Matthew Aucoin

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 and recorded 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 pianists Conor Hanick and 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, the Aspen Music Festival, Juilliard  Opera, 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.

Peter Sellars

Director Peter Sellars has gained international renown for his groundbreaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th-century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects. His work illuminates the power of art as a means of moral expression and social action.

He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra National de Paris, and the Salzburg Festival, among others. He has also collaborated on the creation and production of many works with composers John Adams and Kaija Saariaho.

Recent productions include Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) for the Park Avenue Armory (New York), Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, a revival of Tristan und Isolde at the Opera de Paris, and a staging of Sorey’s Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine at the Dutch National Opera. Upcoming in 2023/24 are new productions of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Medee in Berlin and Vincenzo Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda in Paris.

Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals and the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival. In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a festival in Vienna for which he invited emerging and established artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fields of music, theater, dance, film, the visual arts, and architecture for the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday anniversary. He served as the Music Director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival.

Mr. Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and the founding director of the Boethius Institute at UCLA. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, the Gish Prize, the Polar Music Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

About her work, James Longenbach wrote in The New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption — intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic — rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems."

Graham has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.

AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), founded in 2017 by Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur, builds and shares a body of collaborative work. As a group of dancers, singers, musicians, writers, directors, composers, choreographers, and producers united by a core set of values, AMOC* artists pool their resources to create new pathways that connect creators and audiences in surprising and visceral ways.

Their 2023/24 season proposes a dialogue between neglected histories and uncertain futures, from colonial legacies to today’s climate crisis. With two significant world premieres, a US-tour launch, a new work in Paris, and a continued commitment to developing multidisciplinary works, this season showcases groundbreaking American artistry on an international scale. In December 2023, AMOC* celebrated Latin American poets and the voices of women with John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, a chamber-music arrangement written specifically for AMOC*. El Niño toured to Opera Omaha, Stanford University, and Yale University before returning to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for a second year. Spring 2024 also marks the world premiere of two AMOC* commissions: Music for New Bodies, composed by AMOC* Co-Founder Matthew Aucoin, is a staged song cycle based on recent poems by Jorie Graham. This new work, co-created with director Peter Sellars, explores humankind’s impact on the planet and the presence of immense cycles beyond our control. The work premieres as a co-commission with DaCamara of Houston and Rice University on April 20th at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. In June, The Comet / Poppea, a co-production with Anthony Roth Costanzo, Cath Brittan, The Industry, Curtis Institute of Music, and Yale Schwarzman Center debuts at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. Conceived and directed by Yuval Sharon and composed by George Lewis, with a libretto by Douglas Kearney, The Comet / Poppea juxtaposes W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story The Comet with Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea—framing both a rebuke of opera and a celebration of the form’s radical potential.

Simultaneously, AMOC* continues developing new works, including a multidisciplinary triptych by artistic duo Gerard & Kelly combining music, dance, and film that focuses on Julius Eastman’s life and legacy – in partnership with Los Angeles-based music collective, Wild Up. The first part of this triptych, Gay Guerrilla, premiered in July at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) in partnership with the Opéra national de Paris, & Compagnie, AMOC*, and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, with the support of enoa and the Creative Europe program of the European Union.