Andrew Yee - Trans Requiem

Andrew yee

Trans requiem

Andrew Yee, the two-time GRAMMY Award-winning cellist and composer announces Trans Requiem, a groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind work for trans voices, choirs, and orchestra, commissioned by Trinity Church NYC, via New Amsterdam Records.

Trans Requiem is a bold and necessary act of musical testimony. Rooted in the sacred tradition of the requiem mass, this work reimagines the form through the lens of a trans woman. “I want to give trans people the dignity of being grieved—the kind of communal space that we’re so often denied. This isn’t just a requiem for the dead; it’s a requiem for the living. A space to feel sadness, to reflect, to rage, to remember—and also to love and to find peace,” says Yee. At once an elegy and an act of resistance, Trans Requiem creates space to mourn the lost, honor survival, and imagine a future where trans lives are cherished and held as sacred.

Trans Requiem was conducted by Melissa Attebury and features performances by Andrew Yee, soloists Breanna Sinclairé and Katherine Goforth, NOVUS, Trinity Choir, Trinity Youth Chorus, and production by Melissa Baker and William Brittelle.

buy album

Trans Requiem is composer Andrew Yee’s story: a gift to her community, wrapped in love, empathy, and the hope of healing. For Yee, the composition began as an act of mourning — a refusal to rush past sadness in the face of the recent relentless attacks on her community. “I just wanted to be sad,” she recalls. “To take a minute to feel the weight of what was happening to trans people — and to grieve openly. I wanted to give trans folks the dignity of being grieved. We deserve that.”
Trans Requiem follows the broad structure of the traditional requiem, but Yee uses the flexibility of the concert setting to shape an intensely personal arc that reflects our time. The work was conceived after the 2024 election which saw Yee grappling with feelings of sadness and hopelessness. After performing a mass at Trinity Church, Yee realized that a requiem would “get my feelings out about what it means to be trans in the United States right now.” She spent 8 months writing the requiem and recontextualizing its ancient grieving framework. Says Yee, “there's something really cathartic about the requiem being so over the top sad and angry, and its arrival at radical acceptance. A requiem is made for a person who really feels things to their maximum levels, and for me, that is a comfortable and safe place to exist in.”
Yee’s work of living defiance creates a musical space where fear, vulnerability, joy, rage, and peace can coexist. “Each movement reflects something I’ve felt as a trans woman in this world: anger, fear, love, hope. And I wanted to hold them all at once — because that’s how we live,” she says. Following the opening “Kyrie,” the ancient plea for divine mercy, Yee inserts a new movement, “Would You Have Mercy?” that asks mercy not of God, but from harassing strangers on the street. "Lux Aeterna," (or light eternal, traditionally a prayer for the deceased) is preceded by “Light,” a tribute to the late trans activist Cecilia Gentili.
Like a fist raised in resistance, “Death Before Detransition” is the work’s most defiant moment, drawing from a poignant poem by Jennifer Espinoza. Raw and uncompromising, it uses, as Yee explains, “the language of those who hate us, turned inside out. It’s a middle finger wrapped in poetry.”
Yee breaks tradition by reassigning the requiem’s final section, “In Paradisum,” not to soprano voices but to lower ones, reclaiming the closing blessing for those whose voices — and lives — have so often been excluded from grace. In her version, heaven is not reserved for the pure or the “palatable”; it is open to all exactly as they are. “I think those of us with lower voices deserve paradise, too. I don’t need to change myself to be worthy of it,” she says.
For the trans singers featured in Trans Requiem, performing this work is more than musical interpretation — it’s a sacred act of solidarity. “My identity as a trans individual is just one aspect of who I am,” says soloist Breanna Sinclairé. “I am also a musician, a singer, a leader, and more.” Too often, she notes, people fixate only on the most visible part of a trans person’s identity. But through this music she says, “We are contributing to something revolutionary — something that fosters greater understanding and awareness of our community.”
Bringing a work like Trans Requiem into a sacred space like Trinity carries profound meaning, as the work also offers a way for all people to understand their faith more deeply. “Showcasing a liturgical work that is rooted in trans experience can deepen everyone’s understanding of what a requiem is — and will be a living, breathing demonstration of how such an ancient tradition can sustain us now,” says Rev. Elizabeth Edman.
Throughout Trans Requiem, Yee invites us to hold grief and joy in the same breath. To face fear without flinching, and to believe in the possibility of peace. This is sacred music—music that comforts, disrupts, and transforms.
“They cannot force us to grieve alone,” Yee reminds us. “This piece is a reminder that we can—and must—grieve together.”

Tracklist and Credits
1. Requiem
2. Kyrie
3. Would You Have Mercy?
4. Light
5. Lux Aeterna
6. Libera Me
7. I Am Afraid
8. Death Before Detransition
9. In Paradisum
  
  Credits
  Conductor: Melissa Attebury
  Composition, Voice, Cello: Andrew Yee
  Voice: Breanna Sinclairé and Katherine Goforth
  Ensembles: NOVUS, Trinity Choir, Trinity Youth Chorus
  Production: Melissa Baker and William Brittelle
  Executive Producer: The Rev. Michael A. Bird, Vicar, Trinity Church NYC
  Recording Engineers: Kevin Kim; Jean John (Assistant Recording Engineer)
  Mixing Engineer: Michael Hammond
  Additional Mixing: Thomas Durack
  Mastering Engineer: Idania Valencia at Sterling Sound
  Additional Audio team: Luke Cherchenko
  Album Artwork: Tuesday Smillie
  Additional Trinity Church NYC Staff for Trans Requiem: Harrison E. Joyce, Production Manager and Music Librarian; Brittany Thomas, Artistic Administrator; Thomas McCargar, Choir Administrator; Peyton Marion, Director of Music Education