Composer
Michael Bussewitz-Quarm
Lyricist
Kahlil Gibran
Seattle Men’s Chorus performed “Speak to Me of Clothes” during Festival 2024. Closing plenary speaker Joan Garry cited the performances as one of the ones that spoke to her. Joan invited festival goers and online viewers to learn more about the piece.
Commissioned by Seattle Men’s Chorus for Love Beyond Borders, a concert designed to cultivate awareness of the plight LGBTQ+ people living in (and escaping from) fundamentalist Muslim countries. The concert told the LGBTQ+ refugee experience through original commissioned works. It was supposed to premiere in March of 2020, and, then COVID. For 2024 we reimagined it as a 60-minute oratorio and interwove video storytelling of the refugees to tell the story as one big arc. Several of those who have escaped and are now safely living safely were in the audience in person. It was livestreamed. SMC gave free links (thanks to a donor) to the Michael Faila who has made it his life’s work to save LGBTQ+ people by moving them from their homes where they’d be killed for being gay to safe countries – to share with refugees who were in active migration. 400 of them. They move in ones and twos, not as a big group. So in caves and jungles as individuals were making their way to safe spaces they watched this choral oratorio on their phones. And they send notes back saying: “This gives me hope. Thank you.”
“Speak to Me of Clothes” honors the experiences of trans people within that larger story. Composed by Michael Bussewitz-Quarm, utilizing poetry by Kahlil Gibran.
In the fall of 2024 an original documentary using the music to tell the story of the concert process will be released by the award-winning video team of Michael Willer and Craig Coogan.