Acclaimed Composer and Conductor Matthew Aucoin Prepares a New Generation of Musicians at Boston University
One of opera and classical music’s brightest stars has joined CFA’s School of Music as a visiting professor
At 35, composer Matthew Aucoin has been hailed for work described as revolutionary. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
Acclaimed Composer and Conductor Matthew Aucoin Prepares a New Generation of Musicians at Boston University
One of opera and classical music’s brightest stars has joined CFA’s School of Music as a visiting professor
On a recent winter afternoon, a dozen graduate students from Boston University’s School of Music—most of them voice majors—gather in a classroom to rehearse a quartet from Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Two groups of singers and a student conductor are exploring one of the famous opera’s pivotal scenes with one of the most exciting and sought-after opera and classical music composers working today: Matthew Aucoin.
A 2018 MacArthur Fellow and a Grammy-nominated composer, Aucoin joined the College of Fine Arts School of Music faculty in September as a visiting professor of composition and conducting. His work has been performed on stages across the globe, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. While one of the most in-demand composers working today, with commissions years out, Aucoin spends two days a week on campus, shuttling from a small office at CFA, where he leads one-on-one lessons with composition students, to a windowless classroom at 808 Comm Ave, where he is teaching graduate voice and conducting students in his opera performance workshop.
Throughout the year, he has been working with his voice students on three Mozart operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte. The students are asked to select a role and then explore it in-depth. Over the next 90 minutes, Aucoin listens intently while occasionally interrupting to talk to the singers about what’s happening in the quartet and to offer suggestions.
“What do you notice about the style, the tone, that everyone speaks in?” he asks the singers. He encourages them to think about the emotions their characters are experiencing, occasionally sprinting from the back of the classroom to the piano to make a point. Aucoin urges the student conductor to maintain eye contact with the singers.
“You sort of have to be like a hawk when you’re conducting opera,” Aucoin tells him. “Your eyes have to be everywhere.”
Aucoin is balancing his weekly opera performance workshops and work with student composers with his own demanding schedule composing and rehearsing new works across the country. He sees teaching as a natural extension of his journey as a musician.
“Until now, I’ve never taught composition in a sustained way. I’d do workshops or visit a festival like Aspen or Tanglewood for two days and work with students,” Aucoin says. “And I always felt, this is great, but when you do it for just a couple of days, you don’t get a chance to build a deep connection. You can give someone an idea, but you can’t help them develop it.”
Entranced by music as a toddler
“I’m basically doing today what I was doing when I was six years old,” Aucoin says.
At 35, with a slender build and a mop of brown curls, he looks barely older than his students. Yet he has already amassed the résumé of a far more seasoned composer.
He was entranced by music from the time he was a toddler growing up in nearby Natick and recalls visiting Harvard Square with his mother, where he was spellbound by a group of Bolivian street musicians performing with panpipes and drums.
“We bought their tape and I played it ad nauseum, and when we went back to Cambridge a few months later, they were playing there again. I requested particular songs, and they were completely confused that here was a three- or four-year-old groupie,” Aucoin recalls. Soon after that, he heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time, which launched his own musical journey.
“I was just shocked that there could be anything that beautiful,” he says. By the time he was 9, he had written his first symphonic work and by 11, he could play the entire score of The Marriage of Figaro. At Harvard, he majored in English, but he also pursued his love of music, conducting student-produced operas and continuing to compose his own works.
After he graduated, the Metropolitan Opera Company hired Aucoin as an assistant conductor. Just 21 at the time, he was the youngest person to hold the position. He was then hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as the Solti Conducting Apprentice, where he famously went on at the last minute for an ailing Pierre Boulez to lead the CSO in a critically lauded performance of works by Stravinsky and Ravel.
Composing over conducting
As his career blossomed, Aucoin began focusing more on composing than conducting. His first professional opera, Crossing, a fictional reimagining of poet Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse during the Civil War, was staged by the American Repertory Theater in 2015. That and other early works received such ecstatic notices that a New York Times profile that year was headlined “Matthew Aucoin, Opera’s Great 25-Year-Old Hope.” As the profile’s writer, Carlo Rotella, put it: “If contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it—although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet, and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form.”
Two years later, Aucoin went on to cofound the American Modern Opera Company, known for producing new works. In 2020, his opera Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth, had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera before traveling the following year to the Metropolitan Opera. The work, with a libretto by Sara Ruhl, and adapted from her play of the same title, earned them a Grammy nomination. More recently, his acclaimed vocal symphony Music for New Bodies, based on poems written by Jorie Graham about her experience being treated for cancer, received ecstatic notices when it debuted in Houston and was later performed at Tanglewood and Lincoln Center.
Soprano Erin Morley (above) singing “There was a roar” from Eurydice by Matthew Aucoin, at the Metropolitan Opera, November 2021. Video courtesy of Metropolitan Opera
When he was named a 2018 MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation wrote: “Matthew Aucoin is a composer expanding the potential of vocal and orchestral music to convey emotional, dramatic, and literary meaning.”
Aucoin says that while he could have leaned into his rising profile, he made a conscious decision not to.
“I could have started a podcast or a YouTube series or tried to become music director of an orchestra, but I had this instinct that if I did that, I wouldn’t have the space to write music. If you’re going to write music, you need to have a lot of unstructured time.”
Aucoin describes his music as “explosively tonal.”
“My music generally doesn’t just hang out in a key the way people might be familiar with,” he says. “Instead, there’s a kind of dynamic or unpredictable relationship between harmonies. For me, it’s sort of like walking a tightrope. If the music is too stable, it can feel stuck to me, and if it’s entirely atonal, sometimes I ask myself, how do we get from one note to the next?”
Writing music, whether it’s an opera or an orchestral piece, is an almost spiritual practice, Aucoin says.
“Sometimes, when you’re composing, no ideas come for a long time, and then suddenly you imagine something scary and dissonant and unexpected. And then sometimes it’s the opposite, where you hear something that is so emotionally vulnerable that you go, ‘Oh my God, how can I let that out into the world?’ But my feeling is you sort of have a responsibility to, once you’ve heard it. If it really wants to exist, you have to let it out.”
Preparing a new generation of singers and composers
Aucoin is unabashed about the joy he gets from teaching. In his opera workshop classes, students pick a role and are asked to learn it as deeply as possible. Each week, he selects a few scenes to work on with them. “It’s so exciting to see the moment when something clicks for a singer,” he says.
He tries to impart to his singers the importance of gaining a sense of authority and ownership over their art. “In opera, if you spend your life singing languages that you don’t speak, it’s very easy to be insecure, to never be sure if you’re doing it right. Something I’ve been trying to drive home is that you have to know the language so well—both the literal language and the musical style—that eventually you shouldn’t be beholden to anyone, any coach or teacher, to tell you whether something is right or wrong.”
In his one-on-one tutorials with student composers, Aucoin tries to teach them patience. “If you’re in college or you’re a master’s student, you’ve been in school for so many years, and you’re so accustomed to finishing assignments that it’s dangerously easy to think of composing as just another assignment, to fixate on getting a good grade or meeting a deadline,” he says. “Sometimes students think their job is to finish a piece in a hurry. Part of my job is to push against that, because a composer’s job isn’t to finish an assignment, it’s to write the best music they possibly can. And that takes time and patience.”
His job as a teacher is to understand what each student’s special strengths are and what their artistic personality is, what they’re “yearning to say through their music,” he says.
“I find myself asking, of every student, ‘what is this young artist capable of saying that no one else could say,” he says. “I hope I can teach a practice of being open to what comes. And then once you’ve written down an idea, you have to be discerning and critical and ask, ‘what do I actually believe in?’”
Working with Aucoin “has provided our students with an amazing experience,” says William Lumpkin, BU Opera Institute artistic director and conductor and a CFA associate professor of music.
Aucoin’s students agree.
“Matthew really encourages me to lean into my artistic voice and explore the things that interest me,” says Dylan Nuñez (CFA’28). “Studying with him, I’m becoming a more explorative artist, trying to branch out into compositional techniques I hadn’t previously tried, especially working with text. Matthew has a deep appreciation for poetry and narrative… I can see it influencing the way I approach text in my work.”
Composer Max Mabry (CFA’27), a master’s degree student, has been working with Aucoin on several pieces throughout the year, including an art song and the first movement of what Mabry hopes will become his first symphony.
“Working with Matthew, I’ve learned that no piece is quite as scary to approach as I might think. I was always a little intimidated by large works, especially, but through my work with Matthew, I’ve realized that all I needed to do was find why I wanted to make the piece and then start, and things will really almost develop themselves if I keep that mindset.”
At an artistic crossroads
Aucoin’s next big operatic project is an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, about nihilism in 19th-century Russia, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Company.
And as excited as he is about that project, Aucoin has a confession to make.
“Can I be totally honest and say that I think right now is a difficult moment in my relationship to opera?” he says. While he still loves opera’s ability to magnify human feelings and emotions, the art form, he notes, has its drawbacks.
“It’s massively expensive, the scale can be really hard to work with, so it’s far from easy. I think I was drawn to it in a kind of utopian way, aiming for the kinds of experiences that composers like Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner and others have created. But right now, I’m really in a moment of questioning whether my way of doing that is going to be in the opera house or not.”
A selection of excerpts from Music for New Bodies by Matthew Aucoin, from the work’s premiere in Houston. Video courtesy of DACAMERA
He points to one of his most recent pieces, the aforementioned Music for New Bodies, as an example. “It’s not quite opera. It’s something else. It could be a kind of vocal symphony, it could be an oratorio, it could be something we don’t have a name for,” he says. “And I felt so liberated writing that piece, because it’s not an opera and it doesn’t have the expectations of a certain kind of drama and a certain kind of convention. I think it does something that no other piece I’ve heard does.”
His Song of the Reappeared, which was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in December, also suggests a shift towards pushing the conventions of vocal music in new directions. A 25-minute concerto for soprano and orchestra, the work’s text is from poems by Chilean writer Raúl Zurita, who was imprisoned and tortured under Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet.
And his most recent work, a lyrical song cycle titled “The Inner Core,” which he describes as “one of the most open-hearted pieces I’ve ever written,” premiered at Lincoln Center late last month.
“They feel almost like indie rock songs. My heart is on my sleeve in these songs and that feels great. If I’d written them when I was 23, I might have been a little embarrassed about them. But now I understand that they are one facet of my artistic personality. It doesn’t mean they’re the only facet.”
A teacher following the dictum he gives his students: Hold yourself open to whatever comes next.