feeld songs (PDF Edition)

On the Text:

“’feeld’ is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. In ‘feeld,’ Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past [...] making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. “Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.”

Program Note:

When I first read Jos Charles’ ‘feeld,’ I was struck by its rampant symbolism, and found its multi-tiered narratives drawing so much empathy out of the reader. As a composer, the text seemed so set-able from multiple angles, and at the time I could not recall a choral work that directly uplifted the trans community (knowing that several probably existed in various forms, even if they had not reached my ears, or the ears of many). With that absence rattlingly and upsettingly loud, I reached out to Charles with the idea to set ten of these poems.

The songs are primarily programmatic, shifting from light to dark. The first three concern social scripts, convention, and how the world, (the feeld), exists in relation to the cisgendered and non-cisgendered people within it. In songs four through ten, a protagonist moves through several settings, questions, and scripts, shaping our understanding of how the feeld might work for everyone in it, how that could and should change, and where we all might intersect in that narrative. I hope above all for these songs to serve as an aural catalyst for the text, for the poetry to reach those who may not have read it otherwise, and for more understanding to be had.