Civic Fellow J Holzen honors identity and sound in ‘Transcendent Souls’

Four string musicians performed a program of contemporary solo and chamber music by trans composers in the historic sanctuary of Wicker Park Lutheran Church, where stained-glass windows and a wooden relief based on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” formed an elegant backdrop. Titled “Transcendent Souls: A Celebration of Trans Identity and Sound,” the June 6 concert was curated by cellist J Holzen in their second season as a Civic Orchestra of Chicago Fellow. 

As part of its professional development curriculum, the Civic Fellowship program  requires each participant to design and implement an independent project annually, with financial support from the Negaunee Music Institute at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. For their project this season, Holzen chose to explore the intersection of trans and Christian communities through music.

For Holzen, this approach was deeply personal. “I came out as nonbinary about nine years ago, and I grew up in a predominantly Catholic and Christian community,” they said. “And based on that experience and the dissonance and friction, I felt between my two communities and my two identities, I wanted to put together a concert that celebrated the common values of those two communities and also brought together those two communities at the same time. So my intention with this concert was to really celebrate trans artistry and also create community among trans people, but also between trans people and religious communities, just based on my own lived experience and the experiences of people I really care about.”

In the search for a concert venue, “it was really important to me that I partnered with a church that already had a history of LGBTQ+ allyship,” said Holzen. On the recommendation of another Civic Fellow who attends Wicker Park Lutheran, Holzen chose to partner with the church after learning more about the congregation’s affirming values. The Rev. Jason Glombicki, who identifies as queer, gave brief remarks at the concert, acknowledging the harm that LGBTQ+ people have experienced in Christian churches and reiterating Wicker Park Lutheran’s welcoming stance.

Holzen also elaborated on some of the commonalities that they observe between the trans community and the Christian faith. “I think the sacredness of the human body is a really huge one,” they said. “This Christian idea that your body is a temple, and you’re created in God’s image, and also the fact that trans people are used to celebrating their bodies — whether it’s the body that they have, or the body that they wish they had, or the dissonance between them — that encourages that self-exploration.”

The concert’s opening piece, Leslie Allison’s string quartet Menstrual Notation, illustrated this sense of embodiment. As Allison explained in their program note, the quartet is “a sonic interpretation of my [former] menstrual cycle” and its relationship to the monthly lunar cycle. Holzen said that it was a natural choice to pair this piece with inti figgis-vizueta’s mayu (the great river), a string quartet inspired by Andean cosmologies. “Both of them were about connecting the heavens and the earth,” said Holzen.

The other string quartet on the program, closer than you think, was composed by Sophie McMillan-Myers, who performed on viola alongside Dylan Feldpausch and Zach Buehler on violins and Holzen on cello. Rounding out the program, Holzen also performed Benjamin T. Martin’s Video for solo cello and Yaz Lancaster’s diepenveen for cello and voice.

In the process of curating this concert, Holzen issued an open call for scores by trans composers, which is how they discovered the music of McMillan-Myers and Lancaster. Video, though, was written for Holzen while they and Martin were students at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. “It was actually sort of rehashing the piece and what it’s about with the composer that partially inspired this concert,” Holzen said of Martin’s composition.

Holzen, who is neurodivergent, aimed to create a relaxed, sensory-friendly environment at the concert. Attendees were encouraged to sit wherever they felt most comfortable — on cushions, pews or rocking chairs — and encouraged to move freely, wear earplugs or use fidget toys during the performance. “I’m not asking the audience to perform. I’m asking them to take up space just as much as the performers are,” said Holzen. “And I’m not asking anybody on stage or in the audience to anonymize themselves by making themselves small or making themselves invisible, [but rather] being able to take up space and openly be whoever they are.”

Holzen was pleasantly surprised by both the turnout and the range of people who attended the concert. The audience of about 70 included “a very large queer and trans presence” and “a lot more cis[gender]-het[erosexual] allies there than I necessarily expected,” according to postconcert surveys. “That really embodies the kind of curiosity that I wanted to inspire in people, that trans art is not just for trans people. It’s for everybody,” said Holzen.

This sense of intersectionality also represents another similarity between queer communities and religious communities, in Holzen’s view. “They [both] include people of a variety of ages and cultural backgrounds, and people who have been a part of that community for a very long time and people who are just joining. They’re both communities that are held together by a common value and belief system,” Holzen said. “And I think for both of them, the intersection of that is this idea of love. Of course, love being the central identity for membership in the queer community, and love of oneself as a trans person, but then also these Christian ideas of loving your neighbor, and to really look to Christian teachings to know how to love other people.”

Holzen plans to continue fostering connections between these communities through shared musical experiences. The Transcendent Souls project has already expanded into a three-concert series, with a July 17 performance at Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park and a Nov. 18 concert and livestream at Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood Ave. While these upcoming concerts are not sponsored by the Civic Orchestra, Holzen credits the support of the CSO’s Negaunee Music Institute with helping the project succeed beyond their expectations.

Reflecting on the concert at Wicker Park Lutheran, Holzen said, “This concert is in many ways autobiographical and personal, but ultimately based on experiences that are familiar to so many in the LGBTQ+ community. I’m really grateful for the ways I can celebrate and honor my community, especially in the current moment when we see so much mischaracterization and politicization of trans people and trans bodies. I hope this project demonstrates the beauty and value of trans art, and by extension, the trans community as a whole.”