American Studies

PROGRAM NOTE

In October of 2020—the final stretch of a year-long hiatus from the internet—I set out to write a song every day for a month. It was a chaotic time, and I wanted to give myself permission to write about small things, rather than trying to distill the enormity of the moment into everything I wrote. But on October 9th, I wrote a song called “To Be American,” which insisted on a large canvas:

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…

The song is at once a celebration, and interrogation, of nostalgia: of the naive, pre-9/11 milieu in which I grew up in Northern California. It is from this tune that American Studies, a new string quartet for Brooklyn Rider, developed. Where the song leans into melancholy, the quartet transforms the themes, at least initially, into something sunnier, infused with a folk/string-band sensibility that few groups can dispatch as groovily and convincingly as Brooklyn Rider. (This was not an accident: I’ve known the guys for a dozen years, and one of the great pleasures of being a composer is writing to the strengths of musicians you know and love.)

After a brief introduction, the piece begins as a fairly straightforward transcription of the song, before spinning out into a series of loose digressions — more marginalia than variations: what if this shard of melody were turned upside down and reharmonized? What if the tune were slowed down 400%? After a slow, sombre episode characterized by shattered, detuned horn calls in the violins, the melody re-emerges; sunrise after a long night. A wild and frenetic coda ensues to close the piece: manic—and tragic—American exuberance, perhaps?

American Studies is dedicated with love and admiration to Colin, Johnny, Nick, and Michael.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2023

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American Studies (Excerpt)

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