The young musicians got together to rehearse just twice, on the two nights before the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s annual holiday benefit concert. But it was enough time to create an easy rapport with each other, exchange Instagram account details, and track down four different ways adults told them to get a round of applause.
Music students as young as 10 and up to college level studies joined Toronto’s professional musicians. Queer Songbook Orchestra ahead of the newly incorporated nonprofit’s annual fundraiser Tuesday night, fine-tuning and running the four-song playlist they’ve planned.
Celebrating often untold stories of queer excellence, the impromptu nature of the performance adds to the sense of close community and familiarity of the unique project, founded by Shaun Brodie in 2014, according to several musicians who participate year after year and speak with National Observer of Canada.
“It’s not just about the music,” said Micajah Sturgess (Micajah rhymes with papaya), Brodie’s former housemate and longtime member of the company, who records and performs orchestral versions of popular songs that resonate with LGBTQ communities. . “This is about bringing like-minded people together in a caring way that fosters this safe community.”
QSO currently provides around 50 mostly teen queer and allied students from across the Greater Toronto area with access to mentoring and representation from a fully professional, mostly queer volunteer orchestra.
“I think that’s really weird,” said Sturgess, who currently performs the Nutcracker with the National Ballet of Canada. “We are lucky if we find our people.”
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Sturgess, who plays French horn, said it was “very disappointing” when the wave of the Omicron pandemic forced QSO to cancel their live show last Christmas season.
This year’s host, Matt Nethersole, added that many of the working musicians make time in their schedules to participate, including some who travel from Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and elsewhere.
“It’s very good vibes, a very unique experience,” they said.
“We’re lucky if we find our people,” trumpeter @MicajahSturgess tells @5thEstate, about @queersongbook, an orchestra elevating the 2SLGBTQ+ experience in Toronto
The group focused on a planned show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in the summer of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic first struck, causing Brodie to refocus on nurturing local youth talent.
Last summer, the QSO collaborated with internationally renowned trans elder and musician Beverly Glenn Copeland (known as Glenn to his friends at QSO), connecting him with the youth symphony in a handful of practices culminating in a performance at I live in Yonge-Dundas Square. What part of the luminato festival in June.
Tuesday’s performance will include the combined adult and youth group reprising their summer performance of ‘Colour of Anyhow’ (a 1970s song by Glenn) as well as ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas’, ‘This Christmas’ by Dolly Hathaway (a standard song from QSO’s regular holiday shows) and close the night with the ballad ‘Every One of Us’ from the Muppets and John Denver Christmas album.
Members of the Queer Songbook Orchestra practice ‘I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas’ in rehearsal before their Christmas benefit concert. Morgan Sharp Video
At the end of the second and final rehearsal it was made clear to everyone that once their final notes are sounded all players will stand up for applause before the adults are seated and the youth are specifically recognized.
“I really got a lot of inspiration and insight,” Miata Massaquoi Duke, a fifth grader at Montcrest School and the youngest member of the youth contingent, said afterwards. “It’s really nice to see someone who’s older because you get hope, but in a different way. She talks to you in a different way.”
Miata’s mother, Alison Duke, said playing in the youth ensemble was a great experience for her son, who has played the violin for seven years.
“This is a great space and environment for young players like Miata, it’s really important for young players to be in a group where they feel like they have a family, that they have their tribe and that they can grow up in a safe space. ” she said.
This week’s two rehearsal sessions follow several months of planning for Brodie, who invited special guests to share stories of their experiences during the holidays, an often tense time for queer people dealing with complicated family dynamics, and to connect that story with a song. QSO then performs.
“The idea of an ensemble like this feels like a safe space where they could really be themselves and combine those two parts of themselves, their love of music and their own identity,” Brodie said.
Many of the students who complete their online intake form say that it feels safe to be out as themselves in the group in a way that they might not be in their high school ensemble.
“We’ve all cried on stage, listening to the narrators tell their personal stories, and it happens over and over again, and it’s like every time we play,” said Stefan Schneider, a QSO drummer who traveled from his home in Montreal to participate and says that everyone involved is.
“There’s definitely not another band I play in that’s quite like it,” he said of the passion project. “It’s about sharing the beauty and the stories and expanding the family, the Queer Songbook family, including the audience, you know.”
Looking to expand youth repertoire, range
With more sustainable funding, Brodie said he would like to see QSYO meet regularly and develop the repertoire, further guided by the young participants who decide what music to play and stories to tell. He is also looking to expand it to other cities that could support and welcome it, like Vancouver and Montreal in Canada and then others elsewhere.
“What we are offering is a new avenue for queer, trans and non-binary youth, questioners and allies to get involved in a musical project that is a bit different from what is typically offered for teenagers and students, where we are directly participating in the representation of the queer experience”.
He said there’s a lot of similar material to mine, like composer Bill Strayhorn’s often hidden contribution to the reputation of jazz legend Duke Ellington.
Strayhorn, an openly gay black man, wrote several of Ellington’s popular works, including ‘Take The A Train’, from the relative safety of Ellington’s shadow. After his death from cancer in the 1960s, Ellington recorded a collection of Strayhorn compositions entitled “And His Mother Called Him Bill.”
“That has been a big part of our mandate from the beginning, to bring these unknown narratives or untold stories to light,” Brodie said. “Often you know the music, but not the story behind it.”
(The event takes place at the Opera House at 735 Queen St East on Tuesday, December 20 at 7:30 p.m., Tickets can be purchased here)
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / National Observer of Canada