Vancouver Chamber Choir composer-in-residence Stuart Beatch aims to uplift

The Edmonton-based artist thrives on collaboration and keeps a stack of poetry books within arm’s reach

By JOHn LUCAS

Stuart Beatch (left). Photo by Mark Hughes. Vancouver Chamber Choir. Photo by Diamond’s Edge Photography

Vancouver Chamber Choir performs Chosen Family at Christ Church Cathedral on October 3 at 7:30 pm

AN ABUNDANCE OF CREATIVE freedom can be a mixed blessing, as Stuart Beatch has discovered.

In a call with Stir, the rising-star choral composer admits that, when it comes to commissions, he tends to prefer it when the arts organization he’s working with supplies him with a text that they want him to set to music.

That didn’t happen when Kari Turunen, artistic director of Vancouver Chamber Choir, asked Beatch to be VCC’s composer-in-residence for its 2025-26 season—a position that involves creating a new piece for the choir to premiere.

“Kari was, unfortunately, very open,” Beatch jokes over the phone from his home in Edmonton. “Even the theme of the concert was kind of open and ambiguous, and he just kind of gave me carte blanche to find something that really resonated with me. Which is fine, but it’s definitely a lot more pressure when I have so much freedom and I need to figure out which direction I want to take that in.”

As it turns out, the answer was just an arm’s length away.

“I have a stack of poetry books by my desk for situations like this,” says Beatch. The composer reveals that he landed on American poet Chen Chen’s “I Dream on a Crowded Subway Train with My Eyes Open But My Body Swaying”, although for his piece, Beatch has opted for the less unwieldy title Dream on a Crowded Train.

“Chen Chen is a poet who writes very queer, very joyful, playful poetry,” Beatch says. “This poem is depicting a first date between two people, and it’s very dreamlike, because it’s reflecting on the date on the way home. It has lots of really gorgeous language, very dreamlike, and it ends almost as if you’re falling asleep and that dream logic takes you into a weird, far-off place. It’s hard to describe, and it’s going to be a really fun challenge to try and channel that energy into music.”

When Dream on a Crowded Train is finished, Vancouver Chamber Choir will give it its world premiere on April 17, as part of a concert called Kaleidoscope. In the more immediate future, though, the ensemble is set to perform another of Beatch’s works, Chosen Family, at VCC’s season-opening concert of the same name this week.

For Chosen Family, Beatch set to music four sonnets from Lost Family: A Memoir, a 2020 collection by Victoria-based poet John Barton.

John Barton. Photo by John Preston

“John is a really well-established poet, really at the forefront of gay poetry in Canada, and being very explicit about his own identity and his own lived experience,” Beatch says. “And so when I came to do this project, which was commissioned by Chronos Vocal Ensemble, a choir that I sing with here in Edmonton, I knew I wanted to work with him. I knew I wanted to pull poetry from this book.”

That proved to be a somewhat daunting task of decision-making, since Lost Family includes something like 140 sonnets. 

“It was really a collaborative process with the commissioning choir to try to whittle it down to the poems that we wanted to do,” Beatch says. “We knew we wanted to have four movements, but we’re trying to create a narrative flow between those four movements even though they’re all separate poems, so they don’t technically have anything to do with each other. And it just so happened in the end that the four poems we landed on were all really important people in John’s life—and all people who had passed away.”

With the selections made, the real work began. How does one set about turning a page of printed words into music? Beatch describes his process: “Usually I’ll print it out and I’ll start etching all over it, trying to, say, circle a sentence or a word that I think is important that I want to repeat. I’ll look at the structure of the poem and say, okay, here’s the opening chunk, here’s where the mood can shift—maybe I can take it into a different section, explore a different motif. I really try to defer to what the poetry itself is doing for the structure of the music, and also just trying to find how I can capture the essence of it and highlight the bits that I think are most important.”

On paper, the prospect of four memorial poems doesn’t necessarily sound like the makings of a joyous choral experience, but Beatch’s settings of the selections from Chosen Family are luminous and ethereal, occasionally solemn but never dipping into mawkish sentimentality. There’s even a good dose of humour in “What She Gave Me”, as befits a poem in which Barton reminisces on his late mother’s habit of mailing him a birthday cake every March.

“I’m never one to be depressing.... I really want to uplift people with my music.”

“These are in memoriam of specific people, but I don’t feel like the texts themselves are mournful,” Beatch asserts. “They are aware that the person has died, but they’re really celebrating their lives, and really celebrating moments that were important to them and to John. In my music I’m never one to be depressing. I really enjoy things that are light-hearted. I really want to uplift people with my music, and so I think that was an intentional decision. I didn’t want it to be depressing, I wanted it to be reflective, thinking about these people’s lives, but always focusing on the joy of the time that they had with John and with the people in their lives.”

Beatch says he is ever mindful of striking the right balance between making someone else’s words a vehicle for his own expression and honouring the author’s original intent.

“I feel like I’m taking somebody else’s creation—you know, a piece of poetry that anybody could read and anybody could interpret in their own way—but I have to apply my interpretation when I set it to music,” the composer says. “I kind of take that power away from the listener, in a way, because I’m saying, ‘This is what I think is important in this poem, and here’s how I interpret it.’ That’s really the best part about composing, is being able to bring language to life in that way, but I think it also puts a little bit of pressure on me to respect the words, and to try to work with the poetry, instead of working against it.”

In addition to Chosen Family and the still-gestating Dream on a Crowded Train, local audiences will have other opportunities to hear Beatch’s work throughout Vancouver Chamber Choir’s 55th season. On February 13, for instance, VCC will include his A Boy and a Boy in a concert titled Neighbo(u)rs.

“This is such an amazing opportunity for me to be able to work with such an incredible choir,” Beatch says. “Vancouver Chamber Choir is one of the greatest choirs that we have in this country, so for anybody to be able to hold a position like this is a great honour and I’m just grateful to Kari for giving me the chance, and for being able to spotlight my music in this way. It’s going to be a great season.”

---

Related Articles