Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

What makes you you?

I'm Meta. You can call me Meta or M. You can call me she/her or they/them. You can call me Austrian or Australian. You can call me a composer, or a theatre-maker, or something in between.

I'm not very often just one thing - I'm not sure many of us are. So I wrote this piece as a way of unpacking my own queer hybridity. And for me there is no better writer to choose for this than Gertrude Stein, a modernist writing in the 30s who exploded everything. For this, I have chosen a text that is another hybrid thing - somewhere in between a poem and a play.

(i)dentity explores some of my own questions about rigid identities and labels, and above all, the language we use to talk about other people. On the one hand, defining identity is very important strategically for us as queer people for civil rights, and a sense of self, in a world that rendered us invisible for a long time (and still punishes a failure to conform). But oin the other hand, I wanted to explore my own resistance to rigid categories that simplify the complexities of my particular queerness.

(i)dentity questions the set of assumptions we bring into any interaction, as soon as someone walks into a room. The piece acknowledges the seriousness and difficulty of (not) knowing who you are, but also, utimately, the joy and playfulness in subverting expectations and thinking about the vast spectrum of identities that might be available to us.

Work Details

Year: 2021

Instrumentation: SSAATTBB vocal ensemble, piano.

Duration: 5 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Commission note: Commissioned by Compose Queer Initiative, Divisi Chamber Singers.. (i)dentity was commissioned and performed by Divisi Chamber Singers as part of the inaugural Compose Queer program.

First performance: by Divisi Chamber Singers, Coady Green — 12 Feb 21. 75 Reid St, Fitzroy North, VIC