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,” have, between them, collaborated with artists from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma.

With shared sensibilities and leanings in indie pop, contemporary chamber music and beyond, they are two of contemporary music’s most compelling and emotionally direct storytellers and musicians. Experience their beauty-seeking sound world in the New York premiere of their exquisite new songs inspired by the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 short story The Library of Babel.

Hexagons, written collaboratively by Shaw & Kahane, is a 92NY co-commission.

Hexagons is a 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. Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane invite audiences to contemplate the joy, grief, wonder, and bewilderment that spring from a life oversaturated in information.