HAILEY MCAVOY & BETHANY PIETRONIRO | Songs of Identity
For our 2022 songSLAM Festival, Sparks & Wiry Cries solicited short recital programs from voice and piano duos that would reflect the fullness of their identities. The following is a written interview conducted with one of these great duos, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy and pianist Bethany Pietroniro, contemplating their experience navigating different faith-based communities as queer women. Their recital is available here.
S&WC: How did your approach to programming this recital differ from your usual approach? Were there unexpected challenges?
HM and BP: As a collaborative pair, when planning a recital, we usually build a program by considering both textual and musical elements. With this prompt, the new element was sharing an aspect of our own identities in song. As individuals, we’ve each had different journeys with queerness and faith, so most of our discussion of repertoire focused on searching for songs and texts that were relatable to both of our stories. The challenge was slimming down everything we came up with into a compact yet well-rounded program… We gave it our best shot!
Another part of the challenge was reading into the texts without superimposing too much. Fortunately, though, one of the great things about songs (classical and otherwise) is that they can get at the essence of a human experience without being bound to any particular context. We found songs about faith, for example, that were almost certainly not written by or for queer women, but that highlight a fundamental human experience (a personal relationship with the divine, hope in the face of hardship, nature, and the sublime) that could apply to anyone very personally, including a queer woman.
S&WC: What does it mean to you as performers to bring the fullness of yourself to a performance? How does repertoire play into this?
HM: In the rich tradition of classical music performance, there is so much that has become, to a certain degree, engrained or scripted over time. What we wear. When we walk onto the stage. How we stand or sit to perform. When the audience is permitted to clap. As artists these days, I believe we are called to reconsider these patterns — to ask whether they are truly serving our art form, our audiences, and ourselves. Being prompted to bring the fullness of oneself to a performance is a wonderful way to chip away at mythical ideas about “what a singer/pianist is supposed to be.” What about coming as we are, and connecting from there? Choosing repertoire that leans into that vulnerability is, for me, one way to connect more authentically with audiences.
SW&C: How was your experience rehearsing and recording this program together?
HM and BP: We had fun! As a pair that lived and worked together through the height of the pandemic last year, we’ve recorded a lot of repertoire to be shared online. For this project, it was rewarding to bring our work into a venue as cool as the Blue Building and work with the amazing crew to transform our preparation into a final project.
Our engagement with the repertoire wasn’t actually much different from our typical process. The discussion of how the songs related to us personally happened mostly while we were choosing them; when it came time to rehearse and record, it was just a matter of trying, as we always do, to bring the music to life.
SW&C: Your program proposal alludes to your shared experience of navigating faith-based communities as queer women. How has your musical practice related to this experience?
BP: This is an interesting question for me because my musical work was actually the thing that led me back into contact with faith communities. Having put a good deal of distance between myself and the faith practices I was raised with, I wasn’t seeking that kind of community; instead, I considered my spirituality something fundamentally private. I still do. However, this evolved when I began to work as a church musician. I encountered some incredibly open-minded groups of people who were entirely accepting — even celebratory — of my queerness, my femaleness, my whatever-else-ness. Also, since I had no background in church music, I would bring standard classical repertoire — movements of Beethoven sonatas and Bach suites and stuff — as prelude and postlude music. This music seemed to work well as part of a spiritual experience for a group of people, according to feedback I got from members of the congregation — and for me, it was actually a relief to be presenting the music not as a performance, but as a sort of offering. It made me realize in a new way that musical experiences have spiritual components, just as they have emotional ones and intellectual ones.
HM: For me, faith, music, and queerness have almost always been related. I became who I am today in an environment that was devoutly Catholic. I’m lucky that the people there truly did love and support me, but the environment presented challenges as I came to understand more about myself as a queer woman. No matter how fraught my spiritually-based relationships — with humans or God! — sometimes felt, I could always use music to connect in an authentic way. I remember being in spiritual direction meetings as a teen and feeling a major sigh of relief when my spiritual director joked that Barber’s The Crucifixion was enough to get him into heaven.… On a more serious note, when I went through my longest period, to date, of questioning my faith, it felt like my heart was breaking and I didn’t even have the words to pray — but I could still sing. In some sense, my singing is a practice of prayer that connects me with God.
S&WC: How has poetry and art song influenced your exploration of this negotiation between, as you put it, “human love” and “divine love”?
BP: As a teenager, I actually learned a lot about love through art song (for better or worse!). I remember encountering the two song cycles that were my introduction to the genre (Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel) and getting completely engulfed in the emotional journeys they contained. In a way, getting to know those songs was a unique experience of feeling free to express emotions related to “human love” (especially since it didn’t feel safe to come out at that time). Because it was music, and not “real life”, I felt assured that it wasn’t wrong to explore the emotions fully, and I was more willing to accept those depictions of love than the ones I saw in pop culture. Since it’s a trope in Romantic poetry to view human love as containing some essence of the divine, I think songs are a big part of how I absorbed that idea at an impressionable moment.
HM: Songs and poems have always given me pathways to better understand or express all kinds of things. Meditating on songs and poems that speak to human and divine love has helped me see one reflected in the other… helped me understand, for example, that my relationship with God needs as much tending as my relationship with those I love on earth… helped me understand that the love I have for those on Earth is a gift which comes from God. Ultimately, poetry and song are the best way I have to cherish that gift of love in any manifestation.
Watch Hailey and Bethany’s recital here.
January 13, 2022
