art song & theater
babe not mine (fairy lullaby)
wilde songs
your friends
additional works are linked through my complete list of works.
babe not mine
a lullaby for soprano and piano
Of the many artists I’ve worked with over the years, Jenny Ribeiro has been my most consistent collaborator. A soprano of incredible range and skill, Jenny is always hungry for new music. When she asked for a special piece to sing at her graduate recital from Michigan State University in 2022, I got right to work.
The two of us researched lullaby and fairytale texts for something magical and unusual, and we finally found it in a nineteenth-century Irish magazine: a translation of an old Gaelic lullaby in which a mother, kidnapped by fairies to raise their children, daydreams of being rescued to return to her own family.
one-eleven heavy
for soprano, tenor, and chamber orchestra | libretto by matt frey
About One-Eleven Heavy: making an opera EP. Collage by artist Erin Louise Clancy.
One-Eleven Heavy was released as my first album in 2019 on Navona Records, performed by ensemble Hotel Elefant and featuring soprano Jenny Ribeiro and Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman. It can be purchased and/or streamed on many sites, including Amazon and Spotify.
One-Eleven Heavy is a 14-minute chamber vocal work (or “opera EP,” as I’ve also dubbed it) that explores the relationship of humans to air travel via the tragic 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, which plunged into the Atlantic off the coast of Halifax, Canada. Why would anyone be interested in writing about such a thing? -says everyone, everywhere, to me. For the same reason that I’ve been deeply moved to write about anything: because the human stories and emotions behind this story are intensely relatable. For the details behind this work, including its journey from inception through album, I have a dedicated page with more info and interviews with the artists.
Overview of The Fox and the Pomegranate with short excerpts from the 2014 production at the Crane School of Music.
the fox and the pomegranate
for soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and orchestra | libretto by Daniel J. Kushner
My first-ever foray into opera, The Fox and the Pomegranate is an allegorical story about the multifaceted nature of love, the fluidity of sexual identity and gender roles, and the nuances of infidelity. When I was introduced to librettist Daniel J. Kushner in 2011, he told me about a minimalist story he’d long wanted to turn into an opera-like concept. The imagery of his story (he envisioned it more as a series of musical tableaux then scenes with a lot of traditional action), the characters, and the economy and beauty of his language hooked me.
Since 2012, The Fox and the Pomegranate has been workshopped and produced in stages (and on stages) across the US and has won the 2014 Pellicciotti Opera Composition Prize and, as an extension of the ensuing production, was included in the 1st place position in the 2014-15 National Opera Association's Collegiate Production Competition.
moby dick: extracts on death and other curiosities
for 3 sopranos, tenor, baritone, and chamber orchestra
The most ambitious project I undertook as part of the new music production group West 4th New Music (W4) was to create an evening-length work exploring the themes of Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick. We collaborated with Contemporaneous on what would become a 12-movement oratorio (myself and my three colleagues, Molly, Tim, and Ruben, each writing three). The premiere was a sold-out event at Issue Project Room and was co-produced with MATA.
David Bloom conducts Contemporaneous at the sold-out premiere.
a white and turbid wake | libretto by matt frey (as dissected from herman melville)
A White and Turbid Wake probes the human compulsion to obsess. Through the lens of Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, I reflect on the nature and the necessity of being consumed with mania. His thoughts drive him into a fit of rapture and desperation as Ahab becomes convinced that a passion akin to insanity is essential to the human condition. Aware of the inherent nature of his own madness, Ahab entreats us – how could we not be mad?
Additional Moby Dick movements by me: Some Ships and Lower Away
your friends
song for lyric soprano
During a two-year opera-writing fellowship at The American Opera Project I wrote a ton of new material—but none as personal as this journal-entry-turned-aria. And I could not possibly have asked for a better collaborator to bring this to life: soprano Jasmine Muhammad absolutely internalized every line to deliver an unspeakably haunting performance.
The complete set of arias written at AOP is here.
wilde songs
song cycle for mezzo-soprano, piano, and cello | text by Oscar Wilde
I met mezzo-soprano Kathie Kane in 2014 when she performed the role of “Nate” in my opera The Fox and the Pomegranate. Wilde Songs fuses our joint inspiration for British humor and contemporary music by deconstructing three sections of text from Oscar Wilde’s legendary comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” and sets them against the sonic palates of three classic British musicians/groups of great influence to us: Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, and the Beatles.
Movement III, my favorite, is featured to the left. Movement I, Painful To Part, and II, Men Should Be More Careful, are also on YouTube.