Jun 15, 2007  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

When Andrew Van Etten tried to tell his daughter that he had found a partner, things didn’t go well. Van Etten, 39, has a 14-year-old daughter from a previous, 16-year marriage to a woman. Although his daughter knew Van Etten was gay, she wasn’t ready to handle the news that he was partnered.

“At one point in October, just before the AIDS Walk, my ex-wife and I introduced the idea of my partner to my daughter, Sophie,” Van Etten says. “She was very upset about that and didn’t speak to me and hasn’t spoken to me since October.”

The tension has deeply affected Van Etten, who met his partner last year when he joined the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. The choir’s latest piece, a song cycle titled “This House Shall Stand: Songs of My Family,” addresses a very similar story in a movement titled “The Man in My Father’s Life.”

During a rehearsal, Van Etten listened to the story of a young girl’s growing acceptance of her father and his partner, and he heard his own experience echoed in the words and music.

“I immediately got very emotional to the point where my partner put his arm around me and knew that those words were very powerful for me personally,” Van Etten says.

THE IDEA FOR “Songs of My Family” was conceived more than two years ago in a conversation between the chorus’ artistic director Jeff Buhrman and Jim Lopresti, a former chorus member and current chair of Valuing Our Families, a gay family conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“Our families have lived in the shadows for many years and only in the last five to 10 years have we started to get focus,” Buhrman says. He decided to commission a composition about the gay experience with families. 

Working with the Family Pride Coalition and PFLAG Washington, D.C., Buhrman wrote and disseminated a questionnaire on the organizations’ websites, asking for feedback about family life. After six months, the groups collected 175 stories, which were then transformed into the 13-movement, 50-minute concert that’s premiering at the Kennedy Center on June 24.

“You really have to strand those all together, so the people who took the time to give the stories hear at least a piece of their own story in that text,” says lyricist Robert Espindola. His partner, Robert Seely, wrote the music for the piece.

The result has created what Buhrman calls a “unique and ground-breaking choral work. I know the piece is going to resonate within the gay community and within in the larger world.”

THE CHOIR MEMBERS have already begun responding to the message. For Buhrman, the segment titled “Empty Frame,” about an absence of a same-sex couple’s picture on the family portrait wall, resonates with his own experience.

“It wasn’t until nearly the end of my mother’s life that there suddenly was a photo of myself and my partner [on the picture wall],” Buhrman says.

Choir member Dennis Rivard has noted the same phenomenon at the homes of his and his partner’s parents.

“There was never a picture of the two of us, even though we had a ceremony, had a wedding in a church,” says Rivard. “I never really thought about how much it affected me, how it made me feel, but I was definitely a second-class citizen. The song talked about how when you create your own home, you won’t do that. You’ll have pictures of people you love, past and present, regardless of who they are and what they are. I was just crying. It just struck a chord. I never knew the hurt was there, but it was.”

The lyrics were intentionally written in an accessible way, says Espindola. 

“Sometimes people think of new art as being esoteric or obtuse. This is not. It is thoughtful, while not being esoteric,” Buhrman adds.

The chorus’ concerts are usually accessible, a good excuse to invite families of origin, as Buhrman terms them, and to give reluctant family members a slightly more passive way of entering their gay family member’s world.

“If my parents, who are deceased, could have been here for this concert, it could have opened a whole new world to them because what we find with our music is our concerts give us the opportunity to invite our parents, our families, our siblings,” Buhrman says.

Van Etten is hoping to use the concert as a possible way to open dialogue with his daughter.

“My daughter has actually agreed to have breakfast with me this Father’s Day and I’m hoping ...