The members of Tone Cluster choir are hoping their voices extend far beyond the halls of Centretown United Church at their upcoming Christmas concert.
Tone Cluster is a made up of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people and their supporters. This year marks 20 years since its founding. The concert will double as a launch for the choir’s Fabulous Twenty CD, which will feature recordings of Tone Cluster’s favorite songs from the last 20 years.
While the choir’s “Quite a Queer Qhristmas” advertised as “not your usual holiday qoncert” – promises to be fun and lighthearted, the singers have some more serious issues in mind for their scheduled Dec.13 performance.
According to choir liaison Janel Goyette, Tone Cluster will be also be dedicating the concert to the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa and using part of the performance to talk to the audience about the work YSB does.
The YSB provides many services to youth in crisis, including a mental health walk-in clinic, a 24/7 crisis line and a drop-in service for homeless youth in downtown Ottawa.
Tone Cluster chose to involve the YSB for this concert because the holiday season can be a struggle for young people, especially for homeless LGBTQ youth, Goyette says. She says a survey done by the Canadian homelessness research network in 2013 showed that 25-40 per cent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ.
Choir president Rob Bowman says the partnership with YSB is just one part of Tone Cluster’s presence within the greater Ottawa community.
Prior to the Christmas concert, the choir performed at the World AIDS Day service Dec. 1 at the Wabano Aboriginal Health Centre in Vanier and at Carleton Lodge seniors home in Nepean Dec. 8.
“A lot of elderly gays and lesbians are going into seniors homes . . . The residents there are not as receptive to having gay couples or gay single seniors in these circumstances, and it’s almost driving them back into the closet,” he explains. He says this kind of public involvement is important to the choir.
“We feel like we’re coming out there and putting a visible face on the gay community,” he says.
Tone Cluster vice-president Gianluca Ragazinni agrees that the choir has “served a very important role to get the community together to discuss issues to celebrate victories, to mourn people.”
Tone Cluster will be enriching this sense of community by inviting Harmony A Women’s Chorus and Chœur gai d’Ottawa Gay Men’s Chorus to be guests at the Dec. 13 Christmas concert.
There will also be copies of Tone Cluster’s new Fabulous Twenty, CD available at the concert. Ragazzini says the CD includes several pieces that were written specifically for Tone Cluster by composers the choir commissioned.
“We are a small choir but we are very active in creating the music,” he says.
Goyette, Ragazzini and Bowman all voiced their excitement about the unconventional Christmas pieces the choir has planned.
The concert will include songs that deal specifically with coming out at Christmas and Various Themes on Fa la la, a song that features many classic Christmas tunes but “throws in these musical curveballs,” Bowman says.
“It’s definitely not a straight Christmas concert,” Goyette says.
She’s particularly looking forward to the a cappella performance of Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night.
“(It’s) about spending a cold winter’s night with, you know, somebody that you love or wishing that they were there.”