Gabriel Kahane & Caroline Shaw: Hexagons

After working together for more than a decade, performer-composers Gabriel Kahane and North Carolina-native Caroline Shaw have formed a high-caliber partnership for their first evening-length collaborative work. Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Kahane is a musical storyteller equally at ease in a classical concert hall, on an Off-Broadway stage, or in the studio with some of the biggest names in music. Shaw is a leading figure in the classical music world and the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

For this concert, Shaw and Kahane are composing a new work, Hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this prescient work of magical realism, Borges conjures a labyrinthian library of hexagonal rooms that contain every possible configuration of language and information. Faced with the knowledge that all knowledge is available if it can be identified amongst volumes of gibberish and falsehoods, the library’s inhabitants succumb to deep despair.