Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s biography up to 2020 reads like the epic journey of an artist-hero. Born in Philadelphia, United States, at the tail end of WWII to music-loving Quaker parents, he grew into a musically precocious child then came of age in 1960s Montreal, Canada, with a scholarship to study classical music at McGill University. Glenn-Copeland drew unwelcome attention there, not only as the first Black student in the music school, but also as McGill’s first openly queer Black (pretransition) female student. Due to the hostility he was subjected to, he dropped out.
Glenn-Copeland then travelled to New York to study opera, released niche folk music recordings, discovered Buddhism, chanting and synthesisers, and embarked on a 25-year stint as a regular musical guest on Canadian children’s television show . During his TV tenure he recorded and self-released an experimental new age album in – which sank immediately into obscurity despite its lush synth-driven iridescence. In the 2000s Glenn-Copeland transitioned and began living publicly as male, then shortly afterwards released an arresting album of baroque-electronic operatics and earthy percussion under the alias “Phynix”. That album more or less met the same fate as Later that decade he reconnected with an old friend, Elizabeth, at a friend’s wedding. The spark ignited resulted in the two marrying not long afterwards, and the catalysing influence of this relationship is a consistent feature of Glenn-Copeland’s latter day work. “The quality of her love is humbling,” he says, nestled in a grey wingback chair in their temporary home in Hamilton, Canada. “She is a gifted writer, singer and theatre artist in her own right. She is my creative partner.”
