ChamberQUEER presents their 2022 festival, Revolution, as part of National Sawdust's 7th season, "The Future is...". The festival opens by drawing centuries of music into conversation, juxtaposing boundary-breaking Renaissance nuns with the voices of three fantastic emerging composers drawn from our 2020 Call for Scores: Connor D’Netto, Alexis Lamb, and Rosśa Crean. The concert weaves these musical worlds together through reflective improvisations that converse with multifaceted experiences of queerness across the centuries. The second evening highlights Gay Guerrilla by iconoclastic queer composer Julius Eastman, in a new arrangement for string septet by Jessie Montgomery, and featuring the arranger on violin. Curated in partnership with Eastman scholar Isaac Jean-François, the event paints an image of Eastman’s New York City, both with a new film by Ashanti Soldier and Kham Owens, and through works of Eastman’s colleagues and contemporaries, including Tania León and Talib Rasul Hakim. The program traces lines to queer modernism of the earlier 20th-century, including Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations setting of the poetry of the visionary Arthur Rimbaud.

Photo by Liz van Os, 2019.