Bryce: Welcome to Beyond Travesti, a podcast where I talk to trans and gender diverse opera and music theater professionals about old constructs, present concerns, and future visions of our individual and collective work. I'm Bryce McClendon. I'm a countertinter, writer, educator and creative consultant based in New York City. Today my guest is male soprano Elijah McCormick. We'll talk about how Eli has navigated being a transgender singer in the traditionally conservative space of oratorio and concert.
Elijah: If I have negative experiences in the spaces where I work, it's not usually so know people being openly transphobic or anything. Any negative experiences I have are mostly related to a sense of uncertainty or presumptions on the part of other people. One of the most important things as a performer is to be present in what you're doing and be present in your body, and it's harder to do that when you're not comfortable.
Bryce: We'll talk about how Eli got interested in historical performance and in particular the legacy of the castrati,
Elijah: A sexual minority that is made a spectacle, often sexualized, outside of norms - because this was still never technically legal or church approved, certainly - their success was often relegated to the realm of performance.
Bryce: A couple of episodes [ago] I talked about a resource that I was working to develop in partnership with Danielle Wright of Opera Modo and Katherine Goforth and Dorian Block, who have both been guests from Beyond Travesti previously: a professional directory of trans, non binary and gender diverse opera and music theater professionals. I'm happy to announce that the survey to submit to be included in this professional directory is now available via the Opera Modo website. We will link to it in the show notes.
This isn't only a resource for singers. There are people who work in a number of disciplines related to opera and music theater, and so it is going to be fully indexable and available sometime in January once we get it all together. Super excited to share it with you. Hope you'll submit if it would be useful to you. And we have a lot of exciting conversations going on in order to advance this resource and make it something that companies can use and our community can use to connect together.
And now for my conversation with Eli.
Today, my guest is male soprano Elijah McCormick. Elijah performs concert and opera across the United States and beyond. He recently won the Myerson/Zwanger Award for second place in the Oratorio Society of New York solo competition. He has performed as a soloist with organizations like Seraphic Fire, Washington Bach Consort, Dallas Bach Society, American Bach soloists, and Ensemble Altera. Opera credits include appearances with Haymarket Opera, and IlluminArts, Miami. Also well versed in new music, Eli has participated in several world premieres with The Crossing and also premiered the role of Bell Cohen in Benjamin Wenselberg's NIGHTTOWN with Lowell House Opera. His 2023 season sees his return to Washington Bach Consort ensemble Altera the crossing and Seraphic Fire, as well as his debut within series and also his international debut as soprano soloist in Bach's Christmas oratorio at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
So, Eli, thank you for chatting with me today. I'm excited that you're tuning in to record this all the way from Deutschland. So welcome.
Elijah: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Bryce: I always start off by asking what brought you to classical singing in the first place, and what keeps you involved in classical singing.
Elijah: Well, I've been involved in classical music to some degree from a really early age. I grew up in a very musical family. We were always in church choir. My dad played in a local symphony. He was a violist. But church choir was a really big part of my life from a really young age. So I grew up in kind of a traditional royal school of church music style treble choir, where we were singing all these tutor anthems and whatnot. And then I continued with that into voice lessons in middle school and high school.
And I didn't think for a long time that I was going to pursue a career in classical music. I came to that after my senior year of college, or like towards the end of my senior year of college when my alma mater's music department got a donation to put on a fully staged opera, and they chose a baroque opera. And so after that, I went to do my master's degree in Indiana university.
What keeps me coming back to it is, I think... One of the things that has always attracted me to performing in general, and just like singing: I'm not very great at talking to people. I don't like to speak off the cuff very much. I grew up kind of being one of those kids who really didn't talk to anybody. I was really shy and really quiet. I think being a performer is a way to get attention maybe that sounds like a very shallow reason, but it's a way to express myself that doesn't require a lot of the things that I find really difficult in a lot of social interaction.
So that's really fun. And also just in terms of sort of the more macro, like the art form, I don't know. There's a lot of things in classical music that I relate to and that I feel suited to artistically, as an individual. Like I said, I grew up in a kind of typical Episcopal church choir, and that cultivated an interest in a certain kind of repertoire from a fairly young age. And so as I grew up, I developed a certain kind of voice that has turned out to lend itself really well to baroque music and certain areas of new music and whatnot, choral singing and that kind of thing.
I don't feel like I can do anything in the world of classical music. Like, I'm not a Strauss singer or a verity singer, really, particularly, I don't think. But vocally, I find that a lot of. I feel able to express a lot of baroque music in particular very easily. It feels very accessible to me. And also as a field, I think Historical Performance is seeing a lot of really exciting progress and innovation that is really intriguing to me.
Bryce: Cool. Yeah. So you've clearly had a good amount of success as a concert singer and oratorio singer. You won an award from Oratorio Society of New York. You've sung as a soloist and an ensemble member with a number of prestigious choirs and festivals. So I'm curious how it's been for you navigating these spaces as a transgender singer. In my experience, many of those spaces have tended to be a little more conservative, either because of audiences or standard rehearsal practices or where they're based. Has that proven to be true for you at all? What experiences have you had? Either positive or negative? And what do you think companies should do more of to include and support transgender performers?
Elijah: Yeah, that's definitely real. I think it's just classical music in general is such a gender normative space. It kind of gets into this feedback loop of, like, well, our audiences, we feel, are older and therefore more, I guess traditional is the perception, and we don't want to mess with that. We don't want to bring up politics to our donors or anything like that.
If I have negative experiences in the spaces where I work, it's not usually so much people being openly transphobic or anything. Any negative experiences I have are mostly related to a sense of uncertainty or presumptions on the part of other people. So I tend to assume... I'm not on testosterone, I don't pass, so to speak. So I tend to assume that wherever I am, whoever I'm talking to, even if I haven't brought up being transgender I tend to assume I've already been clocked, kind of. So a big part of it is just, like, not knowing what to expect from any given person.
I think it's true that a lot of more, especially more venerable organizations, would just prefer to acknowledge things like that as little as possible. They want to stick purely to their artistic mission.They don't want to mess with their audiences or their donors or risk any of that.And that's fair.But in some ways it can make it difficult to know what kind of a space you're coming into, if it's going to be affirming or neutral or actively unwelcoming or weird, and exactly how much they're willing to defer to things like presumed audience opinion on things like how their performers look physically.
So, I mean, I personally experience a lot of misgendering of me as an individual. And to an extent I expect that I've chosen this life. I knew what I was getting into, and I'll correct someone in the moment. I'm fairly comfortable with that now. I wasn't always, interestingly, I guess you could file this under bad experiences: I've been in some situations where I won't name names, but of being misgendered most sometimes by leaders in organizations that really do actively try to protect the image of inclusivity and progressivism and whatnot, and who in fact were using my transness for publicity. And in that situation, it was like, okay, well, what are we here for now?
That representation is becoming sort of a marketing thing and it's becoming better PR. Now we have to contend with tokenization and things like that as organization diversify their rosters. And in a sense, that's still progress. At least it is marketable, I guess, to have a diverse roster. But you still also need to treat people like people.
I mean, there's like passive misgendering by section or by voice type. A lot of conversation and things like gendered dress codes, the things that. People don't always think about it too much because it's so entrenched in the culture. But basic things like that can cause a lot of uncertainty for a lot of people.
Bryce: Is there any sort of advice you could share for people who might be in a situation where they're like, I might get hired by this place, but I don't really know what to expect. And I'm not sure what kind of questions I should ask or if there's anything that I should do in advance to make sure that I'm going to feel good or just even personally. How do you think about what to do in advance when you are living in this place where you just sheerly don't know what to expect to kind of protect yourself and your peace.
Elijah: Yeah. I think historically, at this point, a lot of the organizations I work with are organizations that I have already worked with. Like, I'm getting rehired.
Bryce: Yeah.
Elijah: So I don't have to continue having those conversations.
Bryce: Yeah.
Elijah: I think historically, my practice has been: wait until the contract is signed. Because if we're talking about a concert contract, then asking questions about concert dress or whatever should not cause a problem. Usually, like, the emails about dress code and whatnot come a little bit later. Like, fairly close to the performance.
That's something that their admin person is figuring out and sending out to the performances. I've sent emails, like, clarifying things, because there are things that some people just, I think, just don't think about. I feel like it might be less of a problem in early music ensembles where there are so many countertenors. But if you describe a dress code by section and there's, like, one person who's the odd one out who doesn't match the gender or the perceived gender of everybody else in the section, are you envisioning that they match the rest of their section? How much are you assuming about what people are comfortable with?
So I think I have straight up emailed the admin person of at least one organization back and said, can we just call the dress code gender neutral? Can we say, wear one of these options, whatever people are most comfortable with? I don't think that's a huge imposition as a request. I think a lot of some organizations.
Again, particularly older organizations, where they have a fairly entrenched image, they're kind of afraid of audience reaction and whatnot. But having been in organizations where they have changed up their dress code, like they've gone from requiring everyone to wear tuxes and tails and whatnot to a more laid back dress code. Sometimes audiences gripe about it a little bit, but then they get over it. And sometimes, I think there are a few things that I think we need to just brace for a little bit and expect people to get over.
Policing what performers look like in general, it's slowly on its way out, and I think it should be. Because it's not about that, what we do. One of the most important things as a performer is to be present in what you're doing and be present in your body, and it's harder to do that when you're not comfortable.
Bryce: Yeah. So in October, you performed and toured with an organization called ChamberQueer for their concert, Baroque-Queer or Baroqueer? Not sure exactly how it is that you all like to say it. I was lucky enough to attend the concert in New York City before you went to the Early Music America summit, and I'd love to just hear a little about how you got involved with that project and what the experience was like on tour and rehearsing and performing this repertoire, which, for you, I would assume is familiar, but alongside queer, transgender diverse collaborators. Were there things that stood out to you in this process that were distinct from some of the cis-led processes you've been in? How would you talk about that experience or differentiate it from some of the more standard things you do?
Elijah: Yeah, a lot of ways. I actually don't remember how I got in touch with the organizers of Chamber Queer to begin with. I think we just became aware of each other online, the way that trans people in classical music tend to legit. I was going to be in one of their pride performances in the summer of 2022, but then I got Covid, so I couldn't do that.
But I kind of became attached to this tour that we did, starting in Brooklyn and then going to Boston and then to Maine, because at the end of that, we were doing another project in Maine with another presenting organization. I don't need to go into detail about that, necessarily, but essentially, at some point, I had made noises about knowing enough people to theoretically mount an all trans messiah like orchestra. And so I became creatively involved in this project called Messiah Multiplied that we did with classical uprising in Portland. And from there, I tagged on to the rest of their tours.
ChamberQueer is not just about having a queer-friendly or a queer-centric environment. It's really about holistically transforming the experience and lowering barriers that can make people feel excluded. So there's leaving behind dress codes and also gravitating away from religious venues and more formal venues in general. But also having the rehearsals be collaboratively directed between all the performers. So no single person is running the show, and also doing away with a lot of pressure that we feel in classical music to be a perfectionist as well.
So in addition to it just being very refreshing to make music in a queer-normative space where there was no question of respect or affirmation and there wasn't pressure to project a certain image or anything, I felt like I could bring something to the process. I felt like I could say that certain things weren't working for me, and I felt like if I made a mistake or like I had a bad day, then that would be okay. A big deal for someone like me who's fairly non confrontational.
Yeah. And as a result, I felt very present, and I felt like you were an audience member and I was not, or at least I was for some of the time. But I felt like the performances, they felt really energized. I didn't get tired of watching and hearing the instrumental pieces or the other pieces that we did that I wasn't in. So it just felt really authentic and really comfortable on a lot of levels, and I think that has attracted people to their performances.
I noticed that in Brooklyn, the audience was quite young. I'm interested to see what else I'm not involved in ChamberQueer in an organizational capacity. Sure. I'm interested to see what else they do and what other organizations like them might do.
Bryce: Tell me about early music America. I know you did some workshops. Were you involved in that at all?
Elijah: Yes, I attended some of the workshops earlier in the day that were on a similar theme, and there were some really good conversations happening. A lot of people who are really passionate about having these conversations and doing the work to make the field more inclusive. And there were a lot of conversations about access and inclusivity and breaking down barriers and paying reparations and whatnot.
And so what we did was kind of later in the day, we did a performance followed by a workshop. A lot of it was kind of building on a lot of the conversations that had happened earlier on the day. Some of the people at our workshop had already been at other workshops earlier. It was a very organic experience. We kind of gave people a case-study about how an organization might want to reach new audiences. And again, a lot of that. Back to questions of access and what makes people feel like they can't engage with this kind of thing.
Bryce: Yeah.
Elijah: So things like pay what you want. Things like having dress codes. I mentioned a few times that day. I think that when I invite my friends who don't do classical music to come and see something that I'm doing, a lot of the time, the first question that they ask is, like, am I supposed to dress up?
Bryce: What do I have to wear?
Elijah: And I don't want people to feel like that. If you want to dress up, I guess you can, but I don't think people should feel like they have to. Or like they're going to get kicked out. Yeah. I don't dress up when I go to classical music. I'm not on stage.
Bryce: Listen, I dress up. I wear a whole costume.
Elijah: That's fair enough.
Bryce: But I know.
Elijah: No, I feel you.
Bryce: I've read before, you've said in conversations that you became interested in the large body of Castrato repertoire when you were in school, at Skidmore College, in your senior year, I guess, before you went to IU. And there's a complex history around Castrati in opera history, like how much agency they had. They were big stars. They were desirable to the public. So I was wondering if you would talk about that history a little bit and what got you interested in learning about them in particular, and then what resonances do you think there are for us when we look at that history through our contemporary lens of gender? Because obviously, it's very different from 18th century Europe. Does it give us any guidance or any sort of information or ideas about how we could approach studying and performing this music as queer and trans singers?
Elijah: In 2023, my second master's recital at IU in the historical performance institute was all castrato repertoire. Actually I think there was a little bit of treble child and trouser repertoire in there as well. But it was a focus on kind of baroque era gender paradigms, because it's very weird to us as modern audiences. It's kind of paradoxical that these individuals, which we would consider emasculated, which were emasculated, were always cast as, like, heroes and gods and these sort of typical masculine figures, as we would see them. But they became these huge celebrities, and they were so desirable in such a spectacle. So it is spectacle. Just a grown man singing treble is still unexpected. Was unexpected back then, that's one thing.
And due to not going through natural puberty, they grew in ways that, for instance, allowed them to develop unusual lung capacity, resulting in in vocal ability that most people just don't have. But also, people in European Baroque society didn't think of gender the same way that we do now. Although modern ideas of gender are in some ways descendants of those ideas.
But femininity was associated with qualities of sensuality, with sexuality. And in some ways, a feminine man or a boy, awkwardly, would have been considered, like, kind of an ideal. So you get a man with the sensuality of a woman, but you don't need to deal with a woman in the process, which is good if you're a misogynist.
Bryce: Which many were.
Elijah: Yeah. So that kind of thing goes back to ancient Greece, like the sexualization of pre-adolescent boys and whatnot. But a castrato never would have gained the male humors that would make him properly strong and masculine and all that. He retains the feminine qualities all his life. So that's potentially sexually attractive to men and women. And that, among other things, contributes to kind of the intrigue that made castrati so interesting to people.
So, interesting parallels a sexual minority that is made a spectacle, often sexualized, outside of norms - because this was still never technically legal, or church approved - their success was often relegated to the realm of performance. Like, if they weren't successful there, they were out of luck. There are stories about people just kind of being a little too, like, seeing all these successful custrati and being a little bit too eager to have their own child go and join them and make lots of money, and then these poor eunuchs like, hanging around as beggars because they can't make it.
And yet it became a niche and one that resulted in this massive body of repertoire and this kind of cultural craze. And they were a class of people that wasn't necessarily regarded as fully male or female that some people may have still considered freakish or ungodly. So, yeah, no wonder a lot of trans people seem to relate to this repertoire and are interested in reclaiming it as a transgender experience.
Bryce: Sure, yeah. When you started to get interested, was it more about the historical elements or was it purely informed by the music? I guess what excites you from both perspectives?
Elijah: Definitely the music to begin with. Like I said, the first opera role I ever learned was in Serse. It was Arsamene in it just. It just felt like it fit me. So, like, I felt connected to the character. It was something that was both gender-affirming and also just fit my voice really well. And so that was just kind of the baseline.
Historical performance departments tend to be mostly graduate disciplines anyway. But I came in, and I was not the only person in my cohort who came from not an undergraduate music degree, but I had a lot of imposter syndrome. I had never taken just like, a general music history survey in my life, and I still haven't actually.
Bryce: Wow.
Elijah: I studied a lot for my entrance exams, and I passed them and I went right into the specialization. So I guess technically I have taken a general survey of western music.
Bryce: Self taught.
Elijah: Self directed. Yeah, in terms of the actual historical and performance practice elements: massive impostor syndrome until I actually got to my master's degree and started reading the treatises myself. And then a whole world opened up of fun, weird stuff I could do but, yeah, to begin with, it was the operatic repertoire and just kind of, I guess, a more basic connection that I felt to it.
Bryce: Yeah, no, for sure. What of what you have done in your performance career? What are maybe some of the highlights in terms of roles or repertoire you've done? And then what are some things you really want to do?
Elijah: My favorite thing tends to just be, like, the most recent thing that I've done.
Bryce: Sure.
Elijah: Yeah.
Bryce: Fair.
Elijah: Which in this case is worth talking about, because I performed professionally in Germany for the first time.
Bryce: Oh, wow. Yeah. Congrats.
Elijah: Little over a week ago in Leipzig to sing the Weihnachtsoratorium.
Bryce: Come on, European debut.
Elijah: Yeah. And it was actually really nice. People were very sweet to my non german speaking ass.
Bryce: Okay.
Elijah: I can understand okay. But I can't really speak very well to work on that a lot more. But people were very sweet. And also. It was also very nice: someone from the chorus came up to me afterwards and was like, hey, there are a lot of queer people in the chorus, and Leipzig is actually a really queer city. And we enjoyed seeing the representation in the soloists.
Bryce: Amazing.
Elijah: So that was really nice.
Bryce: That's really kind.
Elijah: I really enjoyed the tour with ChamberQueer. It was a lot. It lasted a while. It was a lot of travel, but just had a really good time with the people, with the program. I love doing things in kind of less conventional settings and reaching people that maybe ordinarily wouldn't go to a big concert hall or whatever.
I feel like I say this every time I talk about it, but I would really like to one day maybe perform like a primo uomo, like the proper lead in a Handel [opera]. I've been a secondo uomo a couple of times, and children in operas several times.
Bryce: I can imagine it's like the child gambit a lot.
Elijah: Yeah. And those have been some of my favorite things that I've done. I loved doing Amore and Valetto at Haymarket opera last year. I loved doing Turn of the Screw with IlluminArts in Miami. That was like one of my favorite productions I ever did. But it would be pretty cute to play an adult sometime.
Bryce: For sure.
Elijah: Hasn't so much come up yet, but we'll see.
Bryce: Yeah. Cool. So tell us what's coming up. What's on the calendar soon that you're excited about?
Elijah: I actually keep getting - my upcoming spring season keeps getting busier. Because I keep getting called to sub in for things...
Bryce: Worse problems to have.
Elijah: Oh, in March, I'm singing a French program. I'm on the roster for a French program with the Washington Bach Consort. That's not like super outlandish or anything. But I feel like a lot of people don't perform french baroque that often. So I really like Charpentier and whatnot.
Really, the thing that's going to take up a lot of my time in the Spring is going to be an opera with INSeries in DC. Okay, so they're doing Monteverdi's Ulysses and I am singing Telemachus, who in this production is a treble. That's Odysseus's son, Ulysses's son. They're doing it as a collaboration with a South Asian dance company, I believe, and they're commissioning new madrigals in Vietnamese, like written in the style of Baroque madrigals. I'm very excited to see how that goes. That's going to be in late May, early June.
Bryce: Yeah, that's super exciting. I love that opera, too, just as like in the trifecta of Monteverdis. I think that one's really underappreciated by people.
Elijah: Yeah, I've not done that one before.
Bryce: I'm excited for you. Well, thank you for chatting with me. It's been so lovely just getting to know you a little bit and hearing some of the things you're up to and some of the things you think. I wish you all the best with your upcoming season, and I'm super grateful you spent some time talking with me.
Elijah: Yeah.
Bryce: That's all for this episode, and thanks for listening. Beyond Travesti is produced, recorded and edited entirely by yours truly and fully subscriber funded. The best way to support this effort is to become a subscriber to The Bryce is Wrong on Substack at brycemcclendon.substack.com. All the proceeds go to honorariums for my guests. You can follow the podcast on Instagram @beyondtravesti, or you can follow me @the.bryce.is_wrong and I'd love to hear any feedback or thoughts from this month's conversation. If you'd like to share them, you can get in touch at brycemcclendon@substack.com. Until next time, much love and much care.