60 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
mother would sing him Negro spirituals.
Glenn-Copeland enrolled at McGill
University, in Montreal, in 1961, becom-
ing one of its first Black students. At
the time, he identified as female. After
he was ostracized for being in an openly
lesbian relationship, he dropped out and
became a folk musician. In the late six-
ties and early seventies, he recorded a
couple of bluesy folk albums that call to
mind Joni Mitchell or Odetta, full of
the kind of searching, heartbroken songs
that one learns to write by listening to
other people’s searching, heartbroken
songs. Often, they sound as if Glenn-
Copeland were trying to fit his operatic
range into a narrow band of sentimen-
tality. “So you run to the mirror in search
of a reason/But the ice upon your eye-
lids only reminds you of the season/I
don’t despair/Tomorrow may bring
roses,” he sings. At first, his vocals are
restrained and quivering. But then he
lets loose, soaring above the strummed
guitars and forlorn pianos.
By the time Glenn-Copeland began
teaching himself how to use a computer,
he was working in children’s television,
writing songs for “Sesame Street” and
performing on a Canadian program called
“Mr. Dressup.” He had become immersed
in Buddhism and its traditions. The music
he was making was spacious and unpre-
dictable, nothing like his work from the
seventies. Some songs resembled techno
anthems slowed to a crawl; others seemed
like furtive experiments in rendering the
sound of a trickling stream with a syn-
thesizer. Instead of paeans to a lover,
there were odes to higher powers and
changing seasons, lyrics about spiritual
rebirth and the great outdoors. “Ever New”
slowly builds, a series of synth lines lay-
ering on one another, until Glenn-Cope-
land finally begins singing: “Welcome
the child/Whose hand I hold/Welcome
to you both young and old/We are ever
new.” He made two hundred cassette
copies of an album called “Keyboard
Fantasies.” And then, befitting his life
philosophy, Glenn-Copeland moved on
to the next thing. More snow.
T
here’s a history of electronic music
that replaces the sweaty commu-
nion of the dance floor with self-discov-
ery and alternative forms of conscious-
ness. Glenn-Copeland has described
himself as a “musical monk,” largely ig-
norant of what’s going on outside his
house. “Keyboard Fantasies” was redis-
covered in 2015 by a Japanese record col-
lector, who bought Glenn-Copeland’s
remaining stock and sold it to people
around the world. The following year,
the album was reissued by the Toronto
record label Invisible City Editions.
Part of the appeal of Glenn-Cope-
land’s recordings from the eighties is the
way in which they speak to our desire for
a future that never came. “Keyboard Fan-
tasies” is like an outsider artist’s enchanted
take on electronic music. As “Sunset Vil-
lage” opens, Glenn-Copeland sounds as
though he’s still feeling his way around the
keyboard, showing a slight hesitancy as
he taps a pattern of low notes. But a sim-
ple, gorgeous synth melody weaves into
the mixture, and he begins singing with
a kind of serene calm: “Let it go/Let it
go now/It’s O.K.” Where his folk re-
cordings felt anguished and stormy, here
the vocals are sonorous and slow, merg-
ing with mellow waves and pulses. Com-
puters are capable of producing sounds
that might never end, and it often seems
as if Glenn-Copeland wanted to see how
long he could sustain his vocals and stay
inside the moment.
“Transmissions,” released this month
by Transgressive Records, is a compila-
tion spanning Glenn-Copeland’s career.
Curiously, it’s not sequenced chrono-
logically, so it offers a sense of restless,
ever-shifting moods rather than a sin-
gle line of artistic progression. Plaintive
folk tunes from the early seventies and
eighties and experiments in ambient
pastoralism sit alongside tracks from
“Primal Prayer,” an album released in
2004 under the pseudonym Phynix,
which was full of sampled breakbeats
and dramatic, operatic refrains. “My
mother says to me/Enjoy your life,”
Glenn-Copeland sings on “La Vita,”
which sounds like a homemade version
of early-nineties world-beat dance music.
In the mid-nineties, Glenn-Cope-
land was introduced to the term “trans-
gender,” which eventually gave him a
language for understanding himself.
Glenn-Copeland began publicly identi-
fying as trans in 2002. He had long since
stopped writing songs about relation-
ships or heartbreak. Instead, the autobi-
ographical nature of his music comes
through in its exploration of textures,
moods, and memory. “Transmissions”features a new song called “River Dreams,”
built around a downcast bass line echoed
by piano. Here, Glenn-Copeland seems
to chant, almost as though uttering an
incantation, in an unfamiliar language.
There’s also a live recording from 2018
of the spiritual “Deep River,” calling to
mind the music of his youth. He turns
it into a joyous sing-along, encouraging
the audience to scat with him, and then
thanking them for helping him out.
In August, Glenn-Copeland released
“Live at Le Guess Who?,” made during
a Dutch music festival, which includes
the recording of “Deep River.” On “Co-
lour of Anyhow,” his voice is weathered
and grainy as he unspools that older folk
tune into a delicate jazz ballad. Through-
out the concert, Glenn-Copeland is joy-
ful and giddy, joking about how he’s so
chatty when onstage that the band might
have time to play only a few songs.
Glenn-Copeland’s exposure in the
past few years, and his experiences as a
seventysomething on tour for the first
time, were documented by the filmmaker
Posy Dixon in the 2019 film “Keyboard
Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Story.” One member of Indigo Rising,
his young touring band, marvels at his
desire to spend so much time with them,
grinding away on the road. It looked as
if 2020 would be the first year of Glenn-
Copeland’s life that he made money as
a musician. But the pandemic resulted
in a string of cancelled tour dates, which
he and his wife had been counting on
for income. Their daughter and her part-
ner launched a crowdfunding effort that
helped them avoid homelessness.
Throughout Dixon’s film, Glenn-
Copeland exudes an infectious mirth, like
a person out of step with these grim times.
He spent decades working in obscurity
without realizing that that’s what it was.
Obscurity suggests an awareness of the
outside world and its desires. Only now
does Glenn-Copeland understand that
he was making music for a generation of
listeners who had yet to be born. In the
documentary, he is excited to eat takeout
on the sidewalk and to listen to his band
tell stories about night clubs and new
music. He is thrilled to be interviewed
on someone’s Internet radio show. Ev-
erything is delightful and unprecedented.
He wasn’t waiting for all this to happen—
the recognition, the new records, the tours.
But he was waiting for us.