PERSPECTIVES: Artist Talks with Lavender Studios

Gracie Caggiano


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When we try think about who writes and performs the most beautiful songs in Kansas City, Gracie Caggiano is always at the top of that list. We found Gracie at a songwriters performance session at Englewood Arts with other fabulous musicians and her writing and empathy and love really blew us away. Gracie is an amazing composer, singer, instrumentalist and human being and everyone in KC knows it!

Gracie describes herself better than we ever could. This description is from her website.

"Gracie Caggiano is an eclectic poet-composer, performer, and producer based in Kansas City, MO. Empathetic and fatefully existential, Gracie muses on complex emotions and human experiences, crafting poetic spaces where listeners can speculate about love, vulnerability, meaning, and disability. Whether songwriting in popular genres or composing concert music, Gracie synthesizes diverse stylistic elements from her popular-music background and classical training. 

Gracie creates embodied music which champions the limitations of her disability and reclaims the aesthetic value of fragility. As a performer, she is known for her hauntingly beautiful vocals and authentic delivery. Her idiosyncratic guitar work often employs alternate tunings to facilitate weakness in her hands, resulting in colorful harmonic progressions which characterize songs and concert works alike. 

Gracie frequently collaborates on a range of creative projects, from writing short-film scores and dance pieces, to producing and co-writing songs for and with other singer-songwriters. Gracie has composed concert music for the Stetson University Chorale, UMKC Graduate Fellowship String Quartet, and And2 Percussion. Her concert works have also been performed by the Stetson University Concert Choir and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City (in partnership with No Divide KC). In May 2024, Gracie released her debut album I can’t be anything but human—folk-adjacent, classically-infused songs which passionately chronicle love and grief.

Gracie holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from Stetson University (spring 2021), where she studied composition with Manuel de Murga and voice with Karen Coker Merritt. She earned a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in spring 2023, where she studied with Yotam Haber, Paul Rudy, Chen Yi, and Zhou Long. "

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PERSPECTIVES: Artist Talks with Lavender StudiosBy Lavender Studios KC