Happy Pride Month everyone!
Hi, I’m Stephen Ryan Jackson, a composer who’s working with Loop38 through the 2022 Texas Composer Collaborative. As a featured composer on the upcoming 610 Composer Showcase, I was invited to be a guest on the Loop38 blog, and I decided to make you a playlist of a few pieces I love, by queer people that I love. I hope you enjoy these works as much as I do!
An important note. This blog/playlist focuses on only a few of the many emerging LGBTQIA+ composers writing music today. It is in no way all encompassing but instead is intended as an invitation for you, the reader to further explore the music of queer artists. Pride and Allyship is something that happens year round, not just during Pride month so I encourage you to listen to these pieces and other music by LGBTQIA+ composers all year round.
View the whole Queer Composer Guided Playlist, which includes the six pieces below AND many more!
(Click on piece titles below for individual video links.)
Greg Nahabedian [they/them] - “SpacePants Visits Cheap City”
(for voice and viola)
Greg Nahabedian is a gender non-binary composer, performer and writer whose projects range from operas, films and chamber music, to spoken word, free improvisation, and punk rock. The descendent of an Armenian refugee, Greg uses a diverse range of influences and musical experiences to create works that simultaneously interact with politics, spirituality and comedy.
SpacePants Visits Cheap City tells the story of when SpacePants and THE TUBE decide to pay a visit to Cheap City. When I first saw that the duo SpacePants and Greg were collaborating together, I immediately knew that I was about to witness something whimsical, queer, and full of a complex lore that I admittedly don’t 100% understand. I however, was NOT prepared for the sequinned sock-puppet narrated by Greg themself, telling a story of an alien sentient tube befriending a rat candy crime boss and getting arrested. Much of Greg’s work revolves around the town of Cheap City (which is described as “a real life city somewhere in America”) and I think of their performances as little episodes or windows into the life and happenings of Cheap City’s people. Some of the characters that walk Cheap City’s streets include “Rat Jenkins”, “The Witch in the Alley” and “The Junk Luggers”. I’m in love with the worlds that Greg creates and I hope you enjoy your next stop in Cheap City.
Yaz Lancaster [they/them] - “intangible landscapes”
(for flute, bass clarinet, violin, piano)
Yaz Lancaster is a Black transdisciplinary artist. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics & the everyday; fragments & collage; and liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist & steel-pannist in a wide variety of settings; and their work is presented in many mediums & collaborative projects. It often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of liberation and identity to natural phenomena and poetics. Their ongoing independent studies navigates prison-industrial-complex abolition, Marxist theory and internet/social media cultures.
In intangible landscapes everything feels simultaneously distant and within arms reach. Repetitive motives come in and out like the sound of passing vehicles. These motives transform over the course of the piece, blooming into a pulsating tutti (introduced in the piano) that’s persistence is heavy and attention seizing. At the climax, the original motives return, fragmented and emotionally transformed by the material that came before. Yaz writes, “intangible landscapes deals with the growing feelings of ennui and isolation I encounter[ed] living in New York over the past six years, and how perceived landscapes of memory shift, breathe and transform over periods of time. Many people I love no longer live here. I question whether a home is a tangible, real place, or if it exists in the intangibility and quiet intimacy of created and/or remembered landscapes that can only exist ephemerally.”
Phong Tran [he/him] - ./f a
(electronics)
Phong Tran is a Brooklyn-based composer, electronicist, and visual artist. His works are heavily inspired by the sound of early synthesizers, late night wikipedia dives, simulation theory, RPGs, and vaporwave eccojams. Phong performs in MEDIAQUEER, a synthesizer and violin duo formed in 2018 with Darian Thomas.
./f a is track 7 from Phong’s second album “The Computer Room”. The sonic world in The Computer Room is inspired by vaporwave, video games, virtual spaces and a nostalgia for his childhood, where hours were joyfully lost behind the glow of his screen. While purely electronic in its sound sources, “The Computer Room” is very much about human interaction with the internet and the emotions, nostalgia, and joy that a young child and a computer can have together. Phong writes “I began thinking about how much of my life has been shaped by virtual spaces. I began seeing those bygone virtual spaces—games and forums—in a physical way. They’re like ghost towns from a pre-MySpace internet; these sites still exist, but no one visits them anymore. I miss them. As a closeted gay Asian kid raised in white suburban Georgia, the computer room was where I could escape, where I could be anything I wanted to be, and, eventually, where I could accept who I was in reality”.
Ryann Daisy Swimmer [she/her] - “I Can’t Teach You Empathy”
(for guitar and pedalboard)
Ryann Daisy Swimmer is an American composer, performer, and curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose musical ethos focuses on the in-between, the blurred lines, and the insignificant. As a composer, Daisy brings her knowledge of theory-heavy composition and instinctive popular music together to create music that could be categorized as classically-influenced experimental music, “indie-classical”, or something else entirely.
I Can’t Teach You Empathy this piece to me evokes the world of bands that shaped my teenage self such as, “Explosions in the Sky”, “This Will Destory You” and “Scale the Summit”. I see this kind of music like a warm blanket of nostalgia, a feeling, a place in my memory. Daisy layers this world of clean ambient delays with a virtuosic, distorted solo line that interacts, interrupts and even argues with the opposing material. Daisy writes, “The title I Can’t Teach You Empathy has become a mantra to me. As much as I can learn from the experiences of others, I am not able to force people to see the humanity in others’ experiences. The subtitle of the piece is A Conversation; however, the structure of the conversation yields no significant progress in changing another’s views. The loops and solo guitar never come to a significant agreement and instead fizzle out. Despite attempts to inspire compassionate individuals, there is only so much that one person can teach.”
Luke Ellard [he/him] - “haven’t yet”
(for clarinet & string trio)
Clarinetist, composer, and new music collaborator Luke Ellard strives for art that is intentional, personal, and intersectional. The heart of his music is sharing stories, experiences, amplifying the voices of others, using music to bring communities together. Luke draws inspiration from broad experiences in hopes of communicating the every day to important topics of our time. His works have been internationally performed by ensembles such as the New Trombone Collective, the University of Texas Symphony Band, Michigan State University Concert Band, Barkada Quartet, Mother Falcon String Quartet, and the North Texas Wind Symphony.
Luke writes, “haven’t yet is a deeply personal work for me about relationships, thought life, and patience. For myself and many other queer people, the kind of relationships and openness cisgender, straight people experience is often delayed (if we’re lucky to experience it at all). There is a pervasive feeling of being behind, having such formative experiences occur later in life. Yet it is difficult to convey these circumstances in a meaningful way to those in more relationally privileged positions.
This piece is about how the longing to find that “someone,” even if you have never met, can quickly turn toward negativity and doubt. In our most vulnerable spaces, insecurities can take over and sometimes it is hard to come down from that ledge. I have felt this. Yet we cannot remain in these space, trusting that what hasn’t already occurred does not mean it won’t in the future.”
Xenia St. Charles Gilbert [she/her] - “Shout This Love Song At The Mirror”
(for three low instruments, megaphone and electronics)
Xenia St. Charles Gilbert is a composer, violinist, singer, and improviser who is obsessed with integrating love, social identity, politics, and the collaborative spirit with music to make the world a better place. Her personal identities and experiences as a trans woman are integral to her music, and she hopes that by being open and honest about her life, she can foster more love and acceptance of trans people and trans experiences. Xenia is frequently inspired by recklessness: the reckless beauty of nature, the reckless musical stunts of Rushad Eggleston, the reckless virtuosity of performers, the reckless fabulousness of Richard Bobo’s bizarre-instrument-making, the reckless desire to try new things, and the reckless kindness of her friends
** Content Warning [Transphobia & Profanity] **
Shout This Love Song At The Mirror is a depiction of the disastrous possible scenarios that can go through a trans person’s mind while trying to live their everyday life. It should be noted that these scenarios, while taking place in the mind of the narrator, are very real scenarios for many trans individuals. The piece is divided into episodic scenarios each beginning with the phrase “Oh sorry, you weren’t listening”. The instruments almost always play in rhythmic unison mimicking a large synthesizer, accompanying the narrator using a megaphone, literally shouting and pleading with her inner self to love herself.
Xenia writes “In the nearly 700 days since coming out as a trans woman, I have slowly been coming to peace with myself. But in spite of that, my mind often tells me I should be doing the opposite, and takes me to dark places, either real or imagined.
Therefore, this piece is a few things:
An embodiment of the chaotic inner ramblings of my brain.
A theatrical event.
A loud and open telling of some deeply personal stories.
A piece of trans art.
A coming out, of sorts.
A reminder.
A celebration.
A love song from myself, to myself.”
Thank you for listening!
- Stephen Ryan Jackson
A little about me…
Stephen Ryan Jackson [he/him] is a Boston-based composer and trumpet player who’s work examines and recreates seemingly indescribable sensations. His music often draws inspiration from careful observation of everyday phenomena; stretching, distorting, and reexamining them in order to create works that avoid the concept of narrative and allow audience’s to reevaluate and find beauty in aspects of daily life that they might overlook.
