Matthew Aucoin

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is a co-founder of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), and was the Los Angeles Opera’s Artist in Residence from 2016 to 2020.

Eurydice, Aucoin’s most recent opera, had its premiere at the Los Angeles Opera in 2020 and went on to have a successful production at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2021. His previous operas, Crossing and Second Nature, have been produced at leading theaters across North America, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Canadian Opera Company, and the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.).

Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music has been commissioned and performed by such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, pianist Kirill Gerstein, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Brentano Quartet. He has also received commissions from leading institutions including Carnegie Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, The Gilmore Piano Festival, and the Ojai Music Festival.

As a conductor, Aucoin has appeared with the Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, the San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, and many other ensembles, in repertoire ranging from his own music to the operas of Verdi, Mozart, and John Adams.

Aucoin is the author of The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, a book of personal reflections on opera as an art form (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021). He is a regular contributor to leading publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

Aucoin is a 2012 graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude), where he studied with the poet Jorie Graham, and a 2014 recipient of a Graduate Diploma in composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with the composer Robert Beaser. Between 2012 and 2014, he served both as an Assistant Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and as the Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony, where he studied with Riccardo Muti.

--August 2022