Already at the top of the opera world, Matthew Aucoin has composed his most audacious piece yet

Boston Globe

31-07-2025

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.
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Aucoin will conduct the 70-minute piece, 'Music for New Bodies,' with players from the company he cofounded, the American Modern Opera Company, at Tanglewood on Aug. 7.
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Matthew Aucoin (conducting, bottom center), led instrumentalists and vocalists during the New York premiere of "Music for New Bodies" at the Lincoln Center.
Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
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 by
generational 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.'
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'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 will conduct 'New Bodies' at Tanglewood. '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.'
Opera director Peter Sellars, shown working with young musicians during a rehearsal of "Music for New Bodies" in 2024, called the work a "turning point."
MERIDITH KOHUT/NYT
'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.'
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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.
At the Lincoln Center performance, Sellars had instrumentalists play alongside vocalists, forming and re-forming temporary musical clusters to create a dynamic soundscape.
CREDIT: Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
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.
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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 Jory 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
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"New Bodies" grew out of a conversation Aucoin had with Sellars after the director heard an earlier piece by Aucoin that featured Graham's poetry.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
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.'
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'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