Gabriel Kahane credits the open-ended way he composes to growing up with a classical pianist-conductor father who was also into pop music.

I genuinely enjoyed talking to the multitalented composer, songwriter, actor, and musician Gabriel Kahane, but the conversation I’d really like to sit in on is the one that he and local hero Veda Hille are planning to have during his upcoming visit to Vancouver. There are strong parallels between the two artists: both are classically trained pianists but occasionally play folk-inflected music on stringed instruments; both enjoy writing for musical theatre and have a knack for avoiding that genre’s clichés; both are influenced by mid-20th-century composer Paul Hindemith.

Most notably, though, both have written song cycles based on texts they pulled from on-line advertising sites. Hille’s, penned with broadcaster and occasional Georgia Straight contributor Bill Richardson, was called Do You Want What I Have Got: A Craigslist Cantata and made its debut at the 2009 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Kahane beat her to the punch, however, unveiling his Craigslistlieder in 2006, when he was still in his mid-20s.

The otherwise open, even voluble Kahane is coy when it comes to why he first became fascinated by the on-line sex, services, and used-goods bazaar. “Maybe I was looking for a date; I don’t know,” he says, on the line from his new Brooklyn apartment, where he’s taking time off from unpacking his books. “But I was struck by the kind of vulnerability that people would allow themselves to express in a space that is, on the one hand, incredibly public, and that on the other gives this anonymity that you can hide behind. I couldn’t really get my head around it, I guess. I also felt that in some of the preposterous things that people would propose, there was a real sadness behind them.

“And on a crude level,” he adds, “I thought the juxtaposition of art song—a kind of dense musical language—with very bawdy texts would be somewhat compelling.”

Kahane, accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose (of Antony and the Johnsons renown), will perform Craigslistlieder at Heritage Hall on Monday (April 19). He’ll also perform selections from his self-titled solo CD, and pieces from a new disc scheduled for release later this year.

“It’s going to be all my singer-songwriter work,” he says—and the reason Kahane has to make that distinction is that he’s also pursuing parallel paths in music theatre and “serious” composition. He’s currently readying February House, a musical for New York City’s Public Theater based on a Brooklyn lodging house whose residents included Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and W. H. Auden—all in self-imposed exile from wartime England—along with their American friends Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. And once that’s finished, he’ll start on The Red Book, a piece for the Kronos Quartet that takes its inspiration from the poet Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.

Even in his most straightforward songs, Kahane shows his strong compositional abilities: pensive ruminations on New England landscapes are bolstered by sturdy horn chorales that are obviously and appropriately derived from the American maverick Charles Ives, while his more bittersweet moments gain an edge through string arrangements that are steeped in Viennese atonality. Conversely, in chamber works such as For the Union Dead, a setting of poems by Robert Lowell, he might use electric guitar and a relaxed singing style. In many ways, Kahane considers the divide between popular and serious music an unfortunate and eminently bridgeable one—and he traces this belief to his love of literature, and to his early childhood environment.

“For me, a lot of fiction writers paved the way for what they call in academic terms heteroglossia—the presence of multiple voices in the same text,” he explains. “And while I wouldn’t say that there’s a calculated attempt on my part to fit into that mode, I grew up in a household that was very pluralistic in terms of what was on the CD player or the record player. My father [Jeffrey Kahane] is a pianist and conductor, so he was practising Mozart concerti or Brahms piano music, and then he would take a break and put on a Joni Mitchell record or a Paul Simon album or a Beatles record. Some children of classical-music professionals are taught a kind of dogmatic disdain for pop music, but everything was welcome in my house. And even though I didn’t start writing music until I was in my early 20s, I suspect that those early encounters were formative.”

Those who enjoy Kahane’s open-ended approach to song will get a chance to sample his other side in early 2011: the Vancouver Recital Society has already booked him to return, with cellist Alisa Weilerstein, for a duo recital that will include a new score based on the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. Just don’t expect to hear a sequel to Craigslistlieder.

“I even quit Facebook about two months ago, because I’d forgotten what it felt like to really be alone,” Kahane says, laughing. “And I found myself sort of gleefully lonely after having quit. At night, instead of seeing what was going on in my vast network of nonfriends, I would just experience being alone—and pick up a book.”