The Music

Andrew Yee and Trans Requiem

GRAMMY-winning cellist and composer Andrew Yee—well known from the Attacca Quartet—has created a new large-scale work that reframes one of Western music’s oldest rituals for our present moment. Trans Requiem is written for trans voices, choir, and orchestra, and it was premiered at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City on September 18, 2025, as part of NOVUS Trinity’s Renewal series, “Undivided: Music as a vessel for visibility, pride, and belonging.” The project’s purpose is explicit and generous: to amplify the beauty, strength, and dignity of every voice, with particular love for trans communities who are too often spoken about rather than listened to.

Musically and spiritually, Trans Requiem stands in conversation with the centuries-old Requiem tradition, while reshaping it from lived experience. Trinity’s introduction to the work describes it as Yee’s story—“a gift…wrapped in love, empathy, and the hope of healing”—rooted in the sacred mass but reimagined for a community facing grief, erasure, and political hostility. Yee began composing “as an act of mourning,” refusing to rush past sadness; the score moves through lament, witness, and resolve toward a communal affirmation of worth.

The premiere gathered Trinity’s professional forces—NOVUS Trinity, the Trinity Choir, and the Trinity Youth Chorus—with featured trans artists (including Breanna Sinclairé and Katherine Goforth) to realize a soundworld that is symphonic in scale and personal in voice. Reviewers noted striking dramaturgical choices, including Yee’s replacement of a traditional Dies irae with the defiant movement “Death Before Detransition,” a pivot that turns inherited liturgy toward contemporary truth-telling. The effect, as heard in Trinity’s nave, was one of vivid catharsis: a chorus capable of velvet tenderness rising to fierce unanimity.

Beyond its premiere, Trans Requiem functions as a cultural invitation. Yee’s aim is not polemic but presence—radical listening aligned with radical welcome. By centering trans singers within an orchestral-choral canvas, the work insists that the concert hall can be a place of visibility, pride, and belonging—not despite tradition, but by renewing it from within. In this sense, Trans Requiem extends the long arc of the Requiem—from prayer for the departed to a living chorus for the beloved—asking listeners to hold space, to witness, and to imagine a world in which every voice is fully heard.

Yee has called the experience of bringing the piece to life “one of the most important musical experiences I have ever been a part of.” That feeling—artists and audience moving through grief toward solidarity—may be the work’s most lasting music.

Sources: Trinity Church Wall Street program notes and event pages; The Violin Channel announcement; OperaWire feature; Seen and Heard International review.