Matthew Aucoin - Class of 1960 Music Lecture

Composer Matthew Aucoin presents a lecture titled, The Music of a Shared Consciousness: Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies. In this talk he will reflect on the process of composing his piece Music for New Bodies (2024), an uncategorizable work of music-theater created in collaboration with the director Peter Sellars, based on poems by Jorie Graham.

In composing Music for New Bodies, Aucoin grappled with the polyvocal nature of Graham’s poetry, the sense that we are hearing not from a single “speaker” but from a multitude of voices, both human and non-human. Aucoin’s piece features five singers who all embody both an individual consciousness and the many voices that invade that consciousness: AI-generated voices, voices from the past, voices from deep within the earth. In this talk, Aucoin will reflect on the challenges posed by setting complex, boundary-breaking poetry to music, and the new frontiers that he believes this approach has opened up for American opera and music-theater.

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, and writer, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is a co-founder of the pathbreaking American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), and was the Los Angeles Opera’s Artist in Residence from 2016 to 2020.

As a composer, Aucoin is committed to expanding the possibilities of opera as a genre. His own operas, which include Eurydice and Crossing, have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Boston Lyric Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Canadian Opera Company, among others. The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Eurydice was nominated for a Grammy in 2023.

Aucoin’s most recent work of music-theater, Music for New Bodies, is a collaboration with the legendary director Peter Sellars, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham. The piece, co-commissioned by AMOC, has so far been performed in Houston and at the Aspen Music Festival, and will travel to New York and Los Angeles in future seasons.

Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music has been performed by such leading artists and ensembles as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the pianist Kirill Gerstein, and the Brentano Quartet. Last year, the MET Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featured Aucoin’s orchestral work Heath on its first European tour in several decades. Aucoin has also received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Ojai Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Chicago’s Symphony Center, the Aspen Music Festival, and many other leading musical organizations.

His recent conducting engagements include appearances with the Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, the San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, and other ensembles.

Aucoin’s book about opera, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, was published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He is a regular contributor to leading publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

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