Music for New Bodies

The American composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin has turned to the poetry of his teacher Jorie Graham to devise, with the opera director Peter Sellars, a performance that enacts metamorphoses of music, of words, of bodies, perhaps of the earth itself. The seventy-minute piece, which Aucoin says is not an opera or song cycle but something else not yet named, began with his setting of the poem “Deep Water Trawling” from Graham's collection Fast (2019), which Sellars recognized as a wellspring for something more. It premiered at the Shepherd School on April 20, 2024. Aucoin and Sellars continue to develop Music for New Bodies through various performances and residencies, as the five singers and eighteen instrumentalists undulate across surfaces and risers within the space they share.The libretto that Aucoin and Sellars shaped from various collections of Graham's poetry emerges from her experiences with cancer and treatments for the illness that themselves can be toxic. Her body and the earth are undergoing threats that may, perhaps, be life-saving. Words and music go to places as dark as the ocean's bottom that is scraped clean by human greed for something, trawling for anything that might bring profit. The journey is fearful, hopeful, strange. Struggling to survive under the weight of the world, the listener can surrender to the music that encourages her to breathe as if she now had gills instead of lungs. Or as well as lungs. Something different now seems possible that might be living.One listener in the Q&A that followed an open rehearsal during the residency of Aucoin and Sellars at the Brown Arts Institute said he now knew how the audience felt after hearing Le sacre du printemps. Aucoin thanked us for not rioting.