About the event:

New voices

This last fall, Community Music Center (CMC) launched New Voices Bay Area TIGQ Chorus, a mixed voice tuition-free choral ensemble for self-identified transgender, intersex, and genderqueer singers. In this chorus, we strive to build a creative, empowered, joyful space for the San Francisco Bay Area TIGQ community, and to encourage voices that have been silenced or shamed to grow and be heard. Made up of singers from beginners to professionals, the chorus performs great music from diverse traditions, builds strong connections, and lifts up the TIGQ community’s strength and struggle through choral singing.

New Ideas

Vocal and musical training can be steeped in long held traditions, often implicitly or explicitly closed to musical and vocal expressions that fall outside of a strict set of rules and guidelines. Trans and Singing is our effort to educate our faculty, students, and the Bay Area vocal community at large on TIGQ singing, and to re-examine our thinking and approaches in light of new information. A day-long symposium on transgender singing, it will be followed by ten weeks of individual vocal instruction for NVBA choir members. The symposium will feature presentations, masterclasses, and demonstrations by experts in TIGQ vocal pedagogy and voice science, panel discussions with TIGQ performers, and an open rehearsal and community sing with NVBA. Both the symposium and the NVBA vocal training will be offered as a service to the community, completely free of charge.

We feel TIGQ vocalism is an emerging field of study of great importance, and are thrilled to bring it to light in the Bay Area. Through deepened understanding we hope to help create more safe spaces for TIGQ vocal expression, music making, and community building, bettering TIGQ people's lives, and broadening musical perspectives in the field at large.