Matt Aucoin’s bows after conducting his opera “Eurydice,” which premiered at LA Opera in February, and closed just before everything else closed as well. Craig T. Matthew photography
Matt Aucoin has as much at stake as anyone, when it comes to the performing arts.
“This feels unprecedented,” he says of the pandemic shutdown. “But the human race has seen unprecedented things. The performing arts will bounce back. I can’t imagine the shared, cathartic experience will go away forever.”
Aucoin composes. He conducts. He’s a pianist, and a poet, an insightful critic. He organizes: his American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), co-directed with choreographer Zack Winokur, comprises more than a dozen artists, each with their own glittering resume.
So what’s happening now—with concert halls shuttered, and musicians posting anything online, including haphazard performances, just to stay active—cannot fill the needs of an artist who thrives on collaboration.
“What’s happening now is just holding up iPhones,” Aucoin says. “It’s depressing.”
The Medfield native saw his third opera, “Eurydice,” end its premiere run in late February, just as the coronavirus was shutting down society. Staged by LA Opera, and headed for the Met in 2021, “Eurydice” is the latest in a series of premieres, awards and prominent collaborations that have marked Aucoin’s career.
He graduated Harvard, where he studied with poet Jorie Graham. Composition studies at Juilliard, with assistantships at the Met Opera and Chicago Symphony, followed. Residencies at the LA Opera, and the Peabody Essex Museum, were mixed in. He co-founded AMOC in 2017. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. He turned 30 this year.
Right now, Aucoin is staying put in the Vermont home he shares with bassoonist Clay Zeller-Townson. The couple are engaged: “We were hoping for a late summer wedding,” Aucoin says, without guessing whether that might still be possible.
The forced hiatus coincided with Aucoin’s own scheduled hiatus. “After my opera closed,” he says, “I had planned to just step back, to figure out what comes next anyway.
“I perform, I compose, and I write words. All those things,” he says. “Right now I’m drawn to a solo piano piece. Maybe it’s because I have more faith in the solo pianist, and I’m thinking about smaller-scale things. This feeling seeps into you.”
Intentionally or not, Aucoin has become one of his generation’s public intellectuals. His operas—“Eurydice” joins 2015’s “Crossing,” an intimate Walt Whitman portrait, along with a children’s opera “Second Nature”—will help define a new era of stage collaborations.
Last November, Aucoin traveled to Europe, reviewing three contemporary operas for “The New York Review of Books”—a multi-thousand word cultural examination. He recently curated a listening experience on wisemusicclassical.com, juxtaposing his own music with Duke Ellington’s.
And he co-directs AMOC. The impressive confederation of artists includes Winokur, soprano Julia Bullock, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, violinist/violist Miranda Cuckson, choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and others.
There are still has some live projects on AMOC’s calendar. The ensemble will curate California’s Ojai Festival—the Venice Biennale of music—in 2022. More urgently, a late-August performance at the Clark in Williamstown remains possible. “The No One’s Rose,” a music/dance/theater work composed by Aucoin, a collaboration in San Francisco with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, is still on for October.
Like all major staged works though, “The No One’s Rose” would need ample rehearsal time, creating some schedule nail-biting. “We were going to be building it, together, in August,” Aucoin says, referring to his AMOC partners. Snippets of it were to fit into the Clark program. “It’s a devised theater piece,” he says. “It’s gonna feel like an experimental play.”
Whether or not these potential dates materialize, AMOC itself will survive. Most of Aucoin’s collaborators have their own solid careers. AMOC has supporters as well, and some of them mobilized swiftly upon the shutdown.
The group immediately raised money to help fund new ideas— “just to work out things, when they can’t perform,” Aucoin says. “The kind of generative work that is not usually supported. If there’s a silver lining to this, we’re actually getting money to our artists.”
And funding ideas, which might become projects, which eventually might see the stage—whether it’s in August, or October, or 2022 and beyond.