An eight-voice ensemble built on singing techniques Western training leaves out, Roomful of Teeth brought their genre-crossing sound to the Barbican with the singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane.
Roomful of Teeth, the American vocal ensemble whose first album took three Grammy nominations, sang at the Barbican Centre on Tuesday 22 September 2026. The singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane joined them for this single London date.
Brad Wells and Caroline Shaw founded the eight-voice group in 2009. It commissions new music for techniques that Western classical training leaves out: Tuvan throat singing, yodelling, Korean p’ansori and belting.
Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw’s piece for the group, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013, and she still sings in the ensemble she composes for. Their fourth album, Rough Magic, was nominated in two Grammy categories in 2024.
The programme centred on Elevator Songs, the ensemble’s latest album with Kahane, written and arranged by Kahane. Its nine characters move through an interdimensional hotel, each song set in a different room. Kahane’s solo songs and Peter Shin’s Bits Torn from Words completed the evening.
Kahane was born in Venice Beach in 1981 to the concert pianist Jeffrey Kahane and trained at the New England Conservatory and Brown. He writes art songs and orchestral commissions alongside records of his own about character, place and American life.