Student-Performers Reflect on Housing Instability Through Music

A new performance of original music explores the challenging living situations of young people, in a city were more than 100,000 public students are homeless.

Voices for the Voiceless will be performed at the Queens Theater on Friday. The 10 original songs are the culmination of a months’ long effort by composer Landon Knoblock to make music with low-income students as well as those living in the Landing Family Shelter in the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens.  

After a recent rehearsal, Knoblock told WNYC he hoped the songs, which featured poems and lyrics by the students, challenged the idea of homelessness. It's not just people living on the streets, he said, but those who are "doubling up, tripling up, and moving in with family members." 

And he noted it was rare to hear directly from children who live with housing instability. "It felt like something that I could find a way, musically, to address," he said. 

Giselle Chen is 12th grade student at Port Richmond High School on Staten Island who participated in a series of music workshops Knoblock led at the nonprofit organization Opportunity Network. She said the process made her reflect on her own early years in a cramped basement apartment shared with strangers.

"That made me feel even unsafe, especially when my mom went out to do the grocery shopping and I had to be home alone [with my housemates],” Chen said.

She channeled those feelings into a poem she wrote that makes an appeal for empathy for those who might be in challenging housing situations.

Students should be focusing their energies on school, she recites over a bed of music, not their next housing placement: “Countless movings [sic], countless school absences piling up, the piling begins to build out a wall and block out the light that shines for a bright future.”

Chen said participating in the project made her feel grateful for the house she lives in now. Her sister's family lives with her, her parents, and her brother, but they don't have any strangers sharing their kitchen anymore.