'We need to be visible': Sask. composer diversifying classical music with queer love songs
When Stuart Beatch first read the poems, it was meaningful they spoke to his own experience as a gay man
A Regina-born composer is bringing visibility to the LGBTQ community through classical music.
Stuart Beatch, who now lives in Edmonton, has published He Opens, queer love songs for baritone and piano. It's not his first composition but He Opens is one based on the poetry of a friend.
The performer Adam Arnold first had the idea to turn the work Matthew Stepanic, a poet and writer-in-residence at Edmonton Public Library, into music. Stepanic's work also explores gay love, loss and springtime imagery.
"We just kind of flipped through a collection of his poems and found some that I thought were particularly musical that really spoke to me," said Beatch, who sat down with Stepanic to discuss his work.
"They're all about different lovers that he's had in the past but in this case I pulled together five poems that seem to tell a single story."
Esthetically, the poems spoke to Beatch because they were elegant, well written and subtle, while still having clear themes.
"Then, the fact that they are about gay love gives them a more immediate meaning," he said.
"Anyone can read love poetry and infer their own experience out of it but here, it's really writing about something that I have experienced myself."
The connection for himself as a gay man to read works like this is "extraordinarily important," Beatch said.
"We need to be visible. We need to be making these stories known and I'm not trying to hide them or stay underground."
In the past few decades, there has been more queer visibility in public and in contemporary culture but there's still resistance in classical music, Beatch said, partly because it's a very traditional medium that is commonly enjoyed by older generations.
"It is a medium that still has life and vibrancy and a future but I feel like it's up to us to really push and make sure that we're not just doing the same thing again," he said.
Beatch wants classical music to represent everyone's experience.
"It seems recently I've found myself in this niche of writing very explicitly gay music, and it's something that I really enjoy because I feel like for those people who have the same experience as me, that it is even more meaningful for them," he said.
In the past, Beatch has collaborated The Fourth Choir, an LGBT choir group based in London, England.
"Recently, I did a project with them which was all about the legalization of homosexuality 50 years ago in the U.K. and using some texts which were contemporary to that period," he said.
The texts spoke to the fear and desire for people to be acknowledged and loved, he said.
"And now we're coming into a time where they're able to be free. So, they find a lot of meaning in this music."
If it's meaningful to one person then I feel like I've done my job.- Stuart Beatch
"I really hope that people look at this music and see its value and see its importance and that they will start to write stuff like this," he said.
There's more queer stories being put on stage in theatre but not too many in vocal or choral music. Beatch said he has experienced some resistance personally.
An American publisher sent Beatch a "trite" rejection letter which said some of his texts were not appropriate to be set to music.
"Maybe they're uncomfortable at the stories being told but that means, to me at least, that it's even more important.
"And honestly if it's meaningful to one person, then I feel like I've done my job."