Giving Voice to the Voiceless

With a powerful New York premiere, composer Gabriel Kahane confronts the experience of being homeless as Trinity’s music ensemble, NOVUS, dives heart first into a new season.

A gripping new oratorio by Gabriel Kahane, a singer-songwriter whose eclectic compositions cross genres and grapple with human problems, delves into the plight of those living without a home. With emergency shelter intake form, titled after the questionnaire given to those seeking a bed, Kahane paints a searing portrait of the fear, humiliation, and profound challenges of being unhoused in America. 

The New York premiere, presented by Trinity’s NOVUS ensemble, takes place at 7pm on Thursday, October 24, in Trinity Church, and follows acclaimed performances in London, Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco — where it was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “extraordinary ... by turns bracing, funny, wry, sad, bitter or angry.”    

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Kahane’s piece will kick off the contemporary ensemble’s Renewal: Shelter season, an annual series of events that asks audiences to confront difficult social justice issues and help institute change. NOVUS chose to shine its light on “shelter” this year after assessing the community’s most pressing needs, explains Melissa Baker, Trinity’s Director of Artistic Planning. “The church has always worked to help the housing insecure and homeless, but the arrival of record numbers of asylum seekers in our community has created a new urgency,” she says. And while the title of the program obviously refers to refuge, it’s also meant to prod audiences to consider their own privilege and understanding. 

“We live such sheltered lives that most of us don't even realize that the largest numbers of people without homes aren’t those you see on the street,” says Baker. “There’s a vast ‘invisible’ population who end up having to double up with family or move into shelters or other temporary housing. We might be working side by side with someone who just lost their home and never know it.” 

Framing each movement of his ambitious libretto around questions — such as “Has physical health ever caused you to lose your housing?” — allows Kahane to get into the nitty gritty of the experience and even explore the systemic failures that lead to it. It’s the wrenchingly moving music, though, that gives the text its power. “Kahane paints such unlikely words as, ‘What to sell? Blood plasma, your body, check all that apply,’ with murmuring winds and string melodies, creating an eerily gorgeous moment,” Baker says. “The beautiful orchestration creates a stunning backdrop to the harsh fact that many people are one health crisis away from being unhoused.” 

By choosing to base his work on a form that epitomizes the hoops people are asked to jump through, Kahane puts the painful banality of poverty in sharp relief. “Take this bus to this office to get this form signed, then this bus to this bus to get another form signed. By the time you get to the shelter, it’s 2am, and then you have to be out again at 6:30am — heading to a job or to find work. It’s simply inhumane,” says Kahane, who witnessed the drill up close as a volunteer in a Manhattan shelter. “What they had to do just to get a shelter bed infuriated me and broke my heart.” 

The project began almost a decade ago when the Oregon Symphony asked the composer to create a work about the homeless experience. Kahane started by reading all he could get his hands on, including Matthew Desmond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. His process changed Kahane’s worldview; once he realized that poverty, not mental illness or drug abuse, was the main culprit, he broadened the focus of his piece. “I came to understand how much poor people are exploited economically — by landlords, by banks, by payday lenders, by employers,” he says. 

Though the piece has already debuted in other U.S. cities, Kahane says that performing it in New York City, where he lived the bulk of his adult life and saw the income disparity he writes about on full display, will be particularly poignant for him. “You walk down any avenue in Midtown and you’re likely to see someone wearing a $10,000 wristwatch step over someone sleeping on cardboard,” he says. “One night when I was volunteering, I was in a church basement watching the Grammys with the guys, and there was something very discomfiting about seeing friends of mine on TV and trying to reconcile the glitz and glamor and excess of the broadcast to the ratty couches and folding chairs we were sitting on.” 

Baker too feels the weight of bringing the performance to Trinity. “There’s a cognitive dissonance to presenting this piece in our beautiful church space, while right at our doorstep, we have all these people living in poverty.”

We are all poorer, spiritually and otherwise, when we don't attend to the well-being of the most vulnerable among us."

Gabriel Kahane

For Kahane, bridging the divide starts with opening hearts and minds. “Part of the problem with the housing crisis is that those of us who take housing for granted believe that we’re at a great distance from those who live in a constant state of precarity,” he says. “I want people to understand that this precarity is baked into the system and threatens all of us, in the sense that we are all poorer, spiritually and otherwise, when we don't attend to the well-being of the most vulnerable among us.” 

Throughout the process of creating and presenting emergency shelter intake form, Kahane learned that building community — something music is uniquely capable of accomplishing — is crucial for building empathy. Toward that end, his piece utilizes a choir that includes many who have experienced housing precarity; Kahane says he didn’t feel comfortable not sharing the stage with those who had lived the experience. 

“The most exciting and moving aspect for me has been the interaction between members of the orchestra — who are, generally speaking, several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder — and members of the chorus,” says Kahane. “My hope is that we break down some of the cultural barriers that exist in our society along socioeconomic lines, and that in modeling that on and off stage, we can start a conversation about how to achieve that throughout our society.” 

At the Trinity event, the choir will include youth from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, asylum seekers, and participants from outside organizations, who will move through and around the audience. The performance will also feature calls to action that focus on community building. A QR code in the program will lead audience members to volunteering possibilities at Trinity. As Baker says, Trinity is uniquely poised to help its audience move from inspiration to action — a step many find hardest to take. “Most arts institutions don’t also have a facet that’s going out and doing this kind of work,” she says. “The problem is so huge, people feel paralyzed. We can help with that.”

The afternoon before emergency shelter intake form premieres, Kahane will join Trinity Choir in St. Paul’s Chapel for a special Bach at One concert. Designed as a prelude to Renewal: Shelter, the program offers messages of spiritual fortitude that resonate profoundly within the context of homelessness. 

The choir will present one of Bach’s most powerful and complex choral pieces, Jesu, meine Freude (“Jesus, my Joy”), which poignantly reminds us that within God’s sheltering love, joy is still to be found, even in the midst of suffering. “This piece underscores that humans have long found resilience through displacement,” explains Baker. 

Paired with the Bach are two contemporary pieces by Kahane, both titled We Are the Saints. The first is a little-heard a capella vocal composition exploring the powerful connection between humans and nature, which Trinity is bringing to the East Coast for the first time. The second is a world premiere arrangement of Kahane’s thought-provoking popular song. Like the Bach, it speaks to displacement and resilience, offering a musical reflection on the struggles faced by those experiencing homelessness. It is a fitting prelude to NOVUS’s Renewal: Shelter season, and the compelling musical conversation to come.

As Baker puts it: “We hope to help audience members grapple with how they see this issue and give them an opportunity to reflect on the power of compassion and community — and then sign on to help make the world a better place.” 

Register to join us for emergency shelter intake form on October 24.