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Digital Audio Album
A Love Is A Love Is A Love : a queer song cycle / Meta Cohen.
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Work Overview
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 explored 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.
Work Details
Year: 2022
Instrumentation: SSATBB vocal ensemble, piano.
Duration: 20 min.
Difficulty: Advanced
Contents note: I. You -- II. They -- III. She -- IV. We.
Commission note: Commissioned as part of the ABC Classic Composer Commissioning Initiative. The cycle was recorded at the ABC in May 2022.
First performance: by Divisi Chamber Singers at Divisi Chamber Singers (Chapel off Chapel) on 2 Jul 2022
Texts by Nikki Viveca, Vi Hu, Savanna Wegman, Leona Cohen.
Subjects
- In the form/style of: Song Cycles
Performances of this work
12 Mar 2023: at Australian Art Song for Chamber Choi (fortyfivedownstairs). Featuring Divisi Chamber Singers, Coady Green.
2 Jul 2022: at Divisi Chamber Singers (Chapel off Chapel). Featuring Divisi Chamber Singers.
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