Only This Room
Recorded live on June 13th, 2025 at Coffey Street Studio, Brooklyn, New York
Only This Room is an immersive, site-specific evening of music and performance collaboratively devised by an intergenerational cohort of queer artists: international composer and performance artist Anthony R. Green, acclaimed yangqin player Mantawoman (Silkroad Ensemble), singer and harpist Ruth Cunningham (Anonymous 4), marimbist and cultural activist Steph Davis, and ChamberQUEER cofounder and soprano Danielle Buonaiuto, and featuring cellist and CQ cofounder Jules Biber. Co-conceived with award-winning composers inti figgis-vizueta and Eve Beglarian, Only This Room weaves together words and music of queer ancestors past and present, imagining new ways to create a shared genealogy and manifest a vision for the future.
ChamberQUEER is a Brooklyn-based organization that highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary & historical music and reimagines the classical concert experience as a radically inclusive gathering space & musical community for the 21st century. To learn more about us, visit www.chamberqueer.org
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PROGRAM
Margaret Bonds: Troubled Water (at 2:25)
Eve Beglarian - June Jordan: CALLING ON ALL SILENT MINORITIES (at 7:48)
Steph Davis, arr. for the ensemble: I go to prepare a place for you. (at 10:26)
Ruth Cunningham - Elizabeth Cunningham: The Trees Know (at 18:53)
Anthony R. Green: TO ALL THOSE WHO WERE STRIPPED OF A CHANCE TO BE (at 26:36)
Anthony R. Green: Rest in Pow’r (at 39:17)
Zhou Deming: Joyous Xinjiang (at 43:54)
SOPHIE - Cecile Believe, arr. Mantawoman: Is It Cold In The Water? (at 48:57)
Caroline Shaw: Limestone & Felt (at 53:28)
Eve Beglarian - Anne Sexton: only your dolls (at 59:44)
Mantawoman: Avatar (at 1:07:49)
Trad. Lobi gyil song, transc. Steph Davis: Banyere yo (at 1:13:03)
Ruth Cunningham: Breathe Deep (at 1:16:49)
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
When the CQ co-founders initially thought through the theme of queer ancestry, we departed from a concept that has often informed our process – that as “classical musicians” we inherited an extra genealogy in the form of the canon of classical music literature, and which we, alongside many others in the field, wish to interrogate. We don’t just aim to populate it with forgotten folks, though the ongoing project of rewriting musical history is a very important undertaking. We also want to take a hard look at the very idea of genealogy. Perhaps the linear, even teleological way that we think about genealogy and ancestry limits our understanding of ourselves as queer people. As queer people we don’t always have the luxury of self-identification, the rootedness in biological family or in race/ethnicity, or the sense of continuity that we typically associate with ancestry, heritage, and a historically-informed sense of self. And as queer musicians, we have often felt invisible, erased, and neglected by the story of classical music in a similar way. We were interested in having dialogues, musical and otherwise, with other artists whose work engages with concepts of lineage, identity, rootedness, and interconnection, to see how their perspectives could expand and enrich this initial, broad concept.
The conversations that transpired were far-ranging, enlivening, intimate and sometimes difficult. A serious concern was raised early in the process: what do we gain from thinking about the past in this incredibly urgent present moment, when the material conditions of survival for so many, queer and otherwise, are extremely tenuous? During Monday’s water ritual for witnessing, Naomi Woo asked our group, “What do you think these ancestors need from us right now?” I hadn’t really thought specifically about how that question could address the former, and it was a good reminder of the present-ness, the nearness, of ancestors, no matter how far in the past they lived on this side – and of the reciprocity and mutual obligation of that relationship. Are we thinking about our ancestors as subjective beings with desires and needs? As totem-like beings to guide us and from whom to draw strength? Ideally, perhaps, a combination of the two and of other things? Are ancestors always human, or can they be trees, water, non-human animals, spirits, or ideas?
Our process included free improvisation on various themes or concepts that seemed to speak to our conversations. For example, the idea of the “sameness” of all the wooden instruments, especially those with strings, that would never be exactly the same when sounded, felt very queer. There was something about trying and failing for a perfect unison that seemed to speak to the inadequacy of words, time, space, all these human structures, to quantify our relationships. We took the idea of “backward/forward” and turned it on its head in improv, disrupting our normal sense of time. We all brought music and texts that felt right, and arranged them, improvised on them, juxtaposed and layered them until we found a configuration that told stories that were central to our conversations: searching for our kin in the distant past; communing with beings of all sorts in search of connection and community; becoming, living, and being our full selves even in the midst of systems that are not set up for us; and how to move forward together right now, in this room – only this room.
Before I sat down to write this note, I listened to the audio files each co-curator was asked to provide to create the reel that you hear looping in the space at the beginning of this concert. I found myself thinking about the staggeringly high number of ancestors who have transitioned in the past few years, which have been horribly, multiply tragic. Many of them are children. To speak specifically about our queer community, an entire generation was lost in the AIDS crisis, and just recently, an unprecedented number in the Pulse nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, where 49 people, mostly queer and Latinx, lost their lives. And, as Anthony will point out, what about all those who never got to become themselves, or understand and live into their queerness? His piece has to do with the transatlantic slave trade, but it echoes resoundingly in the present, in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and in the continued oppression of ethnic minorities as with the Uyghur people in Xingiang, and so many others. As our rights here in the United States continue to be eroded, I think about trans people unable to access healthcare, about police brutality and ICE raids, about all the migrants and climate refugees who will be turned away or deported into precarious conditions. I could go on and I know you could too; the veil is thin right now. We are becoming ancestors before our time, sometimes without the willingness to do so, and in terrible ways. We need to allow these recognitions to galvanize us, and the questions we need to ask might feel rhetorical, but are in fact pointed. How can we relate to these ancestors across time and space, and hear what they might say to us, and need from us? What does it mean to keep someone’s memory alive, or honor their memory? And importantly, what kind of ancestors do we wish to be?
We want to explore the idea that our becoming, our living into truth, our connectedness, our collective experiences of grief and joy, are forms of resistance and power. Our idea of ancestry is more assemblage than lineage, more about being in relationship than about past/present distinctions. Can we hear that sounded through music, can we feel it by sounding together? Can we try and see what we learn?
– Danielle Buonaiuto