Being American

Gabriel Kahane is one of several US musicians featured at this year’s festival – the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence provides the theme for a special focus. We asked the singer-songwriter, composer and essayist to offer a snapshot of his homeland. What is it like to be an artist in America today? His essay, written in English, captures the contrasts and contradictions of his country.

We are the land of Duke Ellington and Joan Didion. A nation of wide grins and quiet kindness, church potlucks and twilit baseball games. We are Aretha Franklin and William Faulkner, Susan Sontag and Leonard Bernstein, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down! We are the bright lights of Broadway and street vendor hot dogs, cheap souvenir shops and the pre-9/11 skyline of Lower Manhattan, immortalized in movies dreamed into existence by Hollywood screenwriters on the opposite coast, where sunshine and sprawling orange groves played host to wellness quacks a full century before Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. set out to destroy the nation’s trust in modern medicine.

We are a people of suspicion and grievance, of gated communities and concrete prisons, of unequal justice under the law. A nation of razor-wired army bases on remote islands, of flashing police lights that portend death for those whose skin is the wrong color, of billionaire businessmen who step over the huddled unhoused on their way to thousand-dollar sushi dinners in gleaming architectural monstrosities in Chicago or San Francisco.

We are small towns with two-block main streets surrounded by grain silos and corn fields; we are summer vacationers awed by sandstone in the national parks of Utah, all burnished ochre against blue sky, God in the wilderness. And we are a nation rewriting its laws to permit the poisoning of our rivers and lakes, the air we breathe.

To be an American has always meant grappling with these contradictions. But in 2026, as my country has begun to terrorize immigrant communities and its own citizens while turning its back on allies abroad, the dissonance has reached a choke point. And it is against this backdrop of national crisis that I want to speak about my role as an artist.

For too long, our political coalitions have been constructed based on what we oppose, rather than what we are for. If we have been united by anything, it has been by contempt for each other. I believe that art can help us repair, both through explicitly political work, but also through the realm of abstraction, lyricism, and impressionism.

The two pieces that I’m presenting at Beethovenfest 2026 represent both approaches. The oratorio emergency shelter intake form featuring the Beethoven Orchester Bonn examines economic inequality through the lens of homelessness. A mezzo-soprano leads the listener on a wrenching tour of the bureaucracy and indignity that accompanies poverty in America, interrupted by the »Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics«, a sardonic trio which injects a touch of humor into the piece, while implicating the audience in the problem.

Elevator Songs is more fanciful. I’d been asked to write a »songbook« for the vocal band Roomful of Teeth – a tune for each singer – and landed on the concept of a magical elevator that moves the listener through an inter-dimensional hotel, where each room brings to life a character inhabiting a distinct temporal and geographic reality. Where composing for orchestra can be impersonal – we seldom know the musicians for whom we are writing – creating something for an ensemble like Roomful of Teeth is an act of community building.

And ultimately, community building is, as I see it, the highest calling for an artist. When we gather in a room, we may create an environment in which the complexity of every human life is illuminated. If the internet traffics in cheap binaries that sort us into competing monoliths, the concert hall invites us to reconnect with all that we share: our frailty, our better angels, and our capacity to love.