, literature, and politics can be found at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

A two-time MacDowell Fellow, Kahane received the 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he serves as Creative Chair for the Oregon Symphony.

Described as “exhilarating” by The New York Times and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, Grammy^®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion brings out the best in composers through their unwavering dedication to artistry in contemporary chamber music. The members were brought together in 2011 by their love of chamber music and the simple joy of playing together; they have since captivated audiences with performances that are both visually and aurally stunning. Today, Sandbox Percussion—Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney—are established leaders in the fields of contemporary music and percussion, engaging a wider audience for classical music through multidisciplinary collaborations with leading composers and artists.

Sandbox Percussion’s 2021 album Seven Pillars was nominated for two Grammy^® awards—Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Nationally recognized “as pure as music gets” (The New York Times), Andy Akiho’s feature-length work, with stage direction and lighting design by Michael Joseph McQuilken, is Sandbox Percussion’s largest commission to date. The ensemble also commissioned 11 short films to accompany each movement, and performed the full piece more than 15 times throughout the United States and Europe last season, including at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris with the LA Dance Project and choreographer Benjamin Millepied.

In the 2023–24 season, Sandbox Percussion performs Seven Pillars at the VIVO Music Festival (Columbus, OH); the New School (New York); Aperio, Music of the Americas (Houston); the Frost School of Music (Miami); Brown University (Providence, RI); and the Peace Center (Greenville, SC), among other venues.Additional season highlights include two performances at the Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room (New York), presenting music by Andy Akiho, Amy Beth Kirsten, Juri Seo, David Crowell, Julius Eastman, and new music by past collaborators Christopher Cerrone (world premiere) and Viet Cuong (New York premiere); a performance at the 92nd Street Y with pianist and new-music champion Conor Hanick featuring New York premieres of two works composed for them by Christopher Cerrone and by Tyshawn Sorey; and an appearance at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with acclaimed new-music performers Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, and Alisa Weilerstein. Sandbox Percussion will also continue to champion Viet Cuong’s acclaimed concerto for percussion quartet, Re(new)al, including performances with the Des Moines Symphony and with the Albany Symphony, which commissioned the piece.

This season, Sandbox Percussion also releases their fourth album, Wilderness, featuring the piece of the same name by experimental composer Jerome Begin. The hourlong work seamlessly fuses the raw impact of live percussion instruments with electronic manipulations in real time. Last season, Sandbox Percussion released Bathymetry, on Cantaloupe Music, featuring music for percussion and analog synthesizer by Matt McBane.

The album draws from various strains of minimalism and modern electronic music production, and from ASMR and ambient modular synth videos. In 2020, the ensemble released their debut album And That One Too, on Coviello Classics, featuring music by longtime collaborators Andy Akiho, David Crowell, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Thomas Kotcheff.

Besides maintaining an international performance schedule, Sandbox Percussion holds the position of ensemble-in-residence and percussion faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and The New School’s College of Performing Arts, where they have created a curriculum with entrepreneurship and chamber music at its core. Sandbox Percussion has led masterclasses and coachings at prestigious music schools in the United States, including Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, the Peabody Conservatory, and Cornell University. In 2016, Sandbox Percussion founded the Sandbox Percussion Seminar—a weeklong seminar that invites percussion students from around the globe to rehearse and perform today’s leading repertoire for percussion chamber music.

In 2022, Sandbox Percussion launched their Creator Mentorship Program, a commissioning program that solicits proposals from early-career creators around the world. The selected creators are commissioned to create a new work for the ensemble, and they receive time, space, and funding for a yearlong workshop and development period.

Sandbox Percussion endorses Pearl/Adams musical instruments, Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Remo drumheads, and Black Swamp accessories.