A family trait of making music

Similarly, “Crane Palimpsest,” he said, moves fluidly between “music that we would identify as being classical in nature … and a very sophisticated kind of pop music.” Fittingly, the second word in the work's title refers to a reused parchment that reveals multiple layers of old text beneath new.

“What's going on in the piece,” Gabriel Kahane explained by phone, “is an exploration of whether a kind of formal concert language can coexist in the same space with a more harmonically open vernacular language, without it feeling disjointed.

“I think if I were to try to dissect how I ended up doing what I'm doing,” he said of his multifaceted and iconoclastic pursuits, “it would be very much a function of having grown up in a house where my dad would practice a Mozart concerto, then take a break and put on a Joni Mitchell record. His not imposing a kind of hierarchy of genre really instilled in me the idea that, as Duke Ellington said, ‘There are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind.' “

Jeffrey Kahane, who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983 and is internationally known for his formidable talents as a versatile pianist and conductor, began studying piano at age 4. As a teenager, he played guitar in rock bands and wrote songs. The eclectic musical tastes that he encouraged in his son were fostered in a household where classical music may have dominated, but family concert outings included jazz, folk music and blues.

Gabriel Kahane started with violin at 4, took up piano at 7, “kind of stuck with it” until he was 12, he said, and then moved on to guitar. Returning to the piano at 16, he studied for a year at the New England Conservatory with jazz pianist Fred Hersch before going to Brown University, where he shifted his focus to classical piano, theater and acting. Then this musical polymath began writing songs and his career as a pop artist blossomed.

Among Gabriel Kahane's rapidly growing body of eclectic work are his song cycles “Craigslistlieder” and “For the Union Dead” (the latter based on the poetry of Robert Lowell); “The Red Book,” a 2010 Kronos Quartet commission; and last year's “Orinoco Sketches,” a large chamber work commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and based on the flight of Jeffrey Kahane's mother as a girl from Nazi Germany.