It Turns Out I am Once Again Occupying Space at the Midwest Clinic

Today I am in Chicago with my partner for The 78th Midwest Clinic. I first attended Midwest two years ago, after which I wrote a post about how I felt the crushing weight of toxic masculinity run rampant, experienced the full scope of institutionalized ableism, and outright confronted a very particular brand of large ensemble gatekeepers, insects drawn to that flickering streetlight which is the Hilton Lobby Bar. 

Needless to say, I did not have a good time the first time I attended. 

In the weeks that followed attending Midwest in 2022, I came to learn that no one has a good time at their first Midwest Clinic, and, much more importantly, that I was not alone in my thoughts about the conference. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself and my experience seen and heard. I became more aware that Midwest is an extraordinarily difficult conference that requires the expenditure of a lot of time and energy for everyone, but  especially for educators, performers, and exhibitors attending, and that, by the time you’re actually meeting people at the conference, most people do not have the energy to field a conversation about the aesthetic merits of one’s music. 

There is so much about attending Midwest that I did not know and could not have known walking into McCormick Place the first time, especially as a neurodivergent queer person.

I am writing this for several reasons. First, to explain why I am attending the Midwest Clinic this year despite vocally opposing it and claiming I would never attend again two years ago. Second, to suggest a more sustainable way of managing energy at Midwest, especially as it pertains to talking to composers. And third, to extend an open invitation to join me in Chicago in ways that provide opportunities for self-care and escape. 

The reason I am attending the Midwest Clinic this year is because of Kevin Day.

Yes, it was because of Kevin that I attended in 2022, and it was Kevin that I stayed with in Chicago when I attended. And yes, that was where we initially got together, and now we get to celebrate all our anniversaries in Chicago midwinter (yay…). And yes, because Kevin and I will be celebrating two years together in Chicago tomorrow, I blame him entirely for my attendance at this conference.

Don’t feel too bad for him, though — he has to spend a week with oboists and bassoonists each summer because of me. He’s making out like a bandit from this deal, I swear. 

So I am attending the Midwest Clinic as Kevin Day’s support system, ready to provide him with everything from Lush shower bombs to Gaviscon tablets, from crowd control in that infernal exhibition hall to hard liquor (though he’s pretty good and finding that himself). I will be at Midwest this year primarily as Kevin Day’s partner, not the emerging composer Kincaid Rabb, a term that I object to in the highest possible terms (what am I emerging from, an egg?). 

But that effectively allows me to be more myself at this upcoming Midwest, taking myself out of the calculation of being a composer seeking opportunities for my music. I don’t need to do that as long as I am there to support Kevin, something I am happy to do, even if I don’t quite understand the appeal of whiskey or Chicago-style pizza (it’s just soggy casserole wrapped in bland pastry). 

All I have to do at Midwest is take care of Kevin and invest in self-care. That’s fine with me. 

When one goes to a conference like Midwest, there is one question that keeps getting repeated, each iteration a little more exhausting than the last.

“ What do you do?”

Innocuous enough on its own, asking “ What do you do?” as a method of getting to know a potential new colleague or friend presents a very strange dynamic involving the estimation of value. What is being asked is not “ What do you do within music?” or “ What is your musical practice?”, but instead, almost inevitably, what is actually being asked is “ In what way can you be useful to me?” 

Conversations as a composer at a conference like this often follow a specific cadence. The “ What do you do?” to “ Do you have any music for my grade two middle school band?” pipeline is literally just those two questions. The kinds of transactional meetings that amount in the hundreds at a conference like Midwest are not about the merits of one’s work, the aesthetics of one’s compositional craft, or the subtlety of one’s artistic vision; instead, they simply commodify the work of composers in a way that I find deeply uncomfortable. 

No wonder everyone walks out of Midwest exhausted when all of us are being value propositioned or value propositioning our colleagues. 

An easy solution to this is reframing the question. Instead of “ What do you do?”, ask “ What are you working on?”. This slight repositioning of the same question gives a lot more permission in the response: if the queried person wants to tell you about their work in response, they certainly will, but it also holds space open to talk about the LEGO project that’s overtaken your living room or the database of music for pierrot ensemble written in the last ten years of which you’re particularly proud. 

I would rather have ten deep, comprehensive conversations at Midwest about the merits of my work and the possibility of work to come than a hundred conversations about music I don’t have based on grading system that is subjective to the point of losing all function. 

This year, I will not be discussing my music that already exists. I am only interested in having conversations about music that could be, an avalanche of Blue Sky conversations that will allow me to leave Midwest energized and galvanized, exhilarated over exhausted, both hungry for more and ready to make cool things. 

Don’t be a “ What do you do?” person. Be a “ What can you do?” person, at least a “ What are you working on?” person, or even a “ What do you think about this idea for a concerto I had? Is that something you could make for me?” person. 

For me, this Midwest is about self-care. 

The last time I went to Midwest, I went in relatively blind. I didn’t know what to expect, and Kevin and other friends I had consulted did not adequately prepare me for the overstimulating piranha marsh that I immediately sank waist-deep into that is high school trumpet players destroying their lips playing Pictures at an Exhibition while you’re trying to convince some random band director you just met that you music is valid. 

I am much, much more prepared this time. I’m basically going to wander the conference as a roving apothecary, stocked with everything from Tylenol to cough drops to Liquid IV. Come find me if you need a self-care kit at the conference.

Additionally, when I am not attending conference programming or performances, I will be parking myself in a bar with a number of things that create a sense of escape for Midwest attendees. This year, I have brought two Magic: the Gathering commander decks, our copy of Cards Against Humanity, a tarot deck, and a couple scores that I would be happy to share with you if (and only if) you indulge momentarily in escape. 

I am not interested in assimilating into the hustle of Midwest. I know what that’s like. I have watched as friends and colleagues get sucked into performing pleasantries over having meaningful conversations. I am not interested in your hierarchies or your unspoken rules or the circles of aggressive compliments you form to prove that you are the most masculine. 

I’m interested in walking around like a fairy godmother, handing out little gifts and being there to support my partner, my friends, and our colleagues. 

If I’m to occupy space at Midwest, I’m going to make it easier for other people to do the same. 

Blue Sky: An IDRS 2024 Retrospective

Two years ago, I had the privilege of performing Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet alongside now trusted friends and collaborators Stephanie Carlson, Susan Miranda, and the Carpe Diem String Quartet at the 51st Annual International Double Reed Society Conference in Boulder, CO, USA. At that conference, it was announced that the 53rd IDRS Conference would be at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2024. I remember picking up the brochure showing those panoramic windows of Kitt School of Music and saying “ What a weird place to have an international conference.”

Stephanie Carlson asked me if I was going to have anything performed at the 2024 IDRS Conference. I think I said, “ We’ll see.”  But then I started planning and plotting, having just met a number of people I looked up to and new friends and collaborators I did not know would shape my life for the next two years.

In Boulder, I had a spontaneous sushi dinner with Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, and Mark Lauer. I met Jennet Ingle in passing in an elevator of the dilapidated host hotel we were all told would be knocked down two weeks after we left. After my first three tequila shots at an LGBTQ+ mixer organized by Ari Cohen Mann, I encountered the gloriously nerdy Stephanie Patterson. And, most memorably, I caught Victoria Lee taking a selfie in frog hat she swiped from that year’s performance of the legendary and iconic Contra Band.

And meeting all these people is how IDRS 2024 became what I have framed my entire creative life around for at least the last 18 months. Let me explain.

blue sky

When I was writing The List last summer, the project I undertook during a composition hiatus to refocus what I do and how I do it, I wrote about what I refer to as the Blue Sky phase of planning a project. I’ll summarize it here, but you can read the original text at your leisure. 

Blue Sky is a term that I have borrowed from the themed experience design space. It’s the phase of the project when any ideas are valid and totally possible, and you don’t reject any ideas because of logistical reasons. It’s purest brainstorming possible, and you get the opportunity to imagine what could be… before someone inevitably starts talking about money.

It’s really important to me that Blue Sky conversations happen. If we can’t have a Blue Sky conversation without discussing the actual financial scaffolding of a project, we actually probably aren’t going to be able to collaborate very well. There’s a time and place for the money conversation and I certainly appreciate and enjoy being compensated for my work, but it is not during principal brainstorming. My brain wants to throw some ideas on the wall, see what sticks, see what ideas have that familiar Kincaid ring to them, figure out the perfect ecosystem in which our idea could grow, then pause for the money conversation.

All of the people who centered performing my music at IDRS were able to do Blue Sky with me, then have a conversation about money later.

I don’t expect to get paid for Blue Sky. It’s fun. I like doing it.

And for anyone wondering when I’m starting Blue Sky for IDRS 2025: now. There is no time to delay for 2025’s conference. Email me. Do not wait.

new works for idrs 2024

I was deeply surprised that I had 10 works across 8 recitals accepted for IDRS 2024, nine of which would be premieres. Most of the 10 projects I originally green-lit for IDRS are bespoke double reed works. One of them had already been composed and performed, funded by a consortium in 2020, with a revised 2024 version. Two of them were works originally composed for clarinets that were rapidly gathering dust, having never been performed live. The other seven were works specifically designed with double reeds in mind.

By the time IDRS 2024 actually happened, I only had six works at the conference, all of which were world premieres. Two works I cancelled due to a car accident that I was involved in earlier this year, and two works were not performed at IDRS for personal reasons on the part of other performers. 

the merriment of outlaws

In planning for IDRS 2024, I had opted to expand the instrumentation of The Merriment of Outlaws to English horn octet, which was originally for English horn quartet. Once I started principal composition on Sandbox Mode and it became apparent that it was going to be a 15-minute long English horn epic, The Merriment of Outlaws very quickly became a quartet again. I shelved the project. It is available to anyone who wants to take it on.

single rider

I also cancelled a work for six bassoons, narrator, and two contrabassoons entitled Single Rider. I had hoped that Single Rider would continue a deliberate lineage of works with narrator that I began with Three Aviaries, but I knew how complicated it was to produce the score and parts for Three Aviaries, and it was not going to be viable in the immediate aftermath of the accident. I shelved the project. It is available to anyone who wants to take it on.

wishful thinking

Wishful Thinking was originally composed in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by a consortium of English hornists of which Jenna Sehmann was part. Throughout the last year, I have working in consultation with Carolyn Hove, the principal English hornist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on a revised version of Wishful Thinking that makes it more possible and less exhausting to play. Carolyn performed that version at a series of masterclass recitals in June, and Jenna was scheduled to perform the new version of Wishful Thinking in July at IDRS. Jenna complimented me enormously by pairing Wishful Thinking with a work of Stacy Garrop, and I was very much looking forward to her work as much as my own. Unfortunately, Jenna suffered an injury in June that made travel to Flagstaff impossible, and the new version of Wishful Thinking was not performed at IDRS 2024. I wish Jenna a speedy recovery.

While not the most recent version, Jenna’s fabulous recording of the original version of Wishful Thinking is what I currently use for the reference recording.

The original version of Wishful Thinking is currently available at Trevco. The 2024 version will be made available soon.

breakthrough

Laura Bennett Cameron and I met at a Dallas Winds concert in April 2023. We had discussed creating an intermediate work for bassoon and piano entirely in tenor clef as an introduction to playing in the tenor range of the instrument. Breakthrough is a love letter to Owl City using the harmonic language of Adam Young to encourage players to test their limits and inspire a sense of nostalgic wonder in its audience. Due to personal reasons, Laura was unable to premiere Breakthrough alongside works of Pierette Mari, Amber Ferenz, and Harrison J. Collins.

For those of you interested in a preview of Breakthrough, here is the MIDI realization.

Breakthrough will be available at Trevco sometime in August. While Laura plans on creating a video premiere of the work, anyone is welcome to play or program the work.

six premieres at idrs 2024

Six premieres in one week is a lot. 

It’s a lot in ways that I did not anticipate. I often like to describe composition as carrying additional weight. When an idea goes from being just taking up space in one’s head to being a tangible work product, a physical thing that is more that just pencil on paper or hours spent in notation software, there is a sense of weight added to it. The life of a musical work before it is premiered is kind of like a bubble expanding until it bursts. There is tension in the act of waiting. There is exhaustion in the relief from the weight of it. 

That exhaustion, combined with the fact that IDRS is a marathon, not a sprint, is more taxing than I anticipated. 

There’s a few ways of mitigating this. First my recommendation for my own mental health and the future of my involvement with IDRS is going to be that premieres are facilitated before the event so that the emotional envelope of the premiere does not coincide with the emotional envelope of the conference marathon. It is impractical to do this with every work, especially things like concerti, which require an orchestra, or  works that rely on people meeting at the conference in pick-up ensembles like Sandbox Mode or Bridges of Light, but for most works, one could do a world premiere and an IDRS premiere separately. This will help composers like me attending the conference a lot. 

The second thing that I will do at IDRS 2025 is a lot more self-care before and after the conference. I am publishing this post having just gotten a well-needed massage, having finally given my body the chance to relax as much as I have allowed my mind to do so over the last few days since returning from Flagstaff. Tomorrow, I leave for the Happiest Place on Earth (I’ve actually earned it this time). But I could have done way more before IDRS to mitigate stress I felt during IDRS. 

IDRS 2024 was poorly timed for me in a way that will not impact IDRS 2025. San Diego Pride is always in July, and IDRS started on the Sunday of San Diego Pride’s weekend, which forced us to travel on the Saturday of Pride. This was not ideal. Forcing LGBTQ+ composers to travel for IDRS during their hometown’s Pride weekend is a hate crime almost as bad as hosting an LGBTQ+ affinity mixer during the day without alcohol.

Next time it should be a pool party. In fact, given the option, I will plan the 2025 IDRS LGBTQ+ Pool Party.

And it won’t be during San Diego Pride.

Sunday

I have already written about my first interaction at IDRS 2024 and the emotional whirlwind that it began, separately from this retrospective. It was an ominous portent of what was to come that day, mercifully thwarted by the success of two excellent premieres.

Cabinet of Curiosities

My first premiere of IDRS 2024 was Cabinet of Curiosities, a very difficult five movement work for bassoon quartet that was originally a ten movement work composed for clarinet quartet between 2021 and 2023. With permission from the clarinet commissioner, I selected the five movements that would work best on bassoon and repackaged them from the elaborate tasting menu that inspired the clarinet quartet version to a collection of objects that an 18-century traveler may have accumulated for their curio cabinet.

Cabinet of Curiosities was premiered at IDRS 2024 by ASU bassoonists Ben Kearns, Joe Florence, Cooper Taylor, and Michelle Fletcher. Knowing how challenging the work was, I was pleasantly surprised by some of ingenious artistic decisions made by the quartet.

Sunday’s performances were the first time I had heard professional musicians perform my music in more than a year, and I had forgotten how nice is when players read between the lines of a music you write and introduce an interpretation you would have never thought of to the performance practice of one’s music. I’m not the kind of composer who wants a perfect performance, and I am not interested in micromanaging the people performing my music (there are, of course, many composers who are like this, but I’m not one of them).

For anyone who would like to explore the sound worlds of Cabinet of Curiosities and make different artistic choices than the ones made by the premiering ensemble, you can purchase the score and parts at Trevco.

I find it deeply complimentary to have my music interpreted in a way that would have never occurred to me, and I believe it adds a dimension to my music only attainable through collaboration with live performers. There is perhaps no better example of this having been done that that the next premiere I was honored to experience at IDRS 2024

epiphanies

This one is a long story, but I hope you’ll indulge me. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably down.

After meeting Jennet Ingle very briefly in passing in an elevator at IDRS 2022 in Boulder, I reached out to her and asked if we could have a Zoom session. I had met a number of her students in Boulder, and everyone who I had asked said nothing but good things, so I guess I felt she was always going to be a safe person to work with, and I needed someone like that who could help me focus my energy in the aftermath of the dizzying experience I had at IDRS 2022.

We set up a Zoom, not to discuss anything in particular, but just to get to know each other. There are a lot of people in the IDRS orbit who are willing to give time like this, and Jennet is emblematic of the kind of person who believes in this kind of serendipity. About two thirds of the way through the conversation, as she was telling me about the way she had conceptualized teaching adult oboists through her annual Oboe FLOW program, I spitballed an idea for a set of concert etudes inspired by each member of her studio centered around a single theme.

Jennet took this idea back to her studio, and, unanimously, they agreed. They would fund the commission for the work that would become Epiphanies together.

The first thing I did with Epiphanies is come to one of their sessions, in which interviewed each member of the 2022-2023 cohort in quick succession, listening to their stories and helping them explore an aha! moment that they had experienced, either at the oboe or away from it. Jennet’s students trusted the process, and they told me that they never knew work with a composer could include them so much.

They trusted Blue Sky. Epiphanies was the reward for that trust.

I sat with their stories and thoughts, and between November 2022 and January 2023, I completed 11 of the 12 concert etudes.

A few months later, it occurred to me that I need to write one more concert etude that synthesized all the materials from each of the preceding works. In May of 2023, I completed the final etude of Epiphanies, dedicated to Jennet Ingle, the conduit that made this project possible.

Jennet and I have worked over the past year to perfect the set of intermediate concert etudes into not only carefully-crafted individual pieces of introspective and enjoyable music, and not only a modular work that could be performed in any number of sets of internal movements, but a progressive set of pedagogical etudes that fills a gap left for intermediate concert etudes for the solo oboist. Epiphanies is a set of fond letters to people who want to learn the oboe not because they want to be the best oboist in the world, but because they want to keep learning and become the best oboist they can be.

One of the things that sets IDRS apart from other conferences is how aggressively the double reed community encourages amateur participation. From reading sessions to the work of artist-clinicians like Jennet Ingle, we as a community value including oboists and bassoonists of all levels as long as they are passionate about what we do and interested in creating music. Obviously IDRS also platforms spectacular performances by the artists at the forefront of our field, but we as a community actively include and encourage performances by people who are learning, which is hugely compelling for the double reed community and completely absent in other woodwind communities of similar size.

It was an honor and a privilege to work with Jennet and her cohort of oboists on Epiphanies. Two of Jennet’s students attending the IDRS conference, Barbara Timmerman and Anne Sneller, came to every single on of my premieres at IDRS 2024. I want them to know that it didn’t go unnoticed, and that I adored having familiar faces in the audience every single time.

Jennet Ingle is a pillar of our community. There are few people as giving and patient and wonderful as she is. She is doing the work to inspire and encourage a community within our community that matters and who unconditionally support what we do. We all owe Jennet thanks for that. Working with Jennet is a joy and an absolute treat. Epiphanies is the first fruit of our musical partnership, and it will be available from Trevco in early August.

I hope you all find someone with whom you love working as much as I love working with Jennet Ingle.

monday

Monday was my easy day, due to the cancellation of the performance of the 2024 version of Wishful Thinking. I decided to head to the exhibit hall just to check it out.

I immediately bought two English horn reeds and a reed case and started trying English horn, which I had never played before. I’d written for it, fairly extensively (as I will demonstrate shortly), but I’d never actually played it. I thought I knew how much I liked English horn. I was wrong.

I fell absolutely in love with it.

It’s such a fun instrument to play. The fingering system kind of sucks, and realizing that oboists actually do slide their pinky between C, C#/Db, and D#/Eb all the time is a super rude awakening, but that doesn’t take very much away from how fun it is to play. It just informs me on what to avoid to write better for the instrument.

As a recovering clarinetist, I had a pretty specific idea of what certain intervals felt like. A perfect fifth on English horn feels like an octave on clarinet. And I love that, because clarinet feels to me like less expenditure of energy creates more variables to finesse where English horn feels much more of an equal energy expenditure calculation. In other words, I feel more in direct control of English horn than I ever have playing clarinet.

If anyone would like to purchase two Leblanc Opus clarinets (Bb and A), I’m having them overhauled in October with the intention of selling them. 

tuesday

On the Tuesday of IDRS 2024, which is the third day of the conference (this screwed all of us up, please never start a conference on Sunday morning again), I originally had two premieres: Marine Layer and Breakthrough. With Breakthrough cancelled for reasons listed above, Marine Layer became my only premiere at the conference on this day.

Marine Layer

Marine Layer was the result of a very productive lunch at a Mazemen restaurant in Costa Mesa, CA, between myself, Kevin, and Victoria Lee in August 2023. At that time, we discussed the possibility of performing at IDRS, and Kevin had just had the premiere of his work Riversong for reed quintet and piano at the 2023 Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival at Juilliard. 

It had been several years since I had last composed for reed quintet. I composed a work for the instrumentation in 2019 that was never performed because of the pandemic. Prior to that, I had written five works for reed quintet between 2014 and 2016, all of which were performed at my senior recital in my undergrad (and all of which are now available through Trevco). I was thrilled at the potential of returning to the ensemble as a much more mature composer, and the added dimension of piano with reed quintet was a very interesting sound world to explore.

And I already had Kevin’s work to which I could musically respond. It would be the first time our music would be paired together. I couldn’t resist that. 

I don’t think Victoria will mind me saying that we met in a boba shop in October in Anaheim GardenWalk (three guesses why I asked if we could meet there) and rewrote the entire application for Syrinx and Kevin Day for IDRS 2024. We imagined the two pieces as two visions of water in California: Kevin, who enjoys the mountains and who had already associated Riversong with the lush woodland rivers of Northern California, and me, who loves the ocean and refuses to move too far from its proximity, proposing Marine Layer as a reflection on the way its waves unpredictably crash against the iconic rock formations of La Jolla. 

It was the perfect Blue Sky. My mind raced. I couldn’t help but write.

Named for the frequent weather phenomenon when relatively dry and warm California air moving atop a body of cooler water, Marine Layer is, currently, my most representative work. It combines my contrapuntal aesthetic sensibilities with gestural, wandering melodies, pounding rhythms, and musical motifs that beg you to close your eyes and picture the Pacific crashing upon California shorelines. I love it dearly because writing it excited me in ways I have not been excited ina very long time.

And Syrinx Quintet and Kevin Day performed the crap out of it.

Marine Layer is coming soon to Trevco.

Expect more reed quintet and piano collaborations from Syrinx and Kevin Day. We all really work well together, and we want to expand the what is out there for reed quintet and piano (it’s literally just us and a piece by Ton ter Doest that I have to email Calefax about) and we loved making music with them. To Syrinx: thank you so much for showing me and Kevin the kindness and attention to detail our music deserves.

Marine Layer would have never happened without you.

wednesday

The worst IDRS 2024 hangover.

Yes, I am the party. Yes, my cocktails are strong. Yes, I bring Cards Against Humanity to everything. And, yes, you’re invited. Literally just ask.

Bonus Round

Some projects take you longer to connect with than others.

When Mark Lauer approached me to write an intermediate-advanced work for bassoon and piano about navigating life with ADHD, I was initially hesitant. Though I also have ADHD and have centered my mental health in music before, I often find myself struggling with works that are abstract, and the prompt of “ struggling with ADHD”  flummoxed me.

Sometimes a project goes through a number of thematic iterations before you find the right one. I have started projects before completing Blue Sky for them. Bonus Round was one of those projects, and Mark and I met again to discuss the trajectory for the project, and I suggested that a metaphor for ADHD would help me reframe the work better.

Mark suggested pinball. And it was perfect. It was easy. It felt right.

Bonus Round was premiered by Mark Lauer and Aimee Fincher at spectacular effect at IDRS 2024. At the end of the performance Mark invited me on stage, at which I present him with a token I like to give all my commissioners: the brainstorming document for their commission that I write by hand, essentially, the urtext of the score, framed.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that one’s music has the power to change lives. It can be easy to get lost in the minutia of formatting and placing articulations and listening to the work as if one has not just written it and forget that the music we as composers create has the capacity to become a vehicle for processing emotion. When I presented Mark with the framed urtext of his commission and he broke down in my arms, having just given the work a spectacular premiere, I understood that power and felt its full weight in his friendly embrace.

Bonus Round is one of my proud music achievements, not because I think it’s my best work, but because I didn’t realize how much it meant and how much of myself I poured into it. By the time Mark and I agreed on a piece about pinball being a metaphor for having ADHD, I’d like to think I knew how much I would connect with the material. I didn’t expect the same from him. That reciprocation is everything.

You can purchase the score for Bonus Round at Trevco Music Publishing.

Sandbox Mode

For those of you who do not know the oboist Stephanie Patterson, you should, because she is marvelous. And, it just so happens, we have all the same special interests: double reed music, roller coasters, video games, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. When I suggested that I combine all those things (except Drag Race, that’s IDRS 2025’s English Horn-apolooza! lol) into an English horn octet centering Roller Coaster Tycoon, she vociferously approved and encouraged me to write the work.

I was kind of joking about this. She wasn’t. Everyone kind of just took me seriously this whole time about this.

Don’t do that unless you want me to actually make it happen.

At my request, the extraordinary Aaron Hill stepped in to do the organizing and coordinating the application. At the time, I thought there was literally NO CHANCE an English horn octet would ever be included on the program for any IDRS conference. It was just too silly to imagine that this would happen. But we had the players, and we submitted the applications, and then…

It took me a very long time to figure out what do with eight English horns. The English horn range is exceptionally limited (a little over two octaves total), and it’s a lot of one timbre that doesn’t have a whole lot of clarity and tends to sound muddy in multiples. But, from the limited brainstorming I did on The Merriment of Outlaws, I knew that a quartet of English horns worked, and, after attending a presentation by James Bohn on the musical structure of It’s A Small World at the All Ears: Music and Sound in Disney Theme Parks and Beyond Conference earlier this summer, I finally figured it out.

No, seriously, I am this nerdy.

I am not alone.

Sandbox Mode became a theme and variations, with each variation representing a different theme present in both Roller Coaster Tycoon and Disneyland. This is because the reality is that, without Disneyland, there would have been no Roller Coaster Tycoon. For me, however, it gave me an opportunity to something I always wanted to do: write music about Disneyland… in Disneyland.

Sandbox Mode is a love letter, full of easter eggs and surprise twists for the keen theme park listener. Each variation of the theme begins with a cadenza, giving each player in the octet an opportunity to shine. Not all player perform each movement, which gives English hornists time to rest before playing, but the person with the next cadenza plays at least the last 4 to 8 measures of the previous movement to make sure that their is, in fact, still a working reed.

Sandbox Mode was premiered by English hornists Aaron Hill, Mika Brunson, Taylor Crawford, Matthew Covington, Stephanie Patterson, JD Uchal, Victoria Lee, and Sara Renner. So much of the performance of this work was made special by the people who performed it, from the incredible reality of English horn jazz improvisation made possible by Aaron Hill to wearing the truly fantastic costumes, from tuning on everyone’s favorite note to Sara Renner’s almighty YEEHAW. Thank you all for making my weird meme application to this conference an even weirder reality.

Sandbox Mode will be available from Trevco in August. If you would like to play Sandbox Mode but do not have eight English horns readily available (that’s most of y’all), you can perform it as written with eight of basically any instrument that reads in treble clef.

Saxophonists, I now speak directly to you: knock yourselves out.

thursday

Bridges of Light

It is very interesting to me that my IDRS 2024 six-premiere marathon should be bookended by two works originally for clarinets.

Bridges of Light was originally commissioned by Stefanie Gardner for the Glendale Community College Bass Clarinet Choir, and virtually premiered at the 2021 Virtual ClarinetFest. The work has never been premiered live in its original bass clarinet version, but the exclusivity period expired and I chose to create a version that I believe is infinitely more applicable to more ensembles for six bassoons and two contrabassoons.

When I was in my graduate degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I became a Themed Entertainment Association NextGen member. For a brief time, I worked with a group of designers on a Disney Imaginations entry. Disney Imaginations is the contest that Disney uses to in part recruit new Imagineers to their company. Before we disbanded our team due to personal work relationship reasons, we were working on a Disney Imaginations project inspired by the aurora borealis in which I began to develop the musical material that would become Bridges of Light. I kept the musical material and recycled it for this work.

The bassoon octet version of Bridges of Light was premiered by Alex Meaux, Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, Ariel Detwiler, Ashley Mania, Haley Houk, Chris Werner, and Shawn Karson, with Kevin Day conducting, alongside another work by Kevin Day entitled Harbinger and an arrangement of Joseph Bologne's Symphony No. 1 by Alex Meaux.

You can purchase the score and parts for the bassoon octet version of Bridges of Light from Trevco.

back at sea level

I have a few key takeaways from IDRS 2024.

First, and this is to my fellow composers: double reed players are down for just about anything. One of my favorite questions for double reed players is to ask what is missing from their repertoires. The reality is that it’s not only that there’s giant holes in instrumental pedagogies and entire new music aesthetic missing from both bassoon and oboe literature, it’s also that there seems to be overall a lack of variety in materials available to oboists and bassoonists. They crave what we composers have freely given the flutists and the clarinetists and the saxophonists only to watch those same flutists and clarinetists and saxophonists perform our music once and say, “ I’d rather perform Lowell Liebermann, Jonathan Russell, or Jacob TV instead.”  I’ve watched oboists and bassoonists buy music in the sheer hope that it might be something new for themselves and their students, and I’ve watched the other woodwind communities become insular to the point of cliquish and downright mean. There is a reason I adapted two works to bassoon ensembles over clarinet ensembles and got them performed immediately, and it’s not entirely blatant nepotism. Bassoonists and oboists are the most welcoming, most kind, most patient, and most willing collaborators in new music and y’all are missing out. 

Double reed players believe in Blue Sky. They believe in making magic simply because it is there to be made. I am so lucky to have found what I have in them.

To the double reed players who have chosen to center me and champion my music at IDRS 2024 and beyond: I cannot tell you how profoundly thankful I am for you. You have given me back the confidence that my music matters, that it means something, and that I should absolutely continue making it. And to Ben Kearns, Joe Florence, Cooper Taylor, Michelle Fletcher, Jenna Sehmann, Laura Bennett Cameron, Jennet Ingle, Mark Lauer, Victoria Lee, Micah Wright, Patrick Olmos, Mathieu Girardet, Alex Rosales Garcia, Aaron Hill, Mika Brunson, Taylor Crawford, Matthew Covington, Stephanie Patterson, JD Uchal, Sara Renner, Alex Meaux, Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, Ariel Detwiler, Ashley Mania, Haley Houk, Chris Werner, Shawn Karson, and most importantly, Kevin Day, you have changed my life in more ways than you have realized and I can’t thank you enough for it.

To the International Double Reed Society and its board, conference hosts, and future conference organizers: good job. Keep up the good work. Please put pronouns on all name badges for future conferences. Please consider allowing composers with works performed at IDRS conferences be considered collaborative artists, which would enable us to hear our contributions to the double reed repository without the financial burden of attending an already extraordinarily expensive conference. Please plan all future conferences in cities with easy access to international airports. Please reconsider planning conferences at 7500’ altitudes. Please be more transparent about the financial reports of the organization.

And, most importantly, please continue to foster an environment that encourages new music, one that includes a variety of diverse members, that supports its artists and vendors, and an event that gets better every single year. As much as I have to thank each and every artist who has made my music possible, I also owe thanks to you to make it possible for theme to have all been in one place at one time.

IDRS 2025

People have asked me if I’m already planning for IDRS 2025 at Butler University in Indianapolis. Of course I am. I met new people to collaborate with at IDRS 2024, including the English hornist who subs with my local symphony regularly, multiple oboe/bassoon couples who play spectacularly together, and enough people to easily organize an oboe d’amore consortium. Familiar faces want to collaborate again, including on a huge project that I could not be more thrilled to undertake. I’m planning on buying an English horn there. I already know that there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis, the host hotel for the 2025 IDRS conference. I already have at least five projects in the works for the conference with people who want nothing but to see me succeed, to have my music fill as many ears as possible.

And I’m open to doing more. I have nothing but ideas for double reeds. Ask me. I’m probably down. Six premieres was exhausting, but I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Actually, let’s do double that next time.

Of course I’m planning for IDRS 2025. You should be too. Let’s make some of those plans together. Let’s take those chances, make some mistakes, and get messy. Let’s have those moments of Blue Sky that result in cool things I would have never imagined alone. 

See you in Indianapolis.

All Queer Art is Drag

My mother hates drag.

At least, she hates the concept of drag. My mother has made it known she despises the drag art form and believes that drag queens are doing what they do to make mockery of womanhood. Whenever the topic of drag has come up in conversation, she has made it perfectly clear that she thinks drag is disgusting, unworthy of recognition as an art form, inherently sexual, and inappropriate for anyone to experience.

While my mother was raised in a conservative household, but she has gravitated towards political centrism in terms of her economic and social policy preferences. Though she typically votes liberally and understands the dangers and threats levied towards marginalized communities, she has a difficult time with accepting queerness, participating in queer culture, and recognizing what it means to make queer art.

She has never been to a drag show. She refuses point blank to go to Pride with me (though I invite her each subsequent year to no avail). My mother even forced me, when she found out that there was queer art on my undergraduate recital, to come out to my extended family before they watched what I had made so it didn’t blindside them. My parents have had a very difficult time adjusting to my pronouns and accepting the gender transition I made into being openly nonbinary, and they have objected to how I dress to express my own comfort, what I say (which is sometimes inappropriate, but with no harm intended), and how I identify as a queer transgender nonbinary autistic dinosaur wizard person.

My parents are like a lot of other Americans, who have so thoroughly chosen to not experience queer culture and refused invitations into queer spaces while creating predispositions and prejudices based on their concept of queerness, the movement towards queer liberation, and the art forms that rose out of the queer community, including and especially drag.

It should be said that this what passive homophobia and transphobia looks like. My parents aren’t really actively homophobic or transphobic: they have never called me slurs or chosen to retract support on the basis that I am queer, and they have never disowned me, even though I was a very difficult child navigating queer and neurodivergent experiences that I couldn’t describe and that my parents had no tool in their parenting toolbox to accommodate or comprehend. Honestly, I believe that they simply don’t realize just how homophobic and transphobic it is to refuse point blank to participate in queer culture despite numerous invitations and opportunities to do so. And, like most Americans, I definitely don’t think that they know much queer culture and drag has shaped all queer art, including my music.

If you have never been to a drag show, first of all, go. If you are over the age of 21, find your local drag bar and attend a show on Friday or Saturday night. Bring $20 in singles (at least) to tip the performers, be prepared to grab a glass of wine or a cocktail (or two… or more), and an open mind. You will see things you have never seen before, and some of them may be offensive, but most of them will be astounding, including incredible costumes, spectacular stunts, some of the funniest things you’ve ever heard, and an embarrassment of riches in local talent.

Drag is, fundamentally, the expression of the queer art form. It is subversive, experimental, exacting, clever, and self-referential. Drag artists are masters of a precise yet temporary artistic medium, and they have spent every spare penny they have on looking like the artworks they have imagined themselves to be. A drag performance is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; no drag performance is ever the same and drag artists are constantly reinventing themselves into fresh, new, surprising works of art. As an art form, drag transcends media, combining theatre, fashion, art, and performance, and the live experience of drag is immersive and unforgettable.

Some people in my life have told me that the only experience of drag that they have has been from seeing it on TV. RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality competition show that includes drag, but it is not a viable replacement for the experience of live drag performance. It’s like watching opera in a movie theatre or listening to an .mp3 of The Rite of Spring. It’s just not a substitute for being in the room with the artists and participating in a vibrant and beautiful artistic history that your community cherishes deeply.

In order to understand drag’s influence on art, you have to know drag’s legacy. By no means am I an expert in drag history, but you should know that drag has been around for thousands of years. It’s in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, it’s present every time a man played a woman’s role in Shakespeare, it appears to this day when a woman dresses as young boy in opera (these are referred to as pants roles, and they are extremely common practice), and drag was commonplace in performance practices such as vaudeville. In the 20th and 21st centuries, drag is omnipresent in queer culture and queer art. You see it in Some Like It Hot and Victor/Victoria. You see it in John Waters’ Hairspray and his Trash Trilogy. It’s all over things like To Wong Foo, The Birdcage, and even Mrs. Doubtfire. It is impossible to ignore the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has somehow managed to mainstream drag and queer culture to an unprecedented degree. Drag has existed in all kinds of media, but perhaps the most important single piece of drag media is the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.

Paris is Burning is a seminal drag documentary that centers the The Ballroom Scene in New York City. Ballroom culture rose to prominence within the Black and Brown queer communities in Harlem, who used drag to express themselves in ways that they could not in their public lives because they were not white or straight or passing. They knew that they were marginalized and created space for themselves with drag. They were not included in mainstream society because that society was (and, largely, remains) hostile to them, so they created their own society comprised of houses — chosen families — that competed in balls, pursuing art and beauty in categories that actually included them. It is a fantastic, important film that documents queer culture that easily could have been forgotten, and there are things peppered throughout the documentary that we still say in our queer vernacular today.

Over the course of the last 50 years or so, the influence of drag has percolated through less explicitly queer media. For example, Disney’s The Little Mermaid is fairly clearly queer allegory, complete with a villain whose designed was inspired by Divine and a lyricist who died shortly thereafter due to complications from AIDS. This is one example; there are dozens, if not hundreds, and probably thousands or tens of thousands more.

As a queer person, it is impossible to ignore or refuse to acknowledge that drag exists and that it has had a profound impact on our community. I don’t know any queer people who haven’t experienced live drag. As a queer artist, it is also impossible to separate queer art from drag itself.

I’m not claiming that all queer art is drag in the sense that every queer artist is performing in elaborate costumes, makeup, and wigs or engaging in the tropes typical of the medium of drag performance. Queer art is innumerable in media types and exists in every artistic market there is, and suggesting that the drag performance medium is the only way queer art could be presented is ludicrous. But as queer artists, we are all standing on the backs of the legendary houses before us, borrowing freely from the drag phenomenon and incorporating ourselves in the same narrative that includes everyone from Crystal LaBeija to Divine, Willi Ninja to Trixie Mattel.

I think there is a very fair reading of my music as an act of drag performance.

Over the course of my career as a composer, I have composed several works that center my experience of queerness. The first of these works was Moonlit Meeting, a reed quintet work which was about the unexpected emotional ramifications of engaging in queer hookup culture. My second queer work was Jigsaw, another reed quintet piece which centers the experience of the aftermath of coming out. After those works came to be, queerness has percolated through many of my works: from First Dance, which implicitly mentions my feelings about a breakup I had with a bassoonist I met in community college, to The Winning Play, which invokes camp aesthetics and encourages ensembles performing it to be so theatrical it engages with drag.

I recently finished a queer work and am working on another: first, The Grind, a work for soprano saxophone, narrator, and piano which pointedly criticizes Grindr and the culture that has coalesced around using it for casual sex; and, second, Realness, a work for oboe and piano that celebrates the rich history of drag and the musical artists who influenced it. The Grind will be performed at the end of this month at the North American Saxophone Conference in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Realness will be performed at this summer’s International Double Reed Society conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Like my entire catalogue of music which has explicitly been created by a queer person, both of these works could easily be considered acts of drag performance.

In a way, I kind of love that. I like that that my work is becoming more openly queer again, and incorporating more elements of drag and queer culture. It makes me feel alive, fearless, and strong.

RuPaul has said some very silly things, but also some profound things. The profound RuPaul quote that most resonates with me is “ We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” This simple little statement is particularly impactful for me because I feel it not just as a queer person wanting the freedom to express myself, but as an autistic person, forced to mask — to, in a way, create for myself and act out neurotypical realness in public. But it’s more than that.

Everything I do, every article of clothing I use to decorate and protect my body, every note and word that I write for someone to play or to speak, and every single, granular creative decision I’ve ever made on everything I’ve ever put into the world? Drag.

In the midst of being unable to divorce my queer classical music from drag, there are legislatures in my country making it a priority to ban drag from public spaces. This is not just an attack of the experience of drag, but it is an attack of the experience of all queer art. The language embedded in the legislation working its way through a dozen state legislatures in my country is so broad that would not only make drag impossible anywhere in which children may come in contact with it, but penalize any other queer artist in equal measure. Those legislatures are using children as a class that is more protected than the queer community to silence and make illegal the art created by drag queens and any other queer artists whose work even includes a tangential relationship to drag, which is to say all queer art.

If you are a queer artist and you are not terrified, wake up. They will not stop with drag. They will use the legislation that will criminalize drag as a precedent to silence you. They will challenge and argue their way to the Supreme Court, which will always uphold the most conservative possible ruling. We have got to fight back, not just to protect our ability to create queer work, but for our fellow queer artists in drag spaces and to protect the legacy and history of drag in the United States.

If you are an American who has willfully chosen to ignore queer art or refused an olive branch held out to you by a queer friend or family member, inviting you to participate in the culture for which we have had to fight tooth and nail, it’s not too late. When was the last time you saw a queer film? When the last time you went to a local business you knew was owned by a queer person or a queer family? When was the last you protested alongside us, waving a little rainbow flag at a Pride parade?

When was the last time you went to a drag show?

Drag is the expression of the queer art form, and the expression of what it means to be queer is drag. If you found yourself identifying with the passive homophobia and transphobia that has prevented you from being in the room with a drag artist and watching them perform because of a prejudice you have harbored against them without ever actually experiencing their work yourself, you can do better. You should do better.

And if you are like my parents, it’s high time to recognize that your prejudice against drag artists may include the livelihood of your queer artist child. Or a colleague’s child. Or a friend. Maybe even a total stranger, for whom the dollar you waved in the air could mean that their art actually matters to someone real.

Go to a drag show. Support queer art. It might be your last chance.

There is No Space for You at Midwest

I’ve gone back and forth about writing this a lot over the past couple days. In the midst of a flurry of posts on social media from friends about how amazing their experience of Midwest was, it’s hard to be critical of something that they cherish and look forward to every year. I feel like I should feel grateful, inspired, and uplifted, but I don’t. And I can’t escape the feeling of an obligation to talk about my experience as a first time attendee to the Midwest Band Clinic, why I will never attend again, and why I cannot and do not recommend attending for anyone else.

We need to talk about the ableism and transphobia I experienced and encountered at the Midwest Band Clinic.

I decided to go to Midwest on a whim about a week out from the conference. I was talking to a friend about potentially funding a concerto for harp and wind ensemble, and I decided to call a composer friend about ask them about how they had done large ensemble consortia in the past. My composer friend encouraged me to go Midwest with support of a few other composers, and, after I checked flights and registration costs, I decided that it was (for the first time in my life) financially feasible to attend. So I booked a flight, registered for the conference, and began to prepare.

Part of my preparation for Midwest included reaching to a few friends and colleagues that I knew were also going to the event and making absolutely sure that the conference was safe to attend. This is normal for a queer person with a disability, and I felt like I needed a lot of reassurance about the accessibility and the attitudes towards neurodivergent and nonbinary people. I was assured that there would be space for me.

My first day at Midwest was a blur, but I remember becoming overstimulated in the first hour, before setting foot on the exhibit hall floor. I remember asking if there was a designated place I could go that was quiet and got told that if I was feeling overstimulated, I could go back to my hotel.

The Midwest Band Clinic is held annually at McCormick Place, the largest convention space in North America. There’s seriously no space that could be a designated quiet area in the largest convention space in North America and the best they could do was telling an overwhelmed autistic person to go back to their hotel?

I was told repeatedly throughout Midwest that it’s an exercise in overstimulation. That’s just how it is.

There was strange phenomenon with conversations at Midwest, where someone would come up to a person they wanted to talk to and only talk to that one person, making everyone else around them feel invisible. I tried once to insert myself into a conversation at Midwest and got the nastiest glare thrown at me I have ever known. I wandered the rest of the conference observing conversations but often unable to have them myself. The result was invisibility, not inclusion.

While I was at Midwest, I only attended one session: Conducting, Composing, and Performing with Disabilities: An Accessible, Inclusive, and Empathic Vision for Neurodiverse Music. It was the only time during the entire conference that space was made for neurodivergent people and I was excited to engage with the topic in this setting.

What unfolded during the session would be much different. Some highlights included no introductions for its panelists, some light definitions of things like masking and ableism, the mention of a condition coined by a Nazi eugenicist instead of autism, the exclusion of autism from a panel about neurodivergency altogether, two panelists who suggested that the answer to neurodivergency was going to a psychiatrist for medication, an audience who was largely not there for the topic but instead there for one of its panelists, a well-meaning and informational presentation that had to be heavily truncated because the panelist most of the audience had come to see showboated incessantly, expressions of blatant and extraordinarily internalized ableism presented as extremely hilarious jokes, absolutely no time for audience questions, and the ultimate thesis that all neurodivergent people need from neurotypical people is empathy.

Neurodivergent people don’t need empathy. If you are neurotypical or able-bodied (or both), you cannot and never will be able to understand the reality of living with our disabilities and how they shape how we navigate our world. It’s similar to how white people can’t imagine what it’s like to navigate life being Black, or how men cannot understand what it is to be a woman, having never experienced it themselves. Even among neurodivergent people there is such a wide amount of variation that it’s sometimes hard to have empathy for another neurodivergent person. You can’t understand what it’s like to be neurodivergent and it’s insulting for you to try.

What neurodivergent people need is space to be neurodivergent. To be ourselves, to unmask, without judgement or criticism. We need designated spaces to recalibrate and to avoid potential meltdowns or shutdowns. We need neurotypical people to respect us enough to recognize that we need special accommodations that they don’t, and to leaves alone when we say that we need our space.

No amount of empathy for the neurodivergent experience will provide these accommodations, only enough people initiating or demanding change so we feel safe enough to include ourselves in your classrooms, communities, and conferences.

No amount of empathy will build a quiet room at McCormick Place.

There is a very insidious pattern in a lot of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives to only address the inequities of most visible marginalized identities: race and gender. Disabled people (and neurodivergent people) deserve as much visibility and justice of the inequities we face, but we are constantly excluded from discussions and those discussions made inaccessible for us. No amount of empathy gives us back our seats at the table.

After Midwest concluded, I asked the one other nonbinary person I knew who went to the event if they had ever felt misgendered at the conference. They never felt that way, and they asked me the same question.

I was never gendered correctly at Midwest. I was only misgendered there. I was rarely given the space to correct someone on my pronouns (it’s decidedly they/them, not he/him), and spent the entire conference getting ground down by people to whom I would hand my business card, watch them read my pronouns, and still proceed to misgender me.

I have never written at length about my gender and how my journey surrounding it has shaped my life, but I have also never been made more aware of my own reality of living in a transgender body than I was made to at Midwest. Before I attended Midwest, I was sure that I was nonbinary, but not transgender, having never gone through a what I considered a transition to another gender, simply an eradication of my own concept of gender at all. I don’t caucus with or feel represented by men and I don’t caucus with or feel represented by women, and I don’t dress or act like what I perceive to be any specific gender. I felt authentically me, divorced from gender and as if I didn’t need to adhere to anyone else’s rules about what that looks like.

The Midwest Band Clinic makes quite clear in their FAQ that there is no dress code for the event. That is either misleading or untrue, and the unspoken dress code for the event is business casual. If you do not adhere to either business casual for men or business casual for women, you can expect dirty looks, exclusion from conversations, and getting absolutely ignored because you have the stink of queer liberation on you.

The second day was the hardest for me. The first day, I was still excited to be there and I wandered around in my dinosaur onesie, but that was all before the above mentioned session on neurodivergency. The second day, I wore an outfit that I thought was comfortable, and for every person that said something to that effect about it, there were ten, twenty, maybe a hundred who wouldn’t approach me if their life depended on it. By the end, I never wanted to come back to Midwest. I didn’t feel safe or respected or wanted. I spent huge parts of the rest of the conference constantly on the verge of exasperated, exhausted tears.

Trans and nonbinary people navigate life with this attitude towards us typically at a trickle. We can deal with the occasional off-comment or an uneducated person. The Midwest Band Clinic was a tidal wave of transphobia: unstoppable, relentless, unyielding. Like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

Midwest as institution has no way of supporting the dignity of transgender and nonbinary attendees, but only because they have chosen not to include us. They haven’t even taken the basic step of including pronouns on our name badges. It does not appear that the Midwest Band Clinic has any interest in creating a safe environment for the queer community.

One way that queer people and disabled people share a perspective is that of threat modeling. We have become so accustomed to being so casually mistreated and disrespected that we have to build threat modeling into whether or not we go somewhere or do something. I tried to threat model for Midwest, but was provided with information about an experience of the conference that was not my reality being there, and that made me feel constantly unsafe while attending.

Outside my hotel room, the one safe space I had at Midwest was the …And We Were Heard booth, which I had the opportunity to exhibit at on Monday and Wednesday. They alone made me feel safe and respected and valued. They looked after my needs and checked in with me in ways that buoyed me throughout the conference. I am so lucky to have had their support and to have been safe by them. And they didn’t have to make me feel so seen and heard. They volunteer their time and energy to making people like me visible, and, at least for me, that was life-changing.

I have watched a lot of friends and colleagues go to Midwest every year. One of the things I was told at the conference was that it used to be a lot worse. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine how that must have been, and I can’t imagine why you would come back since that was the case.

Why do you put up this this? If you care about queer liberation and accessibility for disabled and neurodiverse people, why do you continue to support and attend a conference that is hostile to us? If it’s so important to you to center marginalized voices in your programming and champion the work of marginalized composers, how can you justify not creating a safe space at Midwest for transgender, nonbinary, neurodivergent, or disabled people? Why is it okay with you that queer people and disabled people are not welcome at Midwest, yet attend every year as if nothing is wrong? Doesn’t it bother you that you don’t see more trans people or disabled people at the world’s largest band and orchestra conference?

One could say that, at least until Midwest fundamentally changes how it is run, you can either respect your trans and disabled peers and colleagues or attend the Midwest Band Clinic. After this last week and having endured what I did, I’m very inclined to agree. I get that there’s nostalgia and camaraderie and that a lot of people have made lifelong friendships and unforgettable memories at Midwest. There are lots of people who were lovely to me at Midwest, but most of them already knew me, and that doesn’t make the trauma of going to it go away.

For me, I’m not coming back. The Midwest Band Clinic is not a safe environment for me or for people like me, and people in my communities deserve to know just how bad it is before they spend a few thousand or so dollars to be misgendered and overstimulated. Midwest isn’t ready for trans people, nonbinary people, neurodivergent people, and disabled people, and if that’s okay with you, I think you really ought to think about why that is.

Something has to change. I don’t know what it is, but what happened to me at Midwest should never happen to anyone else ever again.

Something has to change.

On Three Aviaries

Last week, I had the enormous opportunity to travel to Boulder, Colorado, to premiere my work Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet at the 51st International Double Reed Society Conference. I was excited for the conference and to introduce myself and my music to a larger audience.

As it turned out, I had woefully underprepared myself for what actually happened. This is the story of Three Aviaries, how it came to be, and how it has already changed me and the way I work.

A few years ago, while I was working on my Master of Music at UNLV, I had the opportunity to have a lesson with Michael Torke, who was visiting UNLV for a residency in which Nextet (UNLV’s new music ensemble) performed a concert of almost entirely his music. In that lesson, I showed a reed quintet work entitled Moonlit Meeting, which is about heartbreak and hooking up on Tinder and (at the time) was my most emotionally devastating work. I told him that I didn’t believe that I could ever go back to that place to write something, to say something so personal through my music. He gazed at me for a moment, and then he said, “ I think you can — and I think you should.” But I never did.

I initially came up with the idea of Three Aviaries in November of 2021, when Stephanie Carlson, one of the most ardent champions of my music and one of my best friends, proposed creating something for IDRS 2022. At the time of our phone call, I was walking through the San Diego Zoo, the place I would often come to relax while I lived in San Diego. I proposed Three Aviaries as a tribute to the Zoo itself, and Stephanie responded enthusiastically. We prepared the application together along with Susan Miranda, and sent it in.

Between the time that we submitted the application to IDRS and the moment I started writing Three Aviaries, I experienced the most difficult time of my life. I was living with a hostile roommate hellbent on training the autism out of me (didn’t work), I was hemorrhaging financial and creative resources to stay afloat, facing the constant threat of burnout, and, on the day I started seriously planning Three Aviaries, I was sexually assaulted on my way home from a rehearsal. I escaped San Diego by the skin of my teeth, moved back to Tucson with my tail between my legs, and spent two months writing Three Aviaries while trying to find a kernel of myself in the rubble of my life.

One of the people I sought out when I moved back to Tucson for help and guidance while I tried to reclaim a lost version of myself than San Diego had taken from me was Annika Socolofsky. She had said something to me on Twitter about how what I was good at in my music would take me far — but I no longer had a concept of what that quality of my work was. She agreed to a Zoom meeting and I told her how I had so heavily researched being able to anticipate and manipulate audience reactions to my music and I wanted so badly to know what about my music was special and what about it drew people in. She said something I did not expect.

“ I think you need to let that go. The times people have most responded to my work have been when I have made myself the most vulnerable.”

Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet was the hardest thing to write I’ve ever written. When I finally had the space to figure out what Three Aviaries was going to be, I realized that work was no longer really about the aviaries of the San Diego Zoo, but instead it was about the profound anguish I had experienced that had made those aviaries so comforting to me. I could not return to that sterile place in which I wrote about the aviaries themselves, and I chose to use my music in a way I had only ever used it once before, in case of Moonlit Meeting: as an opportunity to process what had happened to me.

When I finished Three Aviaries, I experienced a period of terrible depression full of questions and no answers, but what emerged most present in my mind during the time that elapsed between its completion and performance was the horror I felt in the moments when I though about what would happen when people hear what I had to say. I was petrified by the fear that I had said too much, that I had revealed too much of myself in the work. I felt encased in that fear, buried alive by my own creation and the knowledge that I had no idea how people would react to it. I told Stephanie Carlson about these fears and she said, “ This piece is going to change lives and I think people are going to really respond to it.”

About two weeks before Three Aviaries was performed, I came across an essay that Nina Shekhar had written for I Care If You Listen. Within it I found a lot of things comforting, realizing that I was not quite as alone as I thought I was. There were best practices that I built into the performance of Three Aviaries at IDRS, namely, the reading of a trigger warning before the work. I sought out Nina’s advice, any small encouragement that I was doing the right thing. In a very thoughtful and profound email, she told me, “ I think what’s most helpful is to focus on your relationship to your work and disconnect that from everyone else’s reactions… What Three Aviaries means to you matters most.”

And then it was performed. And its premiere brought me many things I had never expected.

The first thing that I did not expect was for Three Aviaries to work at all. It’s ten movements long, in which only four of them are tutti. Three of the movements are soli movements (narrator and string quartet, narrator and English horn, and narrator and oboe), and the other three are aleatoric. The work has so many moving parts that I had convinced myself that, instead of the audience failing to connect with Three Aviaries, the work would not connect with itself. The first time Stephanie, Susan, the Carpe Diem String Quartet and I met and rehearsed the work in Boulder, we got to the first aleatoric movement and the musicians simply followed all the instructions and it just… worked. I burst into tears. That first aleatoric movement is only movement that the narrator is tacet, and I just felt myself melt into the sound and all the memories of the Scripps Aviary just flooded in and it all just overwhelmed me.

I also did not expect how it would feel to perform Three Aviaries. Boulder is at an altitude of about 5000 feet, and the air is thinner up there. After each performance, my body needed a break, because so much energy went into narrating. I sought out Rosanna Moore, another of my best friends and regular new music narrator, and she gave me some very good advice, but I still felt faint after each rehearsal and the performance. I don’t know how much of that was the altitude and how much of it was me pouring myself out into the world, but I now know how much it takes to perform Three Aviaries and how physically taxing it is.

I did not expect to be healed by performing Three Aviaries. I did not imagine that its performance would feel as if I had closed the door on the period of my life that caused me so much pain while I lived in San Diego. It never occurred to me how refreshed and empowered I would feel through performing the work., how it would change the concept of myself as a musician. I never thought that I could be so validate because music I wrote worked. And I still don’t really know what to do with this newfound healing energy I somehow discovered hiding in my music. I think I need more time with it before I know what I want to do with it and I hope that’s okay.

I did not expect to walk away from Three Aviaries wanting to do it all again with any number of the human experiences I have had. I expected to perform this work once and move on to the next, not for it to call into question all the work I have ever done and the work I continue to do. I want to write more like Three Aviaries — this is the work I was meant to do.

And the last thing that I did not expect was the reaction from the audience. In the last few measures of the work during its premiere, I felt myself start to fall apart. My last quavering word, which only with the greatest effort I have ever given during a performance even left my body, was whispered into a shivering stunned silence that I will never forget. The exhale, the moment I finally let go, tears falling freely, unable to really see the standing ovation that I did not feel was deserved. I could have never anticipated audience members bounding on stage to meet me, showering me with compliments rather than criticism, with empathy I have rarely experienced as an autistic person. One told me that Three Aviaries was the best they’d heard at IDRS and I should put it on Broadway and win a Tony for it, which I responded to by bursting it to tears and mumbling an incoherence of gratitude, because that’s among the best things anyone’s ever said about my music. I was already struggling with hearing and receiving compliments about Three Aviaries from my collaborators and the few people who had heard it before its premiere, but the feedback I heard was arresting. How do you hear something like that? How do you process something like that? What was I supposed to do?

I never expected to hold someone whom I did not know tightly in my arms as they freely cried in the aftermath of my music. I had no idea what to say. All I knew is that the best thing I could was be there for the person who I could have known needed to hear what I wrote into existence in Three Aviaries. I told her that it was okay to be like me, and she thanked me and thanked me and thanked me for making her feel visible. I will never be able to forget that this was my impact, just because I told my story in music.

Michael Torke was right — I could go back to that place and I should have done it sooner. Annika Socolofsky was right — people did react the most when I told my truth on that stage. Nina Shekhar was right — I needed to separate my feelings about Three Aviaries from anyone else’s reaction to protect my own healing. And Stephanie Carlson was right — Three Aviaries changed lives, starting with mine.

After the performance of Three Aviaries, I was repeatedly told that by Korine Fujiwara, the violist of the Carpe Diem string quartet, that the work “ has legs.” Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet is special and deserves to be experienced. The question that percolated through my brain since leaving Boulder has been “ What next?” and I’m going to commit to make this work as available as possible.

If you were at IDRS 2022 and you did not get a chance to experience Three Aviaries at the conference, my understanding is that it was audio recorded by IDRS. According to the recording policies of IDRS, I am not authorized to share or post the recording of Three Aviaries or any derivative of that recording on my website or social media. I am only authorized to use the recording of Three Aviaries for archival purposes, so if you email me at wizard@kincaidrabb.com and ask for a perusal score and recording of the work, I can then share the recording with you. Due to IDRS’ recording policy, I was not authorized to create my own recording at the conference and this will be the only recording available of the work when it becomes available.

The other option for you to hear Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet is to organize a performance of it yourself. At this time, I am uncomfortable having any other narrator perform the work other than myself, so I will promise that if you choose to perform this work, I will fly to you and guide you through the performance of Three Aviaries. I will hold your hand every step of the way. I will prepare your audience for it and I will be there for them when it is over.

The next thing I plan on doing is writing more things like Three Aviaries. I already have one work in the very early stages of development as result of having the work performed at IDRS. I had a long conversation with someone who was at the premiere of Three Aviaries, and I think we’ve come up with something really deep. I don’t want to say too much about it because I don’t really know what it’s going to be yet, but I can say that it’s going to be about nostalgia, regret, and pancakes.

I am working to reclaim the place that Michael Torke encouraged me to return to creatively. Three Aviaries proves that I deserve to give myself healing. I am so humbled to have found that power within myself and I have to continue to use it.

The last thing I have to say is thank you. To the people who took time out of their days to choose the autistic composer during a busy conference and experience Three Aviaries, thank you for your kindness and empathy. Thank you for telling people what happened in that room between us. You had to be there, but it was special and I can’t thank you enough for that. To Susan Miranda and the Carpe Diem String Quartet: I have never been so seen by an ensemble in my life, and no one has ever blessed me and my work like you have. To the mentors who I don’t believe know how deeply the influenced me in writing Three Aviaries: thank for saying the things I needed to hear. And to Stephanie Carlson: none of this would have happened without you, and I can’t express how much that means to me.

I am so, so lucky to have found people like me in a world that says that just enough is never just enough.

Experienced Divers Only: The Nutcracker as Framework for Dismantling Classical Music

It takes a lot to become a certified diver.

Diving can be dangerous, and it’s important to understand how to do it safely. According to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), after purchasing expensive equipment, taking a series of courses on safe diving, demonstrating substantial swimming capabilities, logging a number of confined water dives before at least four open water dives, and taking a comprehensive final exam to prove you have acquired a working knowledge of safe diving practices, you can finally dive freely and safely as a PADI certified diver.

But diving isn’t the only way to enjoy the ocean. You could just be a swimmer or a snorkeler, exploring just the surface of the water. You may be able to look down and see the wonders beneath you, but if diving makes you squeamish or uncomfortable, swimming is a perfectly fine option.

Swimming also might not be your thing. Sometimes wading through the water is enough to enjoy the beach. Feeling the salty wind on your face and in your hair, watching seagulls flock and wavers crash, and listening to the water’s gentle roar while only knee deep in the water itself is enough to enjoy the experience.

In themed entertainment design, this analogy of waders, swimmers, and divers is used as a framework to design the experience in such a way that it can appeal to everyone. If you’re familiar with marketing and advertising, the analogy is kind of an inverse engagement pyramid.

At the bottom of the engagement pyramid is where most of the people engaging with a product or service exist. As you ascend the pyramid, you become more and more invested in the product or service, and there are fewer and fewer people at each level. The most important thing to keep in mind about the engagement pyramid is that companies market their products and services to every level of the pyramid, and people identifying with every level get something different out of the product or service.

The experience design framework takes that kind of thinking and turns it on its head — literally.

At the top of the inverse pyramid, most of the people engaging with the experience are waders: people who are there to wander through the attraction, snap a few pictures in front of a castle, and have a very pleasant day escaping into an experience.

The next level is the swimmers: the people who are returning for more, who have planned out their day and determined how they want to curate their own experience. Swimmers are willing to explore the environment and develop a passing knowledge of the experience, building memories through an ongoing relationship with the attraction.

Divers are willing to delve deep into the lore of the experience, finding stories and details hidden within the attraction. They are inquisitive, active participants who develop and maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of the experience and its history. Divers crave the opportunity to engage as much as possible with the experience and will plan extensively to make sure that they are able to maximize their engagement potential with the experience.

The theme park designer knows that the attractions they design will be engaged by waders, swimmer, and divers, all at once, all the time. An effective experience rewards all three.

And that’s what’s so wrong with classical music — it only rewards divers.

Classical music’s greatest failure is its inability and refusal to reward anyone but divers. Only the people already knowledgeable of and invested in classical music are rewarded by our performances. This isn’t limited to followers of Milton Babbitt’s Who Cares if You Listen or classical purists who think Mozart is the best music that would ever or will ever exist. This failure is owned by everyone in our community, because we have all enabled it — or stood by and did nothing to intervene.

The people who have season subscriptions to their local orchestra and only go to the classics like Beethoven and Mahler? Divers. The people who have been taught (or taught themselves) to anticipate when the retransition transforms into the recapitulation? Divers. The people who come up to you after a performance and tell you about the past performances they’ve heard of the piece you played? Divers. And the worst part — we eat it up, every time.

The attention that we classical musicians get from divers experiencing our performances is addictive, because it’s the only way we understand talking about the music we make. Musicians are detail-oriented practitioners of whatever period of music we specialize in, and our education is aggressively technical to support that. We have been trained to appreciate when an audience member can speak our language — and we have been trained to encourage it.

The only time we attempt to reward waders and swimmers is when we see a potential opportunity to convert a wader to a swimmer to a diver. Classical musicians and music educators are specifically trained to funnel people into this pipeline so that we can expand our diver audience. We do not respect that waders may simply want to be waders and swimmers may simply want to be swimmers — if they are not willing to become divers, they have lost our attention.

And this isn’t limited to audience members. I have watched fellow students lose attention and resources from professors because they turned out to be swimmers and not divers (this is evil and reprehensible), and I have observed other musicians tear each other apart for not enough of a diver (over and over, and it’s exhausting every time).

Classical musicians only know how to work with, perform for, and be friends with other divers. This makes the experience of classical music very uncomfortable and alienating for waders and swimmers. Waders and swimmers feel like they will never be able to really understand all the nuance of classical music — because we’ve told them that they can’t.

And the problem is that there are significantly more swimmers than there are divers, and even more waders than there are swimmers. By alienating the waders and the swimmers with our performances, we lost

There are very, very few examples of classical music that reward waders, swimmers, and divers at once and in equal measure.

But there is one: The Nutcracker.

When I was about six or seven, I remember going to my first concert with my mother and both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. It was on a sunny, brisk day in December at Phoenix Symphony Hall, and The Nutcracker was being performed. I distinctly remember the moment when the magic first begins in the story and the Christmas tree enlarges before the battle with the mouse king — the backdrop lifted up and it blew my mind. I remember one thing rushing through my brain: I have to do this.

The Nutcracker is an 1892 ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky which sees thousands of performances every year as part of the overall worldwide Christmas phenomenon. According to Crain’s New York Business, it provides most North American ballet companies with about 40% of their annual ticket revenues. The Nutcracker is the story of Clara, who receives a gift of a nutcracker from her godfather on Christmas Eve, then wakes in the middle of the night to witness a battle with the mouse king, be amazed at the nutcracker’s transformation into a handsome prince, and visit the land of sweets to meet the Sugar Plum Fairy and her subjects.

In many ways, The Nutcracker was my first themed experience. It changed how I thought about entertainment, and it had all the hallmarks of an effective immersive experience: it was themed immaculately, it engaged all my senses, it eliminated negative cues and harmonized positive cues, and it created a sense of memorabilia. It pulled me in, and I immediately went from wader to swimmer to diver.

The experience of The Nutcracker is very interesting in itself, because it’s very hard to divorce it from the overall phenomenon of people celebrate Christmas in the 21st century. For many people, Christmas is a month-long affair — and it encourages as much participation as possible. People are encouraged to theme their homes with Christmas decorations, to eat cookies and drink eggnog, and to spend as much time as possible with their families to build lasting memories of good times together. The Nutcracker exemplifies the Christmas phenomenon, and many people who celebrate Christmas have fond memories of it because it harmonizes so well with the cascade of holiday experiences they already actively participate in throughout the month of December.

But the greatest magic of The Nutcracker is that, like all great themed experiences, it catered to all three kinds of participants. Waders could go to the experience and enjoy a charming ballet that encouraged the suspension of disbelief. Swimmers could attend a performance as part of their annual Christmas traditions. Divers could explore all the elements of the production of the show, from the fabulous score to the magic of stagecraft.

If we examined the power of The Nutcracker as an example of what classical music could be if it rewarded waders and swimmers in addition to divers. The Nutcracker is so effective because it lets people come as they are to engage with it, and it doesn’t (explicitly) suggest or demand that you need to invest time and energy into becoming a diver to understand it.

So… what now?

Classical music and all its derivative genres will continue to suffer because of its failure to reward anyone but divers in its performances. Unfortunately, unless there is intervention, this will eventual cause classical music to bankrupt itself.

For a lot of existing classical music, there’s not a lot that can be done. It’s very hard to reinvent Beethoven in such a way that waders and swimmers will see it as anything other than a shameless attempt to bring "classical music to the masses.” There’s still an underlying attitude there, a holier-than-thou-ness that makes it immediately and distressingly clear that there is a private circle of classical musicians and those they have deemed worth to stand among them — and everyone else. That’s why it’s not enough to simply reframe classical music in a nontraditional venue like a bar; that’s just superimposing a subculture onto a different space, encouraging the divers already invested in classical music to come to an event at which they can also drink alcohol, not making classical music itself more accessible.

It’s fine to have events that only reward divers as long as you understand you are only rewarding divers. Organizations can continue to present classical music in its current state, but they have to expand into programming that rewards waders and swimmers if they expect to be able to survive. Ideally, classical music programming will find a way to reward waders, swimmers, and divers alike, and here are some strategies to actualize that.

1. Show, Don’t Tell

   Telling an audience more information about the performance, whether it’s through pre-concert talks, program notes, or any other means is diver catnip, but it sometimes has the effect of feeling condescending to waders and swimmers. The best thing to do for waders is to let the musical affect them without telling them how they should be effected, and the best thing to do for swimmers is to only tell them why the music affected them so when they ask why the music worked the way it did. Don’t draw attention to program notes or make it seem like pre-concert talks are required to understand the performance — the divers in your audience love the opportunity to find that information out on their own.

2. Deconstruct the Concert Environment

   I’ve actually written a lot about this already, but the proscenium-style concert environment is terrible for presenting classical music. The proscenium is a story device, and it’s often irrelevant for the presentation of concert music — but still suggests a divide between performers and audience that alienates waders and swimmers. It’s a negative cue that waders and swimmers in your audiences find really uncomfortable because it reminds them just how uncomfortable they are. The proscenium works for The Nutcracker (because it’s a ballet and the proscenium is serving a functional role for the story), but Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or Copland’s Rodeo? Not so much.

   Experiment with the way you use the proscenium or find a way to erase the feeling that there is a proscenium at all. You will find that the waders and swimmers in your audiences become immediately and significantly more engaged in the work you perform.

3. Rethink Music Education

   Music education currently encourages waders to become swimmers and swimmers to become divers. If we don’t know how to convert waders into swimmers or divers, or it turns out that we can’t convert waders into swimmers or divers because they’re just not that interested in music, we give up on them and focus our resources on those swimmers and divers we have already been able to engage. This is very bad, and a very easy way of making it sure that we alienate huge potential audiences who may have been okay with just being audiences.

   Not all music educators do this, but it’s so important to make that no music educators do this. The best way to overcome this practice is to talk about the waders, swimmers, and divers concept with students — and recognize that’s okay to be any of them, and different people will get different things out of your teaching. Students would rather understand that there are different ways to interface with art than be left in the dust while students get more attention. Be honest — and they’ll respect you for it.

4. Perform New Music the Right Way

   New music doesn’t have to have pre-existing connotations of what it is for audiences to appreciate it. A lot of new music is a lot better that way. The easiest way of alienating audiences with new music is telling them that it’s going to be weird or different, because that suggests that only some people (the divers) will understand the nuance of it. Expectations are premeditated disappointments, and new music doesn’t automatically come with the classist baggage that classical music does. There’s a lot of opportunities in the changing the world that new music is born into, and investing in a space in which waders, swimmers, and divers can be rewarded that present new music is paramount to changing the associations people have with classical music.

5. Collaborate with Other Media

   Par of what make The Nutcracker so powerfully equipped to reward waders, swimmers, and diver simultaneously is its ability to engage more that one sense. It allows existing sensory associations with Christmas to be heightened during its performances, creating a lot of resonance between all the elements of its experience, which is something that waders and swimmers look for in their search for high quality experiences.

   Collaborating with other media is key to creating a greater sense of sensory resonance. Pair performances of music with visual media on stage, reinforce that media with a curated menu of food and drink at intermission, and create merchandise that will deepen the memorability of the experience, things they can touch and remember the experience of the music. Be more curatorial about the experience and how you engage senses and watch as you attract swimmers and waders — and impress divers.

This is not an exhaustive list (and I could write more), but it gives a good idea of how rigid and exclusive classical music is. From the way that we educate people about what we do as classical musicians to the way that we present classical music, everything that we do is specifically designed to only reward divers or convert people into divers — all while alienating the vast majority of our potential audiences, which are waders and swimmers. By using lessons from The Nutcracker, we can dismantle the way we present classical music as we know it and shape it into something new and welcoming.

All we need to do is let the waders be waders, let the swimmers be swimmers, and let the divers be divers.

We Know.

Today is National Coming Out Day. 

National Coming Out Day is celebrated every year on October 11. It was created by Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary, pivotal early figures of the LGBTQ+ equality movement, and is today celebrated as a moment to honor the courage people show in the act of coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer. It’s an opportunity for the LGBTQ+ community to demonstrate that everyone knows someone who’s LGBTQ+, and to break down negative stereotypes about our community perpetuated by people convinced they don’t know anyone who will be directly impacted by them.

Every year, thousands of people use National Coming Out Day as a chance to talk about the triumphant act of coming out, or, in many cases, actually come out themselves. For those of us who have been out for a long time, it’s a chance to remember the experience of coming out and how it empowered us, how it provided us with our first breath of fresh air outside the closet. 

But for some of us, myself included, National Coming Out Day (painfully) reminds us of the fact that we have never had the opportunity to come out. 

Thirteen years ago, I was a freshman in high school. I went to Arizona School for the Arts, the magnet arts charter school in Phoenix, Arizona, and, from the moment I set foot at that school in 7th grade, people assumed I was gay. People constantly told me that I would come out in a few years and that things would make more sense. What they said with such authority terrified me, and it made me feel like they knew me better than I knew myself. I was so afraid that they might be right, and that them being right about me would give them ammunition. I was already pretty isolated, and, if they were right, surely they’d use that knowledge to dictate the rest of my existence to me. 

Then the unthinkable happened. I fell in love for the first time in my life. I fell head over heels for a trumpet player and choir boy with the prettiest eyes and an infectious level of confidence. I had never had someone who inspired me so much. I felt safe with him, like I could be myself, whoever that could be. I remember the first time I kissed him, and it felt so right, like things just fell into place. It was my first kiss.

I loved him (and probably always will) - and I despised myself for it. My classmates were right about me. I was gay. Or something. I didn’t really ever figure it out. I never got the chance.

What happened next is blur. It was traumatic, and I can’t really remember a lot of things in my life that are so traumatic. I think I broke up with him because of fear, and he started dating someone else. I think we got back together, and I think we had a big falling out. All I really know is how much I regretted losing him, and how much of a mistake it was. 

A month or so later, one of my classmates berated me again, asking me when I was going to come out. It broke me, and I finally did, and, if I had expected to be congratulated or consoled or thanked for being so open about myself, I was going to be disappointed, because there was only one thing my classmates ever said in response.

“We know. We told you so.” 

What was worse was the teachers. There was a rumor that had gone around that the faculty had a betting pool on when I was going to come out. When I came out to them, I always watched in horror as their faces twisted into knowing smiles, and they each validated my classmates in each icy statement.

“We know. It wasn’t hard to guess.”

I tried to start a Pride Alliance at my school, and everyone - students and faculty - rejected the idea. They would ask, “Do you really think ASA is homophobic? Do you really feel discriminated against here?” And for a long time, I didn’t have language to describe how much that answer was yes.

So I hope that rumor about the Arizona School for the Arts faculty having the betting pool going around the revelation of my sexuality was just a rumor, but I’ll never know.

A few years later, I was at a church event with our youth group, including my sister and a number of her friends. It was an all-night event, and some of the people my age were making some sexually-explicit homophobic jokes at my expense. After years of emotional neglect from people my age, I was delighted by the jokes - at least I could feel included, even if it was people subjecting me to derogatory jokes made about my assumed sexuality. I laughed, and confirmed their suspicions. 

“We know, Kincaid. That’s why this is funny.” 

And it went on for hours, providing them with all the entertainment they needed. The next day, my parents asked to talk to me in their bedroom. They told me that my sister had overheard some of the homophobic jokes and that the jokes had made her friends uncomfortable. My sister had told them about the jokes and how I had responded to them, and they asked me if I was gay. I felt cornered, powerless to resist, so I said yes.

“We knew. We’ve known for years.” 

A few years later, and I was preparing for my undergraduate composition recital at the University of Arizona. I told my mom that two of the pieces on my recital were about the experience of queerness and how it had shaped my life. One of them was about coming out - something I had never actually done - and the other was about heartbreak - something with which I had a lot of experience. 

My mother gave me an ultimatum - either come out to my conservative extended family or don’t invite them. She said that it wasn’t fair not to give them fair warning about what they were going to see at my recital. So, a month or so later, over a family dinner, I did it. Not because I wanted to, but because I was given an impossible, terrible choice. 

“We know, and we don’t know why you feel the need to bring it up with us.”

I will probably never, ever write music about my experience as a queer person again.

Coming out is hard. Harder than a lot of people think, but it’s even harder when it’s not necessary, when people have already made the assumption about your sexuality the moment you walk through the door or open your mouth and say anything. 

When people talk about coming out, it’s often framed as this empowering experience that gave them the ability to be more fully themselves. All I’ve gotten out of coming out is the ability to hear that people already know who I am, and the permission to be the person they already assumed I was. 

By assuming my sexuality, people in my life never gave the opportunity to figure out who I was, and because people continue to assume my sexuality upon meeting me, I have never really had the chance to explore what it means to be myself. I might not be gay. And I will never have the chance to express that.

When you make assumptions about people and their sexual orientation, you rob them of a little bit of their humanity, and you make it impossible for you to ever get to know the real them. You make it impossible for them to feel comfortable talking about their sexuality with you, and you immediately alienate them. You rob them of the chance to explore who they are, who they want to be, and how they want their sexuality to play a role in their life. And for what? So you can assign them a label that you understand? So you can make it so you’re comfortable with who they are? Is that really want you want? Are you really that selfish?

I’m not asking for sympathy or empathy, or for the space to explore who I am and come out as such. That has already been taken from me, and it can’t be returned. That damage is done, and no amount of apology can ever repair my experience. What I’m asking you to do, if you have ever judged someone to be LGBTQ+ without them having come out, pressured someone out of the closet, or outed someone, is to never, ever do that to someone again. 

Sometimes, the best apology you can give is changed behavior. If you find yourself identifying with this as a perpetrator, you can’t undo what you did to me or whatever you did to another traumatized queer person, but you can do everything in your power to make sure it never happens again.

I’m also not going to forgive you.

Because the irreparable damage you did to me in making me feel powerless when I have come out to you has shaped the way I have navigated my life, I’m not interested in forgiving you. I am the victim, and what you did was monstrous. You cannot earn my forgiveness and it’s insulting for you to try to do so.

Because I’m not going to forgive you, you have to live with what you did to me. You can choose to ignore it and pretend the shame isn’t there, or you can be angry enough with yourself that you decided to change. Regardless of what reaction you have, you have to learn how to live with the fact that, while you may not be a lifelong homophobic bigot, what you did was homophobic.

Forgiveness does not inspire change.

When people come out to you, if you care about them, you have to think about your impact on them, and you have to think about how what you say may change their life. I’d like to think that my peers and mentors in high school never intended on making me hate myself for being gay, but instead wanted to help me explore what it meant to be out as a queer person. If that was their intention, it has not been how I have been impacted.

I want to believe that my peers in my church group wanted to include me, and so they included me in the terrible jokes they were already making about each other, not thinking about how much it would hurt. If that was their intention, it has not been how I have been impacted.

I hope that my family wants to support every part of me, and I hope they intended to make me feel loved and welcome in their space. I hope they can see and hear me when I talk about my experience, not pretend it isn’t there or isn’t real or it isn’t valid. I honestly hope they wanted me to know that they loved me, not regardless of the gender of people I fall in love with, but because the fact that I am gay is part of what makes me myself. If that was their intention, it has not been how I have been impacted.

If celebrating National Coming Out Day brings you joy, and your experience of coming out was empowering, I am so happy for you. I am proud of you, and I am happy that you avoided people telling you that they already know. I am glad that you came out without experiencing something like my trauma, and that you were allowed the space to figure out who you are without judgment. One of my greatest, most private wishes is that my experience was like yours. I envy you terribly. 

For those of you who have never had to come out because you are straight: you don’t know what it’s like, and you can’t understand how important it is for us. You have to be more careful around the LGBTQ+ people in your life, and you have to honor our privacy. You have to give us the right and the space to choose for ourselves what kind of life we want to lead. If you choose instead to force us into situations in which we feel powerless except to reveal to you a glimpse into our innermost lives, you committing an act of homophobia (or transphobia). You have engaged in act of leveraging your power and privilege you have claimed in the world that was built by you and built for you against the powerless and the unprivileged. If you feel ashamed after reading this because you have done this to someone, I’m sorry, but you deserve to feel uncomfortable and you should examine why you feel that way. You need to take responsibility for the act of evil you have committed against them, and you need to recognize the way that you treated them will affect the way the will navigate the world from that point on. I hope you can move through your shame to a place where you choose instead to advocate for the humanity of my community, the same humanity you once stole from someone who made the mistake of trusting you. 

Give people the chance to come out. Instead of assigning the coming out narrative to people you do not know in that way, give people the space they deserve. If you suspect that someone is LGBTQ+ but they haven’t said anything about it, say nothing. And when they come out to you, never, ever, say that you already knew. 

Thank them for their courage and their trust, smile, and be proud that they have chosen to include you in the knowledge of this part of them. Let us know that you are an ally, and we will trust you forever. We’ll know that we are safe with you.

And I bet that feeling would be - is - amazing. But because you knew about me before I knew about me, I’ll never - I can’t - know.

Am I Marginalized Enough for You?

Author’s Note: This was written prior to coming into a greater realization about how I feel about gender. I am nonbinary, and I use they/them pronouns. Despite the evolution of my understanding of my own gender, I have decided to preserve the original piece of writing.

I am a cisgender white man who grew up in middle class America with two parents who are still together. We always had food on the table. I had years of private music lessons, I went to a high school that was focused on the arts, and I rarely needed to have a job while I was attending school. My parents were active in my local community and we were regulars at church. All things considered, the resources and community I was brought up in would indicate that I was privileged.

For years, I wondered why people hated me. I wondered why teachers had no patience for me, why other students pointed at me and whispered malevolent things, why church leaders gave me dark looks and nothing but criticism, and why almost every single authority figure in my life growing up specifically targeted me for extra punishment and made exceptions in the rules for everyone but me. I wondered why I had it so much harder from my parents that either of my siblings, why we had to have arguments every night. I wondered what I had done, and desperately wished it wouldn’t happen to me.

Despite all my visible privilege and all the resources I allegedly had to work with, remembering my childhood and adolescence is tough, because most of it was traumatic. At the time that the things happened to me, I might not have known why I got berated openly by a teacher for drawing Jimmy Neutron when prompted to draw something that made us happy, why a church leader belittled and humiliated me for being “ different,” or why the principal and vice principal of my high school made it their mission to enable my peers to treat me as a social pariah, and these are just a few of the experiences that had a profound and formative effect on me during some of the most formative times of my life.

I came out as gay when I was 15, though people had been explaining to me that I was attracted to men for almost a decade up to that point. It wasn’t until I was 19 and most of the damage had been done that I was evaluated by a psychologist and received diagnoses of ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder, among others. I finally had an explanation for why people were cruel to me and why the marginalized me: because that’s what neurotypical people always do to people with mental disorders if they can get away with it.

Over the past few years, I’ve gotten really, really good about deflecting people trying out microaggressions (or straight-up aggressions) on me, usually regarding their fears or preconceived notions about neurodiversity or homosexuality. I’ve become an educator in breaking down stereotypes and reclaiming my own humanity. I’ve become really good at creating my own opportunities, and using a DIY mentality to claim some kind of success for myself, knowing that institutions don’t normally support people like me.

I’ve also come to fear institutions with every fiber of my soul. People who have authority over me terrify me, and I feel like I have to prepare myself to experience trauma when I’m around them, because life has conditioned me to know humiliation and retribution for little mistakes, and immediate dismissal or ostracization should I fail in any capacity.

In last few years, we have all experienced a shift in the mainstream acceptance of social justice issues, especially in race and gender. Many of us, including myself, have pivoted to an anti-racist and feminist social practice, which is good work that needs to be done (and that needs to continue). One of the fallacies of this work is that we have put a lot of emphasis on visible identities, and we have often ignored identities that are invisible, such as sexuality (virtually anything that’s not homosexuality gets constantly erased) and neurodiversity (which is almost laughably misunderstood, undervalued, and underrepresented).

In my undergrad, I was involved in student government when an organization comprised of students of marginalized communities brought forward a list of demands that would improve their quality of life at the university. When I came forward and tried to help uplift that organization, I was told they didn’t need my help. Essentially, it was the first time I was told that I wasn’t marginalized enough for marginalized communities, and that has been something that has haunted me for years.

Time and time again, I’ve been placed in this terrible no man’s land between between the white straight cisgender patriarchy and communities or institutions with diversity at their core, marginalized from both for not being enough of either. Visibly, I’m privileged, and that’s all that matters to a lot of people. If it’s hard to identify with a communities that tell you that you don’t fit in here, what you do if all of them say it?

Something that’s really good in new music right now is the overwhelming amount of opportunities designed to uplift and encourage composers and music makers of marginalized communities. Composers and music makers of color, women and nonbinary composers and music makers, and transgender composers and music makers deserve recognition for their work. It’s been too long that cisgender white men have controlled classical and new music and it’s good that institutions and ensembles are working to change that.

But sometimes being marginalized isn’t about being white or cisgender or a man. Sometimes it’s about having experienced (or having to continue to experience) the exhausting trauma of having to constantly out yourself as queer or neurodivergent. And what I haven’t experienced is people having the conversation about the fact that that’s a thing. What is real is the fear that comes with feeling like your work is going to be disregarded because you appear to be privileged on the outside, should you dare apply for an opportunity designed for people of marginalized communities, which have never welcomed you, regardless of the fact that you have experienced marginalization constantly, even relentlessly.

Every time I see an opportunity for an emerging marginalized composer or music maker, I usually close the window and sometimes forward it on to a friend or two. I have never applied to one of these opportunities despite being a marginalized person. I have always made room for someone else, because I have been made to feel powerless in my marginalized identities. I constantly convince myself that the spaces people are creating for marginalized composers and music makers are not (and never will be) for me.

I am a cisgender white man. I am also a neurodivergent queer person. I experience or relive trauma every day. I learn something new about how I navigate the world every few weeks. I try to love myself, but it doesn’t always work. I want to feel wanted, but I don’t know how to make that happen, because I’ve so rarely felt wanted before. I hope that someday I find my people, and that I don’t have to constantly prove myself to them like I have for everyone else in my life.

And I hope someday someone says, “Hey, Kincaid. Looks like you have been marginalized. I want you to know that it’s okay, and you are wanted here. The parts of you that you have been marginalized for are valid and important, and it’s okay for you to take up some of this space.”