Perpetual Change — Olivia Margaret

This month’s installment of Perpetual Change introduces Olivia Margaret, who is not only a classically trained musician and composer, but an accomplished technician as well. “Being a composer is both an avocation and an extension of my primary career,” she said. “I have been a designer, builder, restorer, and voicer of pipe organs, and lately of digital organs and hybrid pipe/digital organs.”

Olivia is originally from the northern New Jersey area, and now lives in the Charleston-Trident area of South Carolina in a rural area known as Givhans.

The path that Olivia has followed as both a musician and as a transgendered person is one that has an air of familiarity for many in the community. Her early memories include those all-too-common moments of being “home alone” and discovering Mom’s clothing; discovering an interest in crossdressing while in Junior High; and a concurrent interest in both classical music and crossdressing while in an all male boarding school, and later in college. She did undergraduate work at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1969, Olivia received a Bachelors of Music degree with majors in organ performance and vocal pedagogy, and minor in composition. (“It’s been the school of hard knocks since then,” she adds.)

Fast forward to 1999 and a visit to the Southern Comfort Convention that proved to her the benefits of having a support system in place. Since no group existed in her part of South Carolina, the obvious solution was to start one. ( Charleston Area Transgender Support, or C.A.T.S. Email )

She is also planning to fully transition in May of this year. “I will really go public on May 13, 2009,” she said. “Olivia will attend her 40th college reunion.”

Well, until that time, Olivia Margaret has been gracious enough to consent to an interview for TG Forum and Perpetual Change. What follows is some extraordinary insight into the life of classically trained musician and composer who is also a highly skilled craftswoman.

TGForum: Since you’re a composer, what do you consider to be your main instrument?

Olivia: I no longer perform in public, but have played organ and piano, been a choral conductor, and been an art song and choral singer. Someday when I have some free time I want to learn how to play the carillon.
Playing or not playing a specific instrument is not a prerequisite to composing for it. If I am going to compose for an instrument or group, I listen to the sound in various ranges, ask questions of a player about how you do this or that, and put together a virtual instrument in my head. This usually works, but not always.

TGF: How old were you when you became interested in music?

Olivia: Kindergarten. Maybe earlier. My first grade teacher reported that I had an excellent sense of rhythm and pitch.

TGF: Come from a musical background?

Olivia: My father sang in our church choir, and Mom occasionally hummed a tune or two. There were no career musicians of any sort in my family’s recent history.

TGF: How much attention do you pay to popular/mainstream music?

Olivia: Almost none, except when a melody or a harmonic progression or a catchy rhythm intrudes on my consciousness. To be honest, I find much “pop” music to be harmonically barren and altogether to repetitive. I think looping and drum tracks are the worst things that have happened in the history of music because, with few exceptions, they tend to make it too easy to let the rhythm overwhelm a nice melody and/or stifle any attempts at musical development.

TGF: What do you listen to for your own enjoyment?

Olivia: I almost always have music going on in my head, and very rarely have music of any sort playing in the background. When I do…it is Bach or other Baroque era composers, and French organ composer of 1900-1960s. My favorite piece of music? Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D, played on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, Netherlands, in 1721. Awesome.

TGF: Other favorite composers/musicians?

Olivia: Johann Sebastian Bach, Louis Vierne (late 19th-early 20th century composer and organist at Notre Dame de Paris); Marcel Dupre (20th century French organist and composer); Ned Rorem (20th-21st century American composer, especially of art songs); Virgil Fox (virtuoso 20th century American concert organist); The Beatles, and ABBA.

TGF: You’ve posted some of your music on the Transgender Music Society’s web site. Anything else available?

Olivia: I have about 40 opus numbers completed or in progress. An opus (work) is either a single piece or a set of pieces, such as an art song cycle, numbered sequentially as completed.

I have written works for pipe organ, for chorus, for solo vocalist, for piano, for string quartet, and for carillon. I have a number of published works and won a competition prize for one of my carillon pieces.
My works have been performed live in the United States, Canada, France, and holland. My concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani has been performed twice at the Spoleto Festival by the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.

TGF: How long does it take you to compose a piece?

Olivia: That depends entirely on the genre and instrumentation. I composed my first String Quartet in two session of about 4 hours each. The (above mentioned ) concerto took me roughly 6 months of working about 10-12 hours a week to complete.

I compose seated at my computer, in standard notation, using Finale software. I do not use a MIDI input device such as a keyboard. Much of the time, the music is already worked out in my head and I just write it out. If not, then in the words of Isaac Asimov, “I just make it up, see.”

TGF: Any tapes, CDs, etc. available? If not, have you ever considered recording?

Olivia: I am slowly editing all my scores and will publish them under my own colophon, “Charleston Music Works”. I do not do actual live recordings of a given work, I am arranging and orchestrating them using Finale to produce MIDI files, which I then play through my computer.

My technique is such that, for keyboard works, I cannot record live, but I have a method where I can take the MIDI files I generate and instead of using a sequencer, can read them into a properly configured digital, or pipe organ, which then becomes the 21st century equivalent of a player piano.

TGF: Ever do session work?

Olivia: I don’t do any session work. I have enough trouble finding time to do my own stuff. Besides which, my technique is just not up to it.

TGF: Has being transgender had any influence or impact on your music?

Olivia: It think it has helped me to understand just how much emotion music, and especially classical music, can generate.

But the question many of your readers may really want answered is “Could you have composed what you have, had you not been transgendered?” To which I will say, frankly, yes, I could have composed my music without ever having “donned a dress,” but the music might not have had the same depth and/or range of expression to it. An easier and better way to put it might be: being transgendered affects everything you do.

TGF: Any advice to musician, regardless of genre’?

Olivia: Be true to your art and be true to your heart. Remember the old German proverb: “Bose menschen haben keine Lieder,” which is translated “Bad people have no songs.”

You want success, be a professional musician first and a professional transperson last.

One of my favorite quotations, from French organist Marcel Dupre: “Excessive self-esteem is the greatest rein on genius.” My personal favorite saying: “They can’t say yes unless you ask them.”

TGF: Anything you’d like to say to the transgender community as a whole?

Olivia: It is time we threw off the belief that we are just a small part of the LGBT community, and merely a minuscule segment of the whole population. We are in fact multi-gendered, which means we can look at things through more than one set of perceptions. It is time for us to share this ability and to sing our own unique songs to the world.

TGF: Any final thoughts?

Olivia: I believe I have said everything I have to say…at least for a few minutes.

ALSO THIS MONTH…

We heard from the folks who organize the Tranny Road Show that their web site had been taken over by porn. Sooooo, here’s their new site.

Olivia can be contacted via email; also, some of her compositions are posted on the TG Music Society’s group site, although it is a members-only Yahoo group.

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