A Boy with Baleen for Teeth - Mezzo-Soprano, Baritone, and Piano, Full Score (PDF Edition)

Program Note:

            Rajiv Mohabir's A Boy with Baleen for Teeth depicts the arrival of queerness at its most authentic: full of shame and forced apology that was never ours to own. In this coming-of-age narrative I use music to center what many queer people hear as we mature: stinging demands from those who define our existence for us, hymns sung by unwelcoming church congregations, and the familiar, looming decrescendo of oppressive noise as we are pushed out of our families, church communities, and birthplaces.

            The vocal lines are given with the rise and fall of crying, yelling and questioning. In the accompaniment, bull-in-a-china-shop type harmonic crashes lash out against the cis-heteronormative confines placed upon the singers. Pivotal moments in their life are surrounded by pulsing quarter notes which taunt the singers like a border, imposed by others and then by themselves as their personhood is pushed down again and again. As the text's whale metaphor develops, the music breaks free from its initial kicking and screaming. Its once-regimented motifs develop in ways that now hold the main character's grief and newfound agency.

            Mohabir describes the main character as "a falling star into the abyss" as they leave their family in the middle of the poem. The piece concludes with them trembling mid-air, "stars shone through the holes of my body," almost a beacon of light for those who later struggle with community and identity as they have. The long-lasting damage done to queer people by western colonization's ever-encroaching philosophies of binary gender, nuclear family structure, and societal respectability has policed and estranged us from communities in this way for centuries. This harm extends at several intersections to the struggles of Indigenous people, Black people, and all who threaten what James Baldwin called the "stupendous delusion" of whiteness in america, queer or not. I offer the following quote from ANOHNI, a queer person who has absolutely been a beacon of light in my creative and personal life, as an epilogue of sorts from the other side of the struggle depicted in this piece:

            "It's maybe a little different now, because there are tiny pockets or enclaves where people, and children, are welcomed. But for many, many years, especially when I was growing up, there was no welcome kit. There was no welcome committee. You were born, and you manifested despite the desire of the society and the family and the church and the community that you be extinguished. So what could be any more natural than such a powerful instinct, that desire to manifest as oneself despite threat of imminent harm? It's really mystical. In almost all cultures now, the trans aspect emerges despite society's desire for it not to. There's no learning that. You know, you look at an effeminate five-year-old–there's no learning that. There's no reason that child does that. She's bending and contorting, desperately trying not to be who she is. She's trying so deeply to suppress her nature, but she can't win. She's going to be herself no matter how hard she tries, no matter the price she will pay for it.

So it's beautiful. It's the most beautiful example of nature that you can have really. That's why I've always been trying to beg for a revitalized alliance between queer and trans people and environmentalism and ecology. Because it's so critical to everything. It's our mandate. It's our biological mandate that we discuss that we're connected to nature. It's our mandate as queer bodies that we talk about nature. Because we are nature."

-ANOHNI, interview for Atmos (14 Nov 2022)