LGTBQ+ songwriters will be paired up to shape and eventually showcase their music through a workshop from the Louisville Orchestra and Louisville Pride Foundation.
The workshop begins the week of March 10, and applications will be accepted through Feb. 21.
The project will be led by current Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps composer Baldwin Giang.
As a Creators Corps composer, Giang spent an orchestral season composing new works.
“We provide [the corps composers] salary, benefits, housing, and while they're here, working for the orchestra, they write lots of new music for us to play, and they are doing collaborations with community organizations and schools and other institutions,” said Jacob Gotlib, Creators Corps program manager.
The free multi-week program, which is separate from the Creators Corps, aims to pair three older members of the LGBTQ+ community with their younger counterparts.
“There's not much transmission that happens between people of different generations,” Giang said. “My idea was to create a project where we could bridge and suture some of those intergenerational gaps through songwriting.”
The pairs will write the melody and lyrics for original compositions that will then be performed by members of the Louisville Orchestra in a concert June 20.
“The idea is down from this phenomenon in the queer community that we have a lot of gaps in intergenerational knowledge, because queer people aren't related to each other by family, birth family at least, or by blood,” Giang said.
Participants will be asked to write their music based on the prompt of sharing knowledge with a queer person of a different age.
“It could also be letters to themselves when they were younger, or letters to themselves when they're older. The possibilities are open,” Giang said.
Pairs will meet at Louisville Pride Foundation in Old Louisville over the course of several weeks to conceptualize, prepare and practice their pieces.
The program is open to people with a wide range of musical experience.
Trans poet and writer Smith Yarberry will meet with groups to help with the lyric writing process in earlier sessions, and Giang will have both group and individual sessions.
Giang, who is Asian American and gay, said he wanted to do something that showcased the city’s queer community.
“I really wanted to celebrate the diversity of people that came to Louisville and have made it their home in the queer community, and to celebrate that intersectionality,” Giang said.
The additional focus on age, Giang said, came from noticing the lack of visibility older people have in society at large, but specifically in the LGBTQ+ community.
He first came up with the idea in August. Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration and a slew of anti-DEI executive orders, Giang said highlighting queer stories and voices is even more important.
“Doing this kind of program that amplifies the voices of real queer people and celebrates their intersectionality, their difference is so vital because it reminds people of the fundamental dignity of difference, of being unique and having a nuanced and complicated identity, and what it means to resist society that is looking to oppress them,” Giang said.
The Louisville Orchestra is also aiming to have queer vocalists perform the works created during the workshop.
