Roland Beach

Tomorrow! 😃

Happy 🏳️‍⚧️ and Trans Music Tuesday! No showcase of trans musicians would be complete without Wendy Carlos (she/her), a trailblazer for trans musicians and electronic music in general. She was an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer, helping popularize it with her Billboard-charting 1968 album “Switched-On Bach”. At a time when new modular synths were thought to only be useful as experimental noise generators, she helped shape the development of the Moog and used it in intricate arrangements of Bach keyboard pieces.

She is also well-known as a composer, most famously as the composer and performer of the scores for A Clockwork Orange and Tron. Here is a wonderful 1989 interview with her, showing her creative process with both subtractive Moog synthesizers and later additive digital synths:

Wendy Carlos Interview 1989 BBC Two （✿＾－＾) ~~**TERFS/TRANSPHOBES DO NOT INTERACT**~~ （＾－＾✿）Wendy appeared on the BBC in 1989 and is best known for the scores to A Clockwork Orange, Tron and Th...

Coming soon to the Western University campus: a Trans Day of Visibility concert and film screening! At 7:30pm on April 1, come to Talbot College room 101 to hear performances from students in the trans/nonbinary/2-spirit community and view the new documentary Tessitura (dir. Lydia Cornett & Brit Fryer), about transgender opera singers. I'm putting this together with the help of the Society of Graduate Students at Western University Pride Commission and Western's EDI office, and I hope to see lots of people there!

(Photo: soprano Breanna Sinclairé, as seen on the Tessitura poster.)

Happy Trans Music Tuesday! This week’s artist is Lucas Silveira. He made history in 2006 as the first out trans man to be signed to a major label with his rock band The Cliks. In the years since, he has made more music with the Cliks (both before and after he started T in 2010), and gone independent as a solo artist. I listened to his solo album “The Goddamn Flowers” on repeat in the nerve-wracking early days of my voice change, and found it super reassuring.

In addition to leading by example, Silveira directly mentors trans and non-binary music artists through the Toronto-based “Transcendence In Sound” program.

Here’s the Cliks’ groovy single “Savanna”:

The Cliks - Savanna - Official Music Video- Directed by The Young Astronauts. Song written by Lucas Silveira & Hill KourkoutisProduced by Hill KourkoutisMixed by Barb Morrison & Hillary JohnsonMastered...

Finally posting some Sweeney pics! This was such a fun show. I got to do it all: be evil, make silly faces, sing ridiculous high notes, and get murdered by my awesome voice teacher! What a wild ride 🥧

Happy Trans Music Tuesday! Today’s featured artist is Liniker (she/her), a Black Brazilian singer-songwriter. Her music, solo and with her band Liniker e os Caramelows, mixes elements of soul, jazz, reggae, samba, and more. She made history in 2022 for being the first trans artist to win a Latin Grammy, with her win for Best MPB Album (Música Popular Brasileira). Here’s a beautiful atmospheric performance of her song “Presente”:

Liniker - Presente | A COLORS SHOW Brazilian soul musician and vocalist Liniker delivers a spellbinding performance of previously unreleased single ‘Presente’.Subscribe to COLORS https://www.y...

This International Women's Day, I'm thinking about how the opera singer workforce is disproportionately women, and yet the available principal roles are disproportionately for men. The rigidity of gendered casting norms denies cis women equal employment opportunities and equal pay and pushes many trans people out of the field entirely.

This excellent article from Dr. Dana Vargas of The Empowered Musician talks more about the problem (and cites some staggering statistics, like an analysis by Brooke Larimer showing 152 male principal roles and only 96 female principal roles in the 25 most performed operas).

What can opera companies and training programs do to address these disparities?
-Pick fairer seasons! There are many excellent operas, both old and new, with female or gender-flexible roles making up the majority of the cast. Not every opera in a season has to be composed by dead cis white men for a cast of mostly men.
-Normalize gender- and octave-swapping of roles to to fit singers who aren't cis men!
-Hire more people who aren't cis men in leadership positions!

Supply and Demand: Gender Disparity in opera (Part 1) — The Empowered Musician Approximately three out of every four singers that graduate today with a bachelors or masters degree in vocal performance are female. So what’s the big deal? 

If you want to help trans Kansans whose IDs have been revoked, here's an established local org that's providing direct funding for things like fees and travel to the DMV (a major expense for people who can't legally drive until they get new IDs, and are now dependent on rideshare).

Please help me spread this!

Masoud El Amaratly was an early-20th-century singer from what is now Iraq, and a mustarjil, a word in his Ahwari culture for what we might now call a trans man! He started publicly identifying as a man around age 18, and also started gaining success as a singer around that period. He recorded songs in the abuḏiya style in the 1920s and 30s, which were popular throughout Iraq and in neighboring countries. He’s a great example of how trans people lived and thrived even in the past, and have been welcomed in regions that now are much more hostile. Transphobia is not inevitable or eternal – it comes and goes, and we’re still here.

مسعود العمارتلي 🎞📽 خدري الچاي ( تسجيل اسطوانة جودة عالية ) 1925 Masoud Al-Amartli #ميسان #أرشيف #زمان #فنون #شعبيه #البصرة