"Always Here" is a song cycle that features texts by queer poets from over a century ago. The poems remind us that queer people have always existed, and that their experiences continue to shape our own.

1. The Kiss (Florence Kiper Frank, 1915)

Co-commissioned by Tetractys New Music and One Ounce Opera for Here Be Monsters.
Soprano: Julia Watkins-Davis
Composer/Orchestrator: Graham Yates
Audio Engineer: Richard Davis

What if Brünnhilde had second thoughts as she leapt into Siegfried’s funeral pyre? This piece begins with her final line from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, but time suddenly freezes. As the stage directions themselves spill from her mouth, Brünnhilde questions everything—her motives, her rage, her sacrifice.

She swings between triumph and doubt: relishing the destruction of Valhalla and her father Wotan, grieving for Siegfried, and wondering if she’s been played all along. Is she a hero, a pawn, a vigilante? Her voice cuts through centuries of myth with a startlingly modern edge, before landing on the most human of confessions: all she ever wanted was to be loved.

Brünnhilde In the Flames

Adela Florence Nicolson (1865–1904), better known by her pseudonym Laurence Hope, was a British poet who spent much of her life in India. Writing under a male name, she became an international best-seller in the early 1900s. Her collection The Garden of Kama appeared in 1901 (retitled India’s Love Lyrics in its American edition), a book whose framing sometimes implied she was gathering “native” verses rather than writing them herself—what I think of as a kind of “pseudo-Indian” style.

“Kama” translates as “desire,” and I approached these poems through that lens. Their voices inhabit a strange spiritual landscape: at times hopeful and innocent, at others sharp with calculation or disillusionment. My own setting was written during a period of unease, shaped both by the global pandemic and the turbulence surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election. That atmosphere inevitably seeped into the music, coloring the way desire, longing, and loss find expression here.

5. The Aloe

4. The Books and of the Reading

2. For to Ride a Horse

Graham Yates is an award-winning Canadian composer and pianist based in Austin, Texas. He is regularly commissioned to write works for choirs, soloists, and chamber ensembles, with performances of his music across Canada and the United States. In addition to his composing, Graham is active as a collaborative pianist and co-founded CTC Music Publishing to champion new music by emerging composers. He holds degrees in Piano Performance and Nonprofit Management from Brandon University and Trinity Western University.

4. The Books and of the Reading

Graham Yates

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