From a singular talent, an audacious
new reach

From a singular talent, an audacious
new reach
A musically dense score set to a pastiche of poetry, his ‘Music for
New Bodies’ will be staged at Tanglewood Aug. 7.

By Malcolm Gay GLOBE STAFF

In 2015, The New York Times crowned composer Matthew Aucoin the
“most promising operatic talent in a generation.’’ He was just 25 years old.
“That is a serious curse to carry with you,’’ said Peter Sellars, a renowned
opera director. “If the Times says you’re the future of American opera, and
you’re still alive? That’s a miracle.’’
Raised in Medfield, Aucoin has seemingly fulfilled that promise in the
ensuing decade, reaching the heights of the opera world as he won highprofile commissions, wrote a well-received book, and cofounded a critically
acclaimed opera company. In case there was any doubt, the MacArthur
Foundation made it official when it named him a fellow, an honor
commonly referred to as a “genius’’ grant.
Now, at 35, Aucoin has produced a singular musical work that is being
hailed as revolutionary, an uncategorizable vocal symphony that represents
a major departure — not just for Aucoin, but perhaps for operatic music
more broadly.
Aucoin will conduct the 70-minute piece, “Music for New Bodies,’’ with
players from the company he cofounded, the American Modern Opera
Company, known as AMOC, at Tanglewood on Aug. 7.
Sellars, who is staging the work at Tanglewood, said Aucoin’s composition is
closely attuned to the current cultural moment, as many people are
distracted, overwhelmed, and apprehensive in their personal lives, while
also coping with the existential upheaval brought on bygenerational
challenges such as climate change or artificial intelligence.
He compared “New Bodies’’ to the work of Italian composer Claudio
Monteverdi, a pivotal figure in the creation of what is today called “opera.’’
“In the history of music, there’s this moment where music has to step in for
things that we are still not able to describe because they’re too new,’’ said
Sellars, who called it an emergent consciousness. “Matt’s piece is one of
those turning-point pieces, which just begins to look forward and resists
looking backwards. It’s trying to open into a way larger realm of experiences
that we all know, and yet we have received inadequate language to
describe.’’
Traveling between the personal, the commercial, the mythic, and the
cosmological, “New Bodies’’ is musically dense. It pushes performers to the
edge of what’s technically possible, while also drawing on a wide range of
musical traditions, from Gustav Mahler to synth pop.
The work grew out of a conversation Aucoin had with Sellars after the
director saw a short piece by Aucoin that set to music a poem by Jorie
Graham, a Pulitzer-winning poet at Harvard University and one of Aucoin’s
early mentors.
Working without a traditional commission, Aucoin said he was free to
develop “New Bodies’’ without many of the logistical constraints that follow
a commission, when music must carry the opera’s narrative, scene changes,
and other practical considerations.
“I think what defines this piece is creative freedom,’’ said Aucoin, who along
with Sellars eventually lined up five groups, including AMOC, to
commission the work. “We basically just made the piece that we wanted to
make, and then found people to present it.’’
Sellars called the creative process “one of the things you dream of for a
composer — not just write music to order, but really to explore with an
open-ended sense of searching.’’
“Matt was on his own: He had no deadline, no assignment, and he could
write something that was not following anybody’s instructions or that
needed to respond to anybody’s programming needs,’’ he said. It’s a “piece
of music that is appearing spontaneously from something that’s on his mind
and in his heart.’’
The resulting work sets to music a number of Graham’s poems from the past
decade or so, when she underwent cancer treatment. Enlisting five singers,
a chamber orchestra, and electronics, “New Bodies’’ wrestles with questions
of mortality, ecological devastation, technology, and the medical industrial
complex.
The singers frequently shift perspectives, alternately inhabiting the voice of
a cancer patient, medical professionals, chatbots, the natural world, and
even cancer-fighting pharmaceuticals as they make their way through her
body.
At a Lincoln Center performance earlier this month, varying hues of light
raked the stage as Sellars had instrumentalists play alongside vocalists,
forming and re-forming temporary musical clusters to create a dynamic
soundscape.
Aucoin said one aim of the piece “was to try to capture what it’s like to be
alive right now in all of its contradictory, overwhelming intensity.’’
“It might feel like a total fever dream to some people because the music and
the poetry are our guide,’’ he said. “But that felt, in a way, more honest to
being alive right now than telling a nice, neat story.’’
With no explicit plot, “New Bodies’’ loosely follows a woman after she learns
she has an aggressive form of cancer. It articulates the emotional chaos that
follows the initial diagnosis, as the speaker considers nonreligious forms of
immortality such as cryofreezing and grows anxious when she struggles to
recognize what she sees in the mirror.
The piece then leaves the human realm, traveling to the bottom of the sea,
where it sings of ecological degradation: “There is nothing in particular you
want—you just want.’’
When the music surfaces, the woman is undergoing a potentially life-saving
(or ending) surgery. The score turns synthetic and cheery as she succumbs
to the anesthesia, a trippy passage where the voice of the drugs seems to
speak from inside her body. As she emerges from this journey, the
protagonist can hear a calmer, more powerful voice: the Earth and the
forces that created it.
“Our rule was: Let’s follow the music,’’ said Aucoin. “It felt exciting to locate
that question through Jorie Graham’s poetry, because she’s been writing
from this predicament of having cancer and wondering what it means to
have a body and to be mortal in a moment when we seem really interested
as a species in living virtually and surpassing having a body.’’
Critics have compared “New Bodies’’ to Mahler’s sprawling “Das Lied von
der Erde’’ (“The song of the Earth’’), but Aucoin, who once played keyboards
in an indie band, has channeled a broad range of influences — jazz,
percussion, even the quartz action of a clock — that goes far afield of
traditional orchestral music.
“A lot of us today grew up playing jazz and improvised music,’’ said Aucoin,
who, like other young composers, is seeking to push the boundaries of the
art form. “We have experience playing various kinds of pop, or at least
hearing a huge range’’ of music. “It’s never made sense to me to say, ‘Well, I
must brand myself in a narrow way.’ ’’
Aucoin, who is the son of Globe theater critic Don Aucoin, has been on a fast
track since graduating from Harvard. He’s held a variety of prestigious
fellowships and residencies, and his opera “Eurydice’’ was produced in 2021
by New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned the work. The Met
has since commissioned him to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons.’’
He first got to know Graham when he took her poetry workshop at Harvard.
(Both Sellars and Aucoin graduated from Harvard, and all three artists have
received MacArthur “genius’’ awards.) The poet gave Aucoin her blessing
when he asked to set more of her work to music, giving him free rein to
work with the material.
“My work of imagination was already done,’’ said Graham, who added that
“New Bodies’’ is a collage that combines portions of multiple poems and
books. “If my words inspire them, that’s a contagion: I need them to do
whatever they need to do.’’
Despite the work’s range, Sellars said “New Bodies’’ retains a feeling of
human warmth.
“The beauty of what Matt and Jorie are doing is that it is personal, and it is
intimate,’’ he said, calling it a balm in an era of “giant, obnoxious public
address.’’ “It has this sense of a private and unique moment that turned into
an immense project.’’
For Graham, who attended the Lincoln Center performance, the title of the
work could not be more apt.
“It made every part of my body have to come into operation,’’ she recalled,
adding the performance engaged not only her intellect but also the part of
the body “that absorbs and distinguishes between shades of colors and all
those instruments and voices.’’
“It’s a music that will give you a new body,’’ she said, “and certainly a body, I
think, more capable of resistance to some of the ways in which our era
wishes to shut it down.’’
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him
@malcolmgay.