Program

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I AM WHO I AM (2021)

Music by Caerwen Martin (she/her), Text by Gail Martin (Arr. Alex Gorbatov)

Commissioned by Miranda Hill for Homophonic!, and re-orchestrated by Alexander Gorbatov for Divisi Chamber Singers, is based on conversations with career soldier, Yvonne Sillett, about her profound experience of discrimination in the Australian Army. Yvonne was demoted and vilified in her profession specifically because she was gay. This discrimination impacted Yvonne’s career outcomes, her mental health, her relationships, and the course of her life but, by telling her story publicly, Yvonne has helped and empowered countless other people in the LGBTIQ+ community to deal with their own experiences of discrimination and oppression. I am who I am focuses on our self-respect, and the decisions we make under duress that uphold the value we have for ourselves and who we are, even in the face of adversity. The lyrics, written by Gail, speak to my own discovery of self-respect.

The Splendour of lying naked in the sun

Music by Cameron Lam (he/him), Text by Salvatore Scibona

The Splendour of Lying Naked in the Sun is an ode to our ordinary bodies and the incredible universe we find ourselves living in.

I The Sun Came Out
The opening movement, The Sun Came Out is a dreamy reminiscence of the author’s college days and first days of Spring – languidly wanting to soak up mild heat and sunlight all over. “resenting no one and nothing except my clothes, which I badly wanted to take off”

II The Desire
The second movement, The Desire, becomes sinuous and yearning as we delve headfirst into the desire to be naked in the sun, “it feels as innate and universal as thirst”. The singers slide and blur into each other creating rippling layers in energetic short movement.

III Blood Red, Leaves Green
The author notes “haemoglobin and chlorophyll resemble each other almost exactly” that what makes our blood red, lets plants ‘eat the sunshine’. The third movement, Blood Red, Leaves Green is zooms telescopically from atoms to cells to larger thoughts in bed of playful minimalism.

IV Hiding Nothing
The final movement, Hiding Nothing, is both personal and cosmic, spacious and spiritual, full of silence and rich harmonic textures. I think the author Salvatore Scibona puts it best: “Your unexceptional body, your only creature — is living its only life. Right now. Hiding nothing from the ongoing explosion that started it and sustains it.”

A love is a love is a love

Music by Meta Cohen (they/she)

This song cycle is a love letter to queerness and the LGBTQIA+ community.

In writing a cycle of queer love songs, it was very important to me that the pieces explore different kinds of love. Queerness has historically been censored or relegated to the margins, so I wanted to insist on queer sexual desire and romantic love being present, centred and witnessed. Equally important, however, are other kinds of queer connections: platonic love; friendships; kinship between queer people; and perhaps more deeply a love of queerness itself and the experience of navigating the world as a queer person.

In a sense, perhaps these are more songs on love than ‘love songs’ – I was reluctant to write a set of ballads, and wanted instead to challenge what you might expect from a love song. The result is four songs that are stylistically quite diverse but share common threads and bleed across each other. I worked with four amazing queer Australian poets to explore these different intersections of queerness and love and encouraged them not to shy away from the complexities these might raise.

The cycle’s title – an homage to the wonderful lesbian modernist writer Gertrude Stein – reflects these intricate and complex relationships. Riffing off ‘love is love’ – a phrase often crucially used in equal rights campaigns as a strategy to make adversaries of queerness see our love as equivalent (or perhaps equally ‘worthy’ of the term) – this cycle instead looks to position queer love as not ‘equivalent’ to straight love, but rather its own rich world.

One queer love is not another; queer love cannot be flattened into one homogenous group, so while these songs might share the common thread of queerness, each one can only evoke the particular experience of its makers. These pieces are not made to be a monolithic representation of queer love: they are an invitation to continue exploring its infinite different facets.

This project could go on endlessly. My deepest thanks to Divisi Chamber Singers and Coady Green-Smith for their championing of new queer work and their insistence of the place of queerness in the classical music canon. My thanks also to the ABC for the opportunity to create this piece.

I you

Text by Nikki Vivika

Some of the deepest queer encounters and friendships begin online.

you – the first song in the cycle – evokes the intimacy of midnight messenger windows, screen glows and keyboard clicks. Nikki Viveca’s text explores sharing a queer experience with someone you’ve never met in person, and the ways in which we choose to disclose queerness to those we trust. These people might not always be the people around us, so I was very interested in the bespoke intimacy of being close with someone far away.

you explores the specific type of love and understanding between queer people who might share common experiences, whether this be of lost dreams by day, or by the trusting of a secret name not yet known to anyone else by night.

II they

Text by Vi Hu

The second song in the cycle – they – is about the buzzing of anonymous encounters and the different faces one might meet (and take on) across a queer life. Where the first song dealt with intimacy between people known to each other (if only online), Vi Hu’s text explores connection found among the anonymous many, evoking a flurry of night-time activity, heat and sex that dissolves at daybreak. To some listeners, this might conjure the world of cruising, saunas and hookups, and others might find very different resonances – eye contact made across a room at a queer event, brief overlaps between queer people. What is common is the fluttering excitement – and sometimes overwhelm – of these queer encounters, be these sexual or otherwise. Within the tapestry of different faces are also the ones we take on ourselves, presenting differently in each different encounter.

Amongst this throbbing energy, there are also quiet moments of connection – in this case, in a love duet sung between the bass and baritone voices. I hope these moments of contemplation, where norms are challenged, might allow us to see the world around us differently – if only for an instant.

The song places us in a world known only to the community experiencing it, and completely inscrutable to the outside world. In this sense, they is an ode to lives lived outside of heteronormative expectations.

III she

Text by Savanna Wegman

she is the third song in the cycle. It might be the most sapphic thing I have ever written.

Set to text by Savanna Wegman, she is about intimacy: the intimacy of breath and the little things you notice about someone when you feel something for them. But while it is undoubtedly about these small details, I also wanted it to feel elemental and sublime, and guide us to unexpected places.

In a sense, she is an incantation that might hark back to Sappho – one of the earliest queer women we know of – and the thing I love most about her writing: the beautiful balance of reverence, awe and desire.

IV we

we is about queer kinship, visibility and finding yourself. Leona Cohen’s text explores the different ways in which we might look around as queer people: in fear; to search for those like us; in realisation; and then – hopefully – in ecstatic awe and delight at the queer people surrounding us. At the heart of this song is visibility: the importance of being seen – rather than looked at – and seeing people like you.

we is an expression of love for the experience of finding queer ways of existing in the world, while not ignoring their challenges. In this final song of the cycle, fragments of melodies found in other movements make their way back into the music. I wanted to end with the utopian joy of discovering queerness – a potential ‘at the edges of perception’, barely imaginable, and then abundantly, joyfully present.

Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan

Music by Joseph Twist

XV(a) The Years

In 1972, Dr. George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, a lecturer at the University of Adelaide was attacked at a gay beat, thrown into the River Torrens and drowned. 50 years on, Joe Twist’s new oratorio Watershed: The Death of Dr. Duncan, shines a light into this appalling story and how his death changed Australia and led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in South Australia and then the whole country. This movement of the work was actually cut from the premiere meaning that this movement is a world premiere!

The full work was premiered this month at Adelaide Festival to raving reviews, it was jointly commissioned by South Australian State Opera, Adelaide Festival, and Feast Festival. The composer kindly agreed to licence this movement to Divisi for its premiere.

We have some fantastic news, Divisi has been granted funding from ABC Classic FM to record and commission and new song-cycle by, Compose Queer composer, Meta Cohen with four new texts by Leona Cohen, Savanna Wegman, Christopher Healy, and Victor Hu. Bailey and I are so excited to be able to continue the work started at Compose Queer to bring Queer experiences into the mainstream of classical music. We owe so much to the generous donors who took a chance on us in our Australian Cultural Fund campaign for Compose Queer. It was the success of that program and the confidence it gave us as a choir that directly lead to this success. We are so thankful for the chance you took on us and we are so excited to show you even more fantastic music by local, emerging, queer composers.

Check out the article and the other winners here.

“Compose Queer” performed by Divisi

Friday, 26 February 2021, 75 Reid St, Fitzroy North

Review by Peter Campbell

Attending any live vocal performance under COVID restrictions is a liberating experience, but to hear one so well presented was uplifting and affirming. Founded in 2018 by students at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Divisi exists to provide experience in consort singing and artistic management as well as an avenue for new music, especially by Australian composers.

The program had high social as well as music aims, being at once a forum for experimentation and a safe place for personal expression. “Compose Queer” was designed to expand the current “limited opportunity for composers to express their queerness at a professional level” and at the same time help raise awareness of “queer issues in classical music”.

Conceived two years ago, four emerging queer-identifying composers were commissioned to write for the ensemble, and they would be mentored by Sydney-based composer/performer Sally Whitwell and Melbourne-based conductor/composer Steven Hodgson. The new works were workshopped in March 2020 before COVID put a stop to performances. Rescheduled to 2021, the concert was again delayed by Melbourne’s latest lockdown but finally took place on 26 February.

Not only was the music new, but so, to many, was the venue. The hall, a converted community centre-cum-church, proved extremely supportive to live acoustic music, with a beautifully sculpted curved wooden ceiling and space appropriate for a socially distanced audience.

The program was carefully curated, with the new works scattered amongst others by well-known Australian and American choral composers. The new was thus heard and seen as natural and normal. The audience itself was drawn into this powerful reinforcement of music as an inclusive and accepting medium. The opportunity here was to enable queer composers to take the main stage and to convey a personal message and the large and supportive crowd approved.

The concert came just a week before the Sydney Mardi Gras and the ABC’s Festival of Female Composers. These are important events in the process of acceptance and equality and recognise our past failures to acknowledge the worth of individuals regardless of their background or personal characteristics. This was the essence of “Composer Queer”, encapsulated in the new composition by Robert McIntyre, “Syrup and Silicone”, in which he unpacks the “irony of such an accepting community creating a need to conform to a set of criteria, instead of thriving in our individuality”.

The works presented were certainly varied and individual. The program opened with two pieces by Queensland composer Joseph Twist, recently returned from several years in the US. They were sonorous and atmospheric, showing off the excellent technical and musical skills of the eight young singers. Works by Americans Caroline Shaw and Nico Muhly, leaders of the under-40 generation of choral composers extending the trail blazed by Eric Whitacre, followed. There was some beautiful, soft and high singing, but the challenges of one-voice-per-part in this repertoire were not always met in Shaw’s “And the Swallow”, while the dramatic piano accompaniment in Muhly’s “Set me as a Seal” provided more support for the vocalists.

The first of the commissioned works was Lore Burns’s “Here is a Safe Place”. A setting of the composer’s own text, the piece employs tone chimes (similar to hand bells) to create a comforting and meditative atmosphere. Its simple melodies emerge from and return to unisons in a work that is largely tonal such that the momentary dissonances and suspensions always retreat back to safety and peace.

Walt Whitman’s 1860s poem “Are you the New Person Drawn Toward me?” provided the base text for Ariel Bonnell’s composition, to which she has added her own set of words commonly thought of as queer “identity markers”. Her work makes us question judgement purely on appearance through a loungey jazz idiom in the piano accompaniment and successful close-harmony writing for the voices.

In fact, the rest of the program was with piano, sensitively and expressively contributed by Coady Green. This consisted of Sally Whitwell’s six-movement “Spectrum” and the remaining two commissioned works. Whitwell’s texts, largely by her, are not gender inspired, but the form of the work is, the movements illustrating, in order, the colours of the rainbow flag. Whitwell wrote it as a song cycle in 2015 and arranged it for piano and vocal ensemble for this project. There is again an underlying jazz idiom, working through a variety of moods to suit the colours and featuring a number of excellently presented vocal solos. Perhaps the rippling piano in “Blue” was at times a little too insistent, but the march-like finale, “The Aubergine Queen” (Purple), was an appropriately light-hearted way to finish the sequence.

McIntyre’s “Syrup and Silicone” is a highly personal work, setting a commissioned text by Savanna Wegman. The fight for identity without judgement or assumption is constant for the queer community, and McIntyre gave us delicate clouds of dissonance above the piano, clearly evoking the penetrating “searchlights” in the text.

The concert conclude with Meta Cohen’s “(I)dentity”, perhaps the most ambitious and complex work on the program and requiring the support of conductor Steven Hodgson. Cohen introduced the work, saying “no one is just one thing”, and the piece played on the word “I” throughout Gertrude Stein’s poem. The rhythmic drive through the piece underpinned an excellent grasp of independent lines anchored by a repeated refrain.

The masked audience was somehow fitting: able to express individuality through choice of pattern or style, but at the same time blinding us to some of the features behind them. It was an unlikely metaphor for the experience of the concert. Navigating the complex world identity and acceptance was central to Divisi’s purpose in presenting “Compose Queer” and the result was a night of impassioned music from both experienced and emerging artists, all of whom should be praised for their bravery and self-belief.

There were occasional moments of hesitancy in performance, and of musical ideas that did not quite “work”, but nothing can be achieved without making that valiant, first attempt. This was an outstanding concert by a young group of talented musicians still exploring their potential. I look forward to their next endeavour and their next confident step.

Peter Cambell is a singer, composer and musicologist specialising in Australian choral history. He is Registrar, Trinity College Theological School, University of Divinity, and Honorary Research Fellow, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne.