Gershwin & Kahane at the San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony last Thursday gave us the first night of a two-night stand featuring Conrad Tao as soloist in the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F as well as Gabriel Kahane's emergency shelter intake form, an exploration of homelessness & inequality in America, so as a fanboy of both Tao & Kahane I went to Davies Hall for the first time since the pre-pandemic years.

Tao, a composer as well as pianist, threw himself into the Gershwin, which he obviously knows inside out (he played mostly with his eyes shut). The piece is not as familiar as Rhapsody in Blue but is in the same vein, with that piquant Gershwin combination of wistful romance & ultimately melancholy exuberance, all caught breathtakingly in this performance. I thought we were going to get an encore, but we did not (though I heard later that Tao played & sang Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life on Friday, which sadly we of the large & enthusiastic Thursday crowd were not given).

After the intermission came the Kahane piece. He is best known as a songwriter but the nearly hour-long emergency shelter intake form showed how well he can sustain a longer work, involving multiple forces (soloists & chorus as well as orchestra). The piece provides thoughtful, evocative, & sometimes comic answers to the bureaucratic boilerplate questions of the titular form ("Where did you stay last night?" "Have you received any income in the past thirty days?" "Have you ever been evicted?"). The answers are provided not only by a soloist (the elegant mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran) but by a Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics (Holcombe Waller, Kristen Toedtman, & Kahane himself), which chimes in with financial/political background, which is not as dry as it sounds; Kahane's text is often pointed, & some of these sections, like the "Can you hear the bull market roar?" refrain of Section XI, "A Brief History of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis" are almost distressingly catchy, capturing well the heady appeal of boom times (& providing a thematic link to the Jazz Age Gershwin).

The soloists are amplified but the chorus (made up in these performances of the Skywatchers Ensemble & the Community Music Center Singers, led by Martha Rodríguez-Salazar), which enters at the end, is not; conductor Edwin Outwater kept all these forces balanced (something that doesn't always happen in Davies Hall when amplification is involved) & pulsing forward. The music ranges widely in mood; the opening lines ("What brings you here? / What happened? / Where did you sleep last night?"), smoothly & yearningly sung by Moran, might almost signal a work about an intimate romance. The instrumentation includes not only the usual symphonic suspects but also guitar, accordion, tin cans, & more, & Kahane's music is as adept at the poetic, the comic, & the heart-breaking as his words. Underlying it all is a generous impulse to resist the demonization of "the homeless", & there's always the thrill of experiencing a major new work by an artist I admire so much. So why did this piece leave me feeling dissatisfied?

The first pronouncement of the Chorus of Inconvenient Statistics is "We believe that the lifeblood of art is – How shall we put it? / Ambiguity", but that's exactly what I felt was missing. As I said, I admire the impulse to resist demonizing "the homeless", but there's an opposite trap which is not avoided here, & that's to portray them purely as victims – I mean in the sense of the perfect or ideal, the blameless, victim. Drugs, mental illness, really stupid life choices, aggression towards others are very fleetingly touched on in the work, & I'm not blaming, judging, or dismissing people who suffer from any of these things, but by eliding them from the world drawn here, we end up with a group of what the Victorians would have called "the deserving poor", the portrayal of whom verges at times on sentimentality – & that's not necessarily a bad thing; sentimentality is just heightening our pity towards those who deserve pity, & from pity can come action.

But it's also true that this sort of categorical compassion can lead to the overly easy satire of other groups, such as the NIMBY types portrayed in Section VI, "Certainly We Can All Agree"; there were appreciative chuckles from the audience at Davies Hall, but I seriously doubt any of them would be willing to live next to a halfway house, let alone a full-on encampment of the unhoused. & it's the NIMBY population, among others, you need to persuade in order for effective policies to gain traction, & lightly mocking & dismissing their concerns about having "our windows barred" is not going to win them over.

& that's why, I think, it matters that the more problematic, troublesome examples of the unhoused among us are not present in this particular work, which admittedly is already taking on several vast & intractable topics. But how can the audience connect what it just felt in the concert hall with what it experiences as soon as it leaves the hall, & how can political action be sustained in the face of this disparity?

The audience was very enthusiastic after Thursday's performance, but when we leave Davies & head to the Civic Center BART station or a parking garage, how are we going to make & sustain the connection between the moving stories of the people we have just heard about & the people we're crossing the street to avoid? (Any downtown SF arts administrator who claims not to be concerned about how the homeless population affects attendance at their expensive entertainments is, I will politely suggest, lying.) The hearts opened up by this work are going to slam right back shut in the face of the familiar & daily gantlet of hostile threats, aggressive panhandling, or even just offensive smells & noises. These too are part of the total situation.

I've been reading a lot of Dorothy Day lately, & one theme that emerged for me is that she didn't help people because they deserved it or because it made her feel virtuous to do so or anything like that; many of the people she helped were, & she knew this perfectly well & acknowledged it, in every sense hopeless: difficult, abrasive, dishonest, even dangerous, & certainly ungrateful. She persevered because of an overwhelming religious conviction – these people are part of the body of Christ, & she is here to serve that body – & whether you share that conviction, or some variant of it, or are just concerned about social stability or urban livability, you will need to make the leap to providing help to people who don't, in many eyes, "deserve" help. Unless you acknowledge that – that people can be undeserving, incorrigible, repulsive, but still deserving of generous assistance – you're not going to sustain the political will necessary to provide such help, or to persuade people to join you in working for it.

I say all this with great respect not only for what Kahane has achieved here, but the generous impulse underlying it: we live in a profoundly sick, mean-spirited country with twisted priorities, & making individuals out of its victims is valuable. But sustained action, action acceptable to a working majority of any country, can't shy away from the less touching aspects of this problem (this "problem"! this population, these people, these individuals).

I would encourage anyone interested in this piece to buy a copy of the original recording & explore the work for themselves.

UPDATE: For another perspective, here is Lisa Hirsch's review in the San Francisco Chronicle as well as her blog entry.