QUEER QWIRES DOWN UNDER
By Kathleen McGuire
Australia's queer choral movement began in 1981 with the Gay Liberation Quire of Sydney. For six years, this group of men was very active in the gay movement in Australia, giving over 300 concerts at all sorts of venues. They crafted lyrics that made social commentary on not just the fight for gay and lesbian rights, but for a host of progressive causes. In 1983 they released an EP single called HORMONES OR JEANS - The Gay Liberation Quire Goes Down On Vinyl, including Hark The Herald Fairies Shout and God Rest Ye Merry Dykes And Poofs.
Now, almost three decades later, the Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) queer choral movement is alive, flourishing, and growing.
Since December 24, 2008, I have been on sabbatical in Australia (my country of origin), away from my position as artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. During my time "down under", I have had the great fortune to visit with Australia's three longest-running queer choruses - Melbourne Gay & Lesbian Chorus (MGLC), Sydney Gay And Lesbian Choir (SGLC), and Canberra Gay And Lesbian Qwire (CGLQ) - and also two of the country's newest groups: Melbourne Gay & Lesbian Youth Chorus (MGLYC) and = LOW REZ =, Melbourne's brand new "metrosexual" men's pops choir. They are among a dozen or so LGBTQI choruses in Australia and New Zealand. GALA Choruses offers Associate Memberships to such choruses for which regular participation in GALA events is impractical, and these Australasian choruses, while distant geographically from their North American counterparts, play a vital leadership role in the history and growth of our global choral movement.
Spending time with the conductors and members of these groups, I learned that choruses around the globe have much in common. Same-gender marriage and equal rights are at the forefront, along with providing a safe, fun, artful, and culturally meaningful environment for members. The members have varied backgrounds and musical training, and share a strong commitment to excellence in order to best serve their communities. They prepare for a few major concerts annually, while also making outreach appearances. They each have only one or two part-time employees (the conductor and pianist) and rely primarily on volunteers to get everything done. They rehearse once a week for a few hours, with the occasional weekend and sectional rehearsal. Members pay dues, buy their own music, supply costumes, pay their own way on tours, and take turns providing refreshments at rehearsal.
Similarities aside, however, there is still much we can learn from one another in different parts of the world. For instance, since mixed choruses are the norm here, there is a rich body of queer-specific SATB music. I experienced some highly innovative work, including a fully-staged (and queered) opera, a commissioned piece from a major composer that left me spellbound, an all-Beatles concert with a message of love, a youth chorus model (and vocal quality) unlike any I've seen before, and new men's pop arrangements influenced by Amsterdam.
WORLD'S FIRST QUEER OPERA
Sydney Gay And Lesbian Choir
www.sglc.org.au
Of course we know that all opera is queer(!), but as far as this author can tell, never before has an LGBT chorus produced a fully-staged opera.
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir started in 1991 after its founder, Rob Holland, had attended Gay Games in Vancouver. Having seen choruses perform at the Games, he returned to Sydney, wrote a letter that was published in a gay newspaper inviting singers to form a choir, and the rest is history!
Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a month-long festival that, this year, included SGLC's The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell at the Tom Mann Theatre, February 19 - 21, 2009. Choir members embodied the opera chorus (as well as understudy roles), clad in brightly colored, Japanese-style futuristic street clothes. Principal characters were played by emerging vocalists from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (with the support of SCM's opera department), and the 20-piece Sydney Chamber Orchestra - complete with a real harpsichord - added authenticity and support. Some roles and genders were switched so that same-gender couples resulted, music was selectively cut to emphasize the chorus and to make the work more accessible to the Mardi Gras audience.
According to the program notes, "This version of The Fairy Queen is unlike any other. It dispenses with Shakespeare's script for A Midsummer Night's Dream, designed to run alongside Purcell's music, and instead provides a new plot focusing on the exploits of Titania, Oberon and their Fairy Chorus. Purcell's music is a comment on marriage, and transformed readily into a debate over same-sex marriage and possible other queer alternatives."
The chorus's singing was the highlight for me, and stage director Sharna Gavin did a marvelous job teaching these new thespians opera stagecraft. A favorite moment was a traditional maypole dance rendered as a stylized, leather-clad group bondage scene!
Soloist Bernie (pictured in rehearsal) played the roles of Hyman and Young Lover. At a celebratory barbecue after the final performance, I asked him about his experience with SGLC:
"I enjoyed being tied up a little too much! Being in this production helped me see the gay world with a new perspective. It was my first time being with gay people away from stereotypical environments. Especially for Asian guys, too many people want us only for how we look but they don't really want to know us as people with a different cultural background."
The visionary Artistic Director, Sarah Penicka-Smith, who spent half a decade methodically planning this ambitious production and whose execution of this - her first - opera was truly admirable, had no idea that this event was a "first" for the queer choral movement. Houses were packed - 1000 saw the opera, many of whom were attending their first-ever opera - and a rollicking good time was had by all.
An audience member declared: "Inspired genius. Purcell would have loved it."
Stay tuned for The Fairy Queen DVD, including a full performance of the opera as well as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.
And now, a history lesson:
The Experience of Queering an Opera
No doubt introduced only for comic effect, the gay subtext of this scene is but thinly veiled by the pretense that one of the men is really a woman. The concept of the molly - an effete man or a sodomite - is documented from the early eighteenth century, a close enough era to The Fairy Queen's genesis to suggest the concept was forming in Purcell's day.
Molly houses were taverns or private rooms where homosexual men could meet and consort with each other privately. Patrons, known as 'mollies,' sometimes dressed in women's clothing and used female personae. Thomas describes the molly house scene as part of a 'rich and openly libertine subculture' and claims patrons were much gossiped about in the London scene. This suggests a probable awareness among many of Purcell's audience that a man in woman's habit had a deeper connection to London society than a mere comic turn.
Yet when all is said and done, it is probably not the fact that we can go a-gay hunting through the text of Fairy Queen which has lent it so well to queering. Here we return to queer musicology and Suzanne Cusick's delightful argument about our response to musical texts. Cusick argues that audiences are trained to receive music on our backs, so to speak, in a heterosexual power paradigm: 'We are people who say "yes" or "no," but not "how about it?". For Cusick, our focus on texts leaves only the composer in the initiating position. This way we run the risk of forgetting that music is something we do.
Cusick calls for us to take more varied positions in our relationships to music - to engage with it in ways that have meaning for us, and which allow us to play with our relationship to the world at large. Not just to receive a tradition, but to take it on and have it reflect our lived experience. This is Cusick's way of queering music, and, without even realising it, through Fairy Queen it has become ours.
© Sarah Penicka- Smith 2009 (reprinted by permission)
HEARTLAND
REVISITED
Canberra Gay and Lesbian Qwire was founded in 1992 by Chris Ashcroft (whom I visited in Mudgee, NSW, in February). Chris also sang with San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus for several years. Musical Director Leanne Linmore has directed the group since 1996 and is the longest-serving conductor of an LGBT chorus in Australia.
I visited a CLGQ rehearsal on March 3, 2009. 25 singers rehearsed music for an upcoming Folk Festival, as well as their June concert. The rehearsal began with sectionals, then the full group reconvened. Among other pieces, they sang Never Turning Back - a chestnut for many choruses in North America. Conductor Leanne Linmore invited me to lead the rehearsal of Sure On This Shining Night, which the Qwire sang beautifully.
A highlight of the rehearsal was in preparation for a civil union celebration. The Qwire sang For All Of Us, by Peter J. Casey. The happy couple, Chris and Susan, were the first same-gender couple to be legally registered in the Australian Capital Territory (i.e. Canberra). They had already been together 24 years. Susan, a college professor, showed me around Canberra the next day (since it was my first visit to Australia's capital) and told me how she and Chris had waited in the early hours for the doors to open for the registry - they were determined to be first!
Recent CGLQ performances include the AIDS Candlelight Vigil at the National Museum, and by-invitation on the steps of old Parliament House for the opening of the Museum for Democracy. CGLQ will host the SGLC and MGLC on June 30th for a performance of Heartland by Australian composer Matthew Hindson. In 2002 I conducted a festival chorus at Gay Games in Sydney, singing Stand Up - a movement from this startling work. 8 years after its premiere, Australia's three oldest gay and lesbian choruses will gather together in June to sing it again. It is a powerful piece that is challenging, ground-breaking, fun and rewarding for singer and audience alike.
Heartland was commissioned by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir for the first Australasian Choral Festival, with financial assistance from the Australia Council, the commonwealth government's Arts funding and advisory body. Heartland was especially created for first performance on April 15, 2001, as part of a festival of combined gay and lesbian choirs from throughout Australia and New Zealand.
To learn more about Heartland, visit: http://www.hindson.com.au/wordpress/2005/01/31/-2001/
BEATLE-MANIA 50 YEARS ON
Melbourne Gay & Lesbian Chorus
http://www.mglc.org.au/
Melbourne Gay & Lesbian Chorus is Australia's oldest gay and lesbian choral organization. It was founded in 1990 by my gay brother, Lawrence McGuire. One night at a party, he and I listened to a record of a male chorus. Upon inquiry, we learned that we were listening to San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus Tour America '81 album. In 1990, AIDS was prevalent in the news in Australia. The gay community was shed in a very dark light. Sick of it, and sick of the disunity in the community, and with the experience of having grown up with lesbians (myself and our aunt), Lawrence decided to start a choir for gay men and lesbians.
Now, almost 20 years later, I was given the opportunity to conduct MGLC as guest conductor for Love Is All You Need - A Tribute To The Beatles, in two performances at the Darebin Arts and Entertainment Centre, May 16, 2009. The program was emceed by John-Michael Howson (pictured with me, backstage), an Australia TV and radio personality who had seen The Beatles in concert, "before they were really famous." We also educated the audience about Brian Epstein, The Beatles' early manager who happened to be gay. Epstein organized the matching mop-top hairdos and the slick, matching suits. "Who else but a gay man could have done that!"
In Act I, chorus members each wore mop-top wigs, black suits, white shirts and skinny retro ties, while performing many of The Beatles slower ballads. In My Life was dedicated to the recent bushfire victims of the devastating Black Saturday fires in Victoria, not far from where the concert was held.
Act II was a change of pace as chorus members donned '60s psychedelic hippy garb. Highlights were Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, complete with strobe lighting and mirror ball, and a choreographed Yellow Submarine, including an actual (cardboard cut-out) submarine. The audience sing-along was an extensive medley, with the Youth Chorus interjecting with When I'm 64.
The full house was up on its feet and in the aisles for the encore of Twist And Shout. It was an amazing experience for us all.
A week after the concerts, I asked MGLC president, Greg Cooper, what he'd like to share about his Chorus. Here are the various points he raised:
- Everyone is always welcome to visit us. Drop in anytime! Send us an email; there'll be a cup of tea waiting. We'd be delighted to see them.
- Choruses from overseas are our family, part of our extended family of choice.
- Men and women together? OMG! This has been a myth-busting experience for both sexes, breaking down stereotypes about each other.
- Our 20th anniversary next year is a very, very important event
- We'd love to see GALA set up Skype conferencing so we can get to know others overseas
- We like to be prepared, sing well, look good. We value excellence. We like to work hard.
YOUTH CHORUS AUSSIE-STYLE
http://www.mglc.org.au/youthchorus.php
Melbourne Gay & Lesbian Youth Chorus, the first group of its kind in Australasia, began in August, 2005, founded by Jonathon Welch. The model upon which it operates is very different from its North American counterparts. All of the members, who age 16 - 25, are also members of MGLC. The Youth Chorus rehearses for an hour immediately before the "adult" chorus's rehearsal. In dealing with laws regarding minors, all members of MGLC sign and adhere to a Code of Conduct.
The Youth Chorus, numbering 10 members, is phenomenal. In The Beatles concert they sang Blackbird, Will I, and Imagine. It was simply stunning. They have recently released their first CD: Count Me In.
MEET =LOW REZ=
Melbourne Male Pop Choir
www.lowrezmelbourne.com
This new group of 25 men made its concert debut on May 24, 2009, at the Uniting Church of St. Kilda, directed by Dene Menzel. Its first public performance was on January 26 - Australia Day - singing Peter Allen's I Still Call Australia Home.
The impetus for the formation of Low Rez came from partners Nick Barker-Pendree and Rob Roelofs. They had sung in a similar group in Amsterdam, missed the experience when they moved to Australia, so set to work to start up something similar in Melbourne. Matt Sauvarin - a founding member of MGL Youth Chorus - helped them co-found LOW REZ.
They described some teething problems getting the group started, including finding a suitable conductor and retaining membership, but any challenges were long forgotten at the concert. Along with emcee/guest artist cabaret favorite Trevor Jones, it was a wonderful debut. They loosened up the audience first with a 30-minute champagne meet-and-greet, then went into their polished pops program. Highlights included a fabulous arrangement of I'll Be There, a hilariously choreographed The Bitch Is Back, and Jones' audience sing-along of Bohemian Rhapsody. The concert was low-tech (with only a piano and occasional tambourine, no PA, and minimal lighting), but the performance was high energy. I chuckled during the remarks at the end of the concert when Rob told the audience that this group identifies as "metrosexual" because some of the guys are straight!
To hear recordings from the concert visit: http://lowrezmelbourne.com/recordings/
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