Matthew Aucoin feels music through his whole body. When he reaches an impasse while composing Crossing, a new opera based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War diaries, he stands up and conducts his way to the answer, letting his body lead the way. Aucoin’s amiable character and genial sense of camaraderie at first mask the pluck and precision of his working style. He wields his conductor’s baton and his gentle smile with equal confidence. He swiftly conducts a rehearsal on bouncing knees, never neglecting the details. He diagnoses the tiny kink in a colossally rich chord with a surprising exactitude and obligingly shepherds his musicians to the solution.
Music was one of Aucoin’s first languages; he began playing the piano and reading music almost as soon as he could read words. While he remains loyal to his first loves—Verdi, Beethoven, and Stravinsky among them—Aucoin has also built up more diverse musical tastes. As a teenager who felt like classical music was too constrained, he discovered a love for jazz and indie rock. As teenagers, Aucoin and his friends formed the indie band Elephantom, which he performed with through high school and college. He reveled in the freedom of creating music with his peers outside of “the other world, where everyone tells you what to do.” Aucoin later fused all of his musical interests to create a broad tonal vocabulary that he developed as an undergraduate at Harvard.
In college, Aucoin excelled in his study of poetry and developed his appetite for different musical styles in an environment of what he calls “do-it-yourself music.” He could perform, create, and conduct classical works in ensembles with other passionate students. Aucoin emerged with an unapologetically eclectic taste. “I want the freedom and spontaneity of jazz, I want the precision of classical notation, and I want the ecstasy of indie rock,” he reflects. “The climax of an Animal Collective song is still for me the pinnacle of musical ecstasy, identical to the climax in a Verdi aria.”
Aucoin trusts his diversified palate for music and poetry, and it has paid off. His credentials at age twenty-four rival those of Leonard Bernstein at the same age. Aucoin already has dozens of composing, conducting, and performing credits to his name. After the upcoming world premiere of Crossing directed by Diane Paulus in May, Aucoin has forthcoming works commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He is the Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an Assistant Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, and the Composer-in-Residence at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Already a respected professional in his field, Aucoin hopes to take advantage of a musical world growing with new possibilities and challenges. He describes the music business today as a supermarket. “We have more options than ever, but we risk superficially relying on the cheap, premade goods,” he explains. “It’s as hard as ever to write good music, but we now have more choices to make.” As the musical universe expands with each era and style, Aucoin avoids the temptation to make only easy choices. He mixes inspirations of the past with his own intuition, intellect, and work ethic to inform his craft.
Walt Whitman was a physically-minded poet who wanted to bring poetry to the working man. Aucoin’s goals echo Whitman’s as he hopes to shed the pretension of the classical music world and make it more accessible to a wider audience. Aucoin strives for a musical world where the audience can “access the deliciousness of the music without feeling like it was something that was reserved for a particular social class or a particular concert environment.” As Whitman searched for an American poetic idiom that could appeal to the elite as well as the working man, Aucoin writes his librettos in English and hopes that classical music can be something other than an elitist foreign import: “Italian opera is not a fancy thing for the wealthy. If you import a cheese from a village in Italy, you’re probably a rich person in America who wants to buy that cheese. But if you’re from that village, the cheese is nothing fancy—it’s just what’s for dinner, a natural product of the soil.” Aucoin’s pursuit of a more accessible classical music scene is both serious and whimsical: countless hours of work and revisions met with a waggish hand gesture and a cheese metaphor.
Crossing is not Aucoin’s first opera, and Whitman is not the first American poet he has taken as a muse. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Aucoin wrote Hart Crane, an opera about the legendary American modernist known for his intricate style and grand attempts to express the entirety of the American experience. These men were both great poets and controversial risk-takers, but Aucoin points out that opera needs more: “The characters are larger than life as soon as they start singing, so the big question for what makes a good opera subject is, can it survive being blown up to that scale, and is it also interesting on a psychological level? Is it both big and intimate?” For Aucoin, opera is a visceral fusion of music, poetry, and theater: “The music has to be something that crackles in relation to the action. It has to be the action.”
The Civil War’s daily hemorrhaging of sickness, illness, and spiritual suffering was both a devastating and defining moment in American history and in Whitman’s personal life—a time both big and intimate. Whitman found his calling as a volunteer caretaker and harbinger of hope in Washington’s hospitals, where the sickest of the Union’s soldiers bled away in a limbo between life and death, wondering if they would ever be able to return to the nation they fought to defend. In Crossing, Aucoin captures the fractured rhythms of a time when Whitman, searching for human connection and longing to become America’s literary savior, found his cosmic calling in intimacy. He wrote letters home for soldiers, absorbed their stories like a sponge, and strove to bring them justice in his writing. Aucoin takes up the gauntlet of Whitman’s brotherhood spirit and translates it into his own musical language in Crossing. From powerful orchestral swells to gentle and poignant vocal strains, Aucoin traps his poet and awe-inspiring chorus of soldiers in a singular universe of intimacy and grandeur, longing and hope.
Brenna Nicely is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
