Six songs for a girl, may she hold them tight like a blade in her hand, they’re all I can give her other than to say I love her… and I’m sorry: song cycle for digital voice and chamber ensemble

Creating art that centers the voices and concerns of trans women is fraught in the contemporary academic and political climate. Cisgender readers and audiences often do not understand what we are trying to communicate because they do not have the language to relate to our material experiences—they do not know what they do not know. six songs for a girl, may she hold them tight light a blade in her hand, they’re all i can give her other than to say i love you… and I’m sorry is a song cycle for digital voice and chamber ensemble that looks to take this challenge head on, exploring transfeminine perspectives on time, love, and our bodies without the acts of translation that the cisgender gaze demands of us. I expanded Haraway’s myth of the cyborg with Baitz’s idea of a transsexual musicology to claim and design a digital voice as my own embodied voice, and worked to explore its materials through live performance and improvisation. six songs looks past the ways in which trans women’s voices are violently critiqued towards a queer futurity where the subjects of our desires and perspectives can be fully explored. six songs is additionally exploration of text in music, using lyrics, poetry, and textscoring to shape varied song forms. The songs contain difficult and often pointedly violent reflections on my own past and childhood, relating these thoughts as an abstracted conversation with my younger self.