{"id":2334377,"date":"2026-03-18T04:40:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T04:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2334377"},"modified":"2026-03-18T04:40:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T04:40:26","slug":"acclaimed-composer-and-conductor-matthew-aucoin-prepares-a-new-generation-of-musicians-at-boston-university-bu-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/acclaimed-composer-and-conductor-matthew-aucoin-prepares-a-new-generation-of-musicians-at-boston-university-bu-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Acclaimed Composer and Conductor Matthew Aucoin Prepares a New Generation of Musicians at Boston University | BU Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of opera and classical music\u2019s brightest stars has joined CFA\u2019s School of Music as a visiting professor<\/h2>\n<\/header>\n
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At 35, composer Matthew Aucoin has been hailed for work described as revolutionary. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi<\/p>\n

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One of opera and classical music\u2019s brightest stars has joined CFA\u2019s School of Music as a visiting professor<\/h4>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

On a recent winter afternoon, a dozen graduate students from Boston University\u2019s School of Music\u2014most of them voice majors\u2014gather in a classroom to rehearse a quartet from Act I of Mozart\u2019s Don Giovanni<\/em>. Two groups of singers and a student conductor are exploring one of the famous opera\u2019s pivotal scenes with one of the most exciting and sought-after opera and classical music composers working today, Matthew Aucoin<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A 2018 MacArthur Fellow and a Grammy-nominated composer, Aucoin joined\u00a0 the College of Fine Arts School of Music faculty in September as a visiting professor of composition and conducting. His work has been performed on stages across the globe, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. While one of the most in-demand composers working today, with commissions years out, Aucoin spends two days a week on campus, shuttling from a small office at CFA, where he leads one-on-one lessons with composition students, to a windowless classroom at 808 Comm Ave, where he is teaching graduate voice and conducting students in his opera performance workshop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Throughout the year, he has been working with his voice students on three Mozart operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, <\/em>and Cosi fan tutte. <\/em>The students are asked to select a role and then explore it in-depth. Over the next 90 minutes, Aucoin listens intently while occasionally interrupting to talk to the singers about what\u2019s happening in the quartet and to offer suggestions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you notice about the style, the tone, that everyone speaks in?\u201d he asks the singers. He encourages them to think about the emotions their characters are experiencing, occasionally sprinting from the back of the classroom to the piano to make a point. Aucoin urges the student conductor to maintain eye contact with the singers.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou sort of have to be like a hawk when you\u2019re conducting opera,\u201d Aucoin tells him. \u201cYour eyes have to be everywhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aucoin is balancing his weekly opera performance workshops and work with student composers with his own demanding schedule composing and rehearsing new works across the country. He sees teaching as a natural extension of his journey as a musician.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil now, I\u2019ve never taught composition in a sustained way. I\u2019d do workshops or visit a festival like Aspen or Tanglewood for two days and work with students. And I always felt, this is great, but when you do it for just a couple of days, you don\u2019t get a chance to build a deep connection,\u201d Aucoin says. \u201cYou can give someone an idea, but you can\u2019t help them develop it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Entranced by music as a toddler\u00a0<\/h3>\n

\u201cI\u2019m basically doing today what I was doing when I was six years old,\u201d <\/strong>Aucoin says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At 35, with a slender build and a mop of brown curls, he looks barely older than his students. Yet he has already amassed the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of a far more seasoned composer.<\/p>\n

He was entranced by music from the time he was a toddler growing up in nearby Natick and recalls visiting Harvard Square with his mother, where he was spellbound by a group of Bolivian street musicians performing with panpipes and drums.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe bought their tape and I played it ad nauseum, and when we went back to Cambridge a few months later, they were playing there again. I requested particular songs, and they were completely confused that here was a three- or four-year-old groupie,\u201d Aucoin recalls. Soon after that, he heard Beethoven\u2019s Ninth Symphony for the first time, which launched his own musical journey.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just shocked that there could be anything that beautiful,\u201d he says. By the time he was 9, he had written his first symphonic work and by 11, he could play the entire score of The Marriage of Figaro<\/em>. At Harvard, he majored in English, but he also pursued his love of music, conducting student-produced operas and continuing to compose\u00a0 his own works.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aucoin outside the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, November 28, 2021, during the opera company\u2019s production of Eurydice<\/em>. He was the youngest composer to have a Met premiere since Gian Carlo Menotti in 1938. Photo by Gary He for the Boston Globe<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After he graduated, the Metropolitan Opera Company hired Aucoin as an assistant conductor. Just 21 at the time, he was the youngest person to hold the position. He was then hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as the Solti Conducting Apprentice, where he famously went on at the last minute for an ailing Pierre Boulez to lead the CSO in a critically lauded performance of works by Stravinsky and Ravel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Composing over conducting<\/h3>\n

As his career blossomed, Aucoin began focusing more on composing than conducting. His first professional opera, Crossing,<\/em> a fictional reimagining of poet Walt Whitman\u2019s work as a nurse during the Civil War, was staged by the American Repertory Theater in 2015. That and other early works received such ecstatic notices that a New York Times <\/em>profile that year was headlined \u201cMatthew Aucoin, Opera\u2019s Great 25 Year-Old Hope.\u201d As the\u00a0 profile\u2019s writer, Carlo Rotella, put it: \u201cIf contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it\u2014although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, Aucoin went on to cofound the American Modern Opera Company<\/a>, known for producing new works. In 2020, his opera Eurydice, <\/em>a retelling of the Orpheus myth, had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera before traveling to the Metropolitan Opera the following year. The work, with a libretto by Sara Ruhl based on her play of the same title, earned them a Grammy nomination. More recently, his acclaimed vocal symphony Music for New Bodies,<\/em> based on poems written by Jorie Graham about her experience being treated for cancer, received ecstatic notices when it debuted in Houston and was later performed at Tanglewood and Lincoln Center.\u00a0<\/p>\n