8 / 16
8
Age:
25
Hometown:
A small town near Boston, MA
What’s your favorite kind of music other than opera?
So many kinds...indie rock, jazz, non-operatic classical music.
What was your favorite subject in school?
Literature. Much more than music, actually.
What inspired you to become a composer?
I caught the composing bug pretty early—I think I was six. I heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
and got addicted.
Tell us about the first time a composition of yours was performed in public.
I was about nine when I first heard my own music performed. A local orchestra played a piece of
mine.
Where did you get the idea for
Second Nature
?
I got the idea for
Second Nature
when I was walking around the Lincoln Park Zoo. Seeing
our planet’s cool, funky, beautiful creatures made me think about how much of nature is
disappearing—and a big part of that is humans’ fault. Some of those animals’ natural habitats
are in danger because of pollution, for example. So I imagined a future world in which humans
have messed up the environment so terribly that now
we
have to live in a zoo, to hide from the
terrible heat and storms and toxic air outside.
How do you decide which voice type each character should be?
I decide the characters’ voice types based on their personality and their attitudes. For example,
a bird might be a soprano, which is a really high woman’s voice, and an old king might be a
bass, which is the deepest kind of male voice. But sometimes there are surprises: sometimes a
male character is sung by a woman, or the other way around. The human voice expresses parts
of ourselves that we don’t see every day. There are parts of me that I would want to express
through a heroic tenor voice, and there are other parts of me that feel more like a squeaky
soprano.
Meet the
Composer
Matthew Aucoin wrote the m
and the libretto for Second Nat
(pronounced oh-KOYN)