PRIMA Midway Meetup: An Evening with Matthew Aucoin
Monday January 22
6:30 – 8:00pm
BLO Headquarters at Midway Artist Studios, 15 Channel Center St. Boston MA 02210
FREE
Join PRIMA friends and fans for a winter gathering and lively conversation with celebrated composer and Boston native Matthew Aucoin. Music and culture scholar (and fellow PRIMA member!) Lucy Caplan moderates an energetic discussion about Aucoin’s opera Eurydice, which BLO will present in March 2024. Explore the opera’s varied literary, musical, and dramatic inspirations, and hear excerpts performed live by the composer. The evening will include light bites and refreshments (both alcoholic and zero-proof), and time for socializing and Q&A.
PRIMA is BLO’s social group for young professionals ages 21 – 45.
Matthew Aucoin’s residency has been made possible by Katie and Paul Buttenwieser.
This event is at capacity! Please email prima@blo.org to be added to the waitlist.
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 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, Los Angeles Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 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 orchestral and chamber music has been performed by such leading artists and ensembles as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Brentano Quartet.
His recent conducting engagements include appearances with Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, Houston Grand Opera, the San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, and many 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.
Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is an interdisciplinary historian of music and culture in the United States. Her first book, which tells the story of how African American artists fundamentally transformed the art form of opera in the early twentieth century, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2024. She is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she teaches a wide range of classes on American music, African American music, and cultural history.
