Roomful of Teeth play the Barbican with Gabriel Kahane on Tuesday 22 September 2026 at 7.30pm.
Roomful of Teeth is an eight-voice American ensemble founded in 2009 by Brad Wells and Caroline Shaw, and its whole method is to learn singing techniques that Western classical training leaves out — Tuvan throat singing, yodelling, Inuit throat games, Korean p’ansori, belting — and then commission composers to write for the sound that results. Their first album took three Grammy nominations in 2014, and the piece Shaw wrote for them, Partita for 8 Voices, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 at thirty.
Gabriel Kahane is the guest. Born in Venice Beach in 1981 to the concert pianist Jeffrey Kahane, he went from the New England Conservatory to Brown, and has since worked on both sides of a line most people stay on one side of: art songs and orchestral commissions on one hand, records of his own songs on the other. Their fourth album, Rough Magic, was nominated in two Grammy categories in 2024, and Shaw remains a singing member of the group rather than a composer who writes for it from outside.
They play the Barbican on Tuesday 22 September 2026 at half past seven. It is one night, and neither name appears again in the announced season, which is the ordinary fate of American ensembles in London: they come through once, and if you miss it you wait years.