The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Caroline Shaw, viola/vocals & Gabriel Kahane, piano/vocals in the New York premiere of Hexagons on Friday, April 25, 2025 at 7:30pm ET at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center. Tickets start at $40 for in person and are available at https://www.92ny.org/event/caroline-shaw-and-gabriel-kahane.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane, the artist The New Yorker called “one of the finest, most searching songwriters of the day,” are two of contemporary music’s most compelling and emotionally direct storytellers and musicians.

With shared sensibilities and leanings in indie pop, contemporary chamber music and beyond, they have collaborated with artists from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma.

Hexagons is their new work inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel.” In this enigmatic narrative, Borges conjures a captivating and perplexing universe where the notion of infinity collides with the fragility of human understanding. Randomly arranged books, each containing exactly 410 pages, fill the Library of Babel’s infinite expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, encompassing all knowledge that currently exists or may exist in the future while paradoxically offering no true enlightenment. Shaw and Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.

Hexagons, written collaboratively by Shaw & Kahane, is a 92NY co-commission. Other co-commissioners include Newman Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco
Performances, University Musical Society, Duke Arts, Philharmonie de Paris, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Wigmore Hall, and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.