This Friday, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Crafted event puts composer Aaron Copland’s 1944 orchestral suite Appalachian Spring in conversation with composer, pianist, and vocalist Gabriel Kahane’s 2018 work Book of Travelers.
The event kicks off this season’s Crafted Concerts, which pairs music from today with an orchestral mainstay. Norman Huynh conducts the hourlong concert, which is bookended by drink samples and snacks, as well as mingling with the musicians.
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Copland’s orchestral suite examines themes of young rural love in America, while Kahane’s work was inspired by a 9,000-mile train journey that he took in 2016, after the election of the 45thpresident.
“Copland was a city boy, imagining a part of American life that was not necessarily native to him,” Kahane says by phone en route to an East Coast show a few days ahead of Crafted. “I was at the time a Brooklyn boy, not imagining so much as going out into the heartland and having conversations with strangers.”
Kahane says the leadup to the election saw a perfect storm of cynicism, animus, and greed—repeating and cyclical happenings in history, he says, that divide Americans and create “tribal rancor and mutual contempt.”
His train journey saw him talking with scores of people with whom he disagreed profoundly on politics. “In just about every instance, I was able to find some point of connection,” says Kahane. “The trip was in the days leading up to Thanksgiving—a lot of people were traveling to see family, and I was reminded of how nearly universal our individual loyalties to our families are.”
The train trip also inspired another album, Magnificent Bird. “Putting the phone down and putting the internet away for a couple weeks was nothing short of transformative for me in so many ways,” he says. Magnificent Bird chronicles the final month of a yearlong hiatus from the internet.
During his time away from ginning up Spotify numbers and Instagram followers, Kahane says he learned to feel a lot of gratitude and to spend more time with his family, including two young children.
“Capitalism doesn’t want us to feel gratitude,” he says. “The internet is the same—it’s the same principle. Surveillance capitalism is the same, it will make you feel bad about yourself so you will buy something you don’t need.”
So what does all this have to do with Copland?
“I think in a lot of Copland, there is this sort of optimism,” Kahane says. “I feel like in this moment of us being so profoundly divided, the most radical thing you can do is open someone’s heart. I’m less interested putting criticism into the world than an ethic of love and hope and beauty, and that’s really present in Appalachian Spring.”
Crafted: Kahane and Copland’s Appalachian Spring is Friday, October 14 , at Powell Hall (718 N. Grand). Doors open at 5:30 p.m., and the concert begins at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $30.
