Sunday, October 5
Concert at 3 PM | Lensic Performing Arts Center
Artist Dinner at 5 PM | Alkemē
Santa Fe Pro Musica Orchestra
Anthony McGill, clarinet
Gabriel Kahane, conductor, piano, and singer
Colin Jacobsen, violin and leader
DVOŘÁK Serenade for Strings, Op. 22
KAHANE Songs
KAHANE “If love will not swing wide the gates”
for Clarinet and Orchestra
DVOŘÁK
Serenade for Strings, Op. 22
KAHANE
Songs
KAHANE
“If love will not swing wide the gates” for Clarinet and Orchestra
Lyrics from Gabriel Kahane’s songs
Baedeker
from Book of Travelers
Raise a black-heeled sky
Put it up to the moon
Shaking the sand
From your mind
Delay, dead of night
When you reach
For the Baedeker
Leather bound book
From another time
Red line for railroad
Black line for river
Carving the country
Sweetbread and liver
Maps that tell secrets
Maps that run backward
Learn to be lost now
Learn to be shattered
A dream where you don’t feel right
On your knees in an open field
Startled by silence
You don’t recognize
White light on a thousand lakes
Like paths of glass that someone breaks
Before the barefoot contortionist
Makes her grand debut
Blood leaks from the frozen moon
You think about the wound
And wonder who will die?
Amber Nebraska
Pink Minnesota
Mint green for Kansas
Blue North Dakota
Red line for railroad
Black line for river
Carving the country
Sweetbread and liver
Raise a black-heeled sky
Put it up to the moon
Shaking the sand
From your mind
Red Letter Days
from Red Letter Days – Single
What if that was the last show that I’ll ever play?
Green room, bottle cap, pack up your things, fly away.
Thirty thousand feet, the rent was pretty cheap,
Long as I kept my eyes closed.
What if that was the last show?
What if that was the last show?
Bodies lined up in straight rows of velveteen chairs,
Jewel box, chandelier, standing here nothing prepares you
For the feeling that starts when you fall into their hearts,
And you hold them with your voice.
What if that was the last show?
What if that was the last show?
Well, the lucky ones, we dust ourselves and crawl back to the stage
After this season of silence, of grief and of rage,
We’ll drink in the crowd, and when the bar gets real loud,
We’re gonna sing them a tune
Of the wonder and ruin
Of these red letter days.
To Be American
from Magnificent Bird
To be American again,
Teenaged and certain of innocence:
Six lanes of Western caravan
Burn fuel to speed up the renaissance.
Before the trench coats and the roped off rooms,
The shell-shocked mothers and the TV crews,
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
In high school I sang in the choir
With all the Mormons from Rohnert Park.
Now all their houses are on fire;
Strange glow of oxblood in the dark.
I think we all meant well, or so I thought,
That season, privilege was a parking spot.
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
If Reconstruction and the War
Seemed distant back in eleventh grade,
How quaint our simple lives before
Seem now in face of the coming days.
Foreclosing a grand old dream—
Black motorcade running on empty,
Big box and a Ponzi scheme,
Drain everything, land of the plenty.
Our furniture’s on the street;
In every church last rites are spoken.
One criminal’s soft defeat
Can’t change the fact that we’re broken.