“Isn’t That Life, in a Way: Trying to Accommodate Dissonance?” Reflections on Lesbianism and the Life and Music of Ann Southam

Canadian composer Ann Southam (1937–2010) was a proud, outspoken, and generousfeminist who found affinities between feminism and the minimalist musical language shedeveloped in the late 1970s. At the same time, Southam was a very private person; it wasonly towards the end of her life that she began to speak on record about being gay. Musicwriter Tamara Bernstein, a friend of the composer, weighs the merits of focussing on thisside of Southam’s life: the willingness with which Southam spoke in her final interviewsabout the difficulty of coming of age as a lesbian in the 1950s, and the fact that materialrelated to this from her final interview has not been published until now; the importance ofremembering how recently lgbtq rights werefully enshrined in Canadian law. Finally, alongside a caveat about the dangers ofreductivism, and reminders that Southam found musical inspiration in other sources (e.g.,nature), the author suggests ways in which Southam’s struggles with a sexual identityconsidered “dissonant” may have found their way into her music.