Brooklyn Rider

with Gabriel Kahane

Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston. At Sanders Theatre,

Harvard University, Friday at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $20-$40. 617-482-6661, www.celebrityseries.org

Gabriel Kahane has a request he’d like everyone to consider.

“Please, please, please, please, please, stop talking about genre,’’ he tweeted back in December. He has since expanded that cri de coeur into a thoughtful Tumblr post, explaining why he objects to the predominance of genre talk in our musical discourse.

You can see, though, why people are so drawn to that kind of language when talking about Kahane, who joins the string quartet Brooklyn Rider for a Celebrity Series of Boston performance on Friday at Sanders Theatre — the quartet’s last Boston engagement with its founding cellist, Eric Jacobsen, whose conducting career lately has taken flight. An increasingly prominent singer, songwriter, and composer whose work takes expressive inspiration from a myriad of sources, Kahane teamed up with the string orchestra A Far Cry during his last Boston visit, in December, singing both his own songs and Schubert lieder. Genre hopping in action, right?

One problem with framing the discussion this way, he said during a recent phone conversation from his Brooklyn home, is that it alienates as many or more people than it invites in. “I don’t think the lay listener is particularly interested in the genre of something,’’ Kahane said. “They’re interested in whether they’re going to be moved. If they hear about this guy who blends X and Y, and maybe they don’t like X or Y, I feel like you’re starting off on the wrong foot.’’

He also thinks that focusing on genre, essentially music’s outer garments, is a way to avoiding talking about craft, its internal design. In any music Kahane loves, he explained, “it’s all a question of, is there solid architecture? Are there compelling events? Are those events linked to authentic emotional moments? Is there a harmonic field that’s compelling? All of things are linked to craft, and that’s the thing that I don’t feel like we’re talking about enough.’’

So let’s talk about craft, especially as it relates to “The Fiction Issue,’’ Kahane’s new album, which features Brooklyn Rider in all three of its selections. The title work is a song cycle that interweaves two winding monologues — one male, one female, both written by Kahane — that are steeped in love and loss, with New York City a constant, evocative backdrop. The text is ambiguous — what, if anything, is the characters’ relationship? — and the instrumental writing, for string quartet with occasional guitar and keyboards, mirrors the open-endedness of the subject matter, sometimes echoing the loosening tonality of late Romanticism.

For Kahane, what’s key is that the music of the cycle “more or less grows out of the first three notes’’ of the vocal line, sung on the recording by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. “And so I would like for the rigor of the cellular development of the piece to buy a little bit of leeway with how impressionistic and sometimes unspecific the text is.’’

“Bradbury Studies,’’ for quartet, is one of a series of instrumental pieces based on Kahane’s songs. In this case, it’s “Bradbury (304 Broadway)’’ from “The Ambassador,’’ his recollective tour of Los Angeles’s history and architecture. While Kahane spoke with pride about the accessibility of his songs, even the complex ones, “Bradbury Studies’’ features some astringent harmonies and textures that occasionally recall the music of Thomas Adès, as the song melody repeatedly tries to assert itself.

“To be totally transparent, I think that when I’m writing concert music, I am wrestling with the self-consciousness of being a songwriter who doesn’t want to write a string quartet and just write three chords,’’ he explained. Again, the architectural key is that the music is all generated from a few melodic cells. “It’s kind of an experiment in what happens when I take little bits from what feels like my primary mode of expression and put it into a sausage grinder, and it grinds and grinds and grinds.’’

Sticking with the theme of the interrelation between string quartet and song, Brooklyn Rider will play Schubert’s “Rosamunde’’ Quartet, its movements interspersed among Kahane’s pieces, which include “Bradbury Studies’’ and “Come On All You Ghosts,’’ the last and more extrovert work on “The Fiction Issue.’’

He’ll also sing a selection of his songs, including “Empire Liquor Mart (9127 S. Figueroa St.)’’ from “The Ambassador.’’ It is the story of Latasha Harlins, an African-American girl shot and killed at a liquor store in 1991, told from her point of view after the tragedy. The album’s dark, haunted center, the song manages the difficult feat of being both topical and affecting. Kahane said it was important for him to do the song on this tour — both because it’s nearly impossible for him to play solo, and because it’s still so relevant to American life.

“I wanted it to be really, brutally honest,’’ he said. “It’s sad that that song remains germane to our public discourse. But that’s the world we’re living in.’’

Brooklyn Rider with Gabriel Kahane

Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston

At: Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Friday at 8 p.m. Tickets: $20-$40. 617-482-6661, www.celebrityseries.org

David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @davidgweininger.