Choosing which path to pursue proved nearly impossible throughout his early life, and while all the academic degrees he has earned (five of them!) are focused entirely on classical music performance and composition, he now embraces a career that allows him to all of the above as well as being a composer of works associated with the concert stage.
Gabriel attended the Eastman School of Music as an undergraduate earning a bachelor’s degree in composition, after which he obtained a PhD in composition from Harvard, followed by a Professional Performance Diploma in harp performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and finally an Artist Diploma in composition from the Yale School of Music.
All the while, he pursued a career as a modern dancer on the side, continuing to train rigorously in contemporary dance and perform professionally. He also continued to hone his skills as a writer, penning texts for musical setting including three libretti, as well as a healthy stream of standalone creative writing in the form of poetry, short stories, novels, and essays.
One of the conundrums of Gabriel’s early professional career was how to integrate his artistic interests rather than remaining siloed. During his nine years of teaching at the Yale School of Music, Gabriel mainly focused on his concert music output, completing dozens of chamber, orchestral, vocal, and dramatic works that are published exclusively by Schott. He won two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Naumburg Prize in Composition, a Fromm Commission, a Copland House Residency, and received commissions from Miller Theatre, the Seattle Symphony, the American Composer’s Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Guggenheim Museum, and more.
In 2021-2022, Gabriel taught at the Mannes College of Performing Arts and the New School, expanding his teaching—which had focused exclusively on composition and analysis at Yale—to include areas like improvisation, performance practice, orchestration, and harp performance.
Around this period of time, Gabriel began experimenting with the liminal space between text and music, and then dance and music, and finally dance and text and music. These explorations gave rise to pieces like The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep written for Loadbang with a danced part for Gabriel, and eventually A Journey Through the Underworld: Counterpoint, a work that exists in the grey area between book and musical piece, theatre and lecture.
In the fall of 2022, Gabriel was appointed Associate Professor of Composition at Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music. At IU, Gabriel enjoys a deep engagement with the craft of composition, but finds and creates the space to be constantly reevaluating the boundaries of what composition is, and how it can interact with other art forms. At IU, he created his multimedia works for solo dancer and fixed media The Art of Leaving and On Becoming Transparent, commissioned respectively by the Seattle Symphony and the Eastman School of Music.
Gabriel has just released his first album as a singer songwriter, which is titled Lonesome, and features his own vocals and playing on banjo and guitar. He looks forward to the release in addition of two singles, Winged, and Wolf. Gabriel’s songs embrace a raw emotionality in a lyrically driven folk idiom.
Gabriel is also rigorously pursuing mastery of the mandolin, composing a concerto for mandolin and chamber ensemble featuring himself as mandolin soloist, to be premiered by the New Music Ensemble at IU under the baton of David Dzubay in 2025. The piece will also go on tour in South Korea with the New Music Ensemble in March of 2026.
Other current projects include a novel in progress titled The Purgatorium about a shady research project masquerading as a pest extermination service, and several ongoing essays focusing on philosophy and music.
Gabriel lives in Bloomington with his daughter Bea and his two dogs: an Irish Wolfhound named Saul, and a Maltese named Parsnip.