As our Ensemble Studio School Tour of Second Nature gets underway, take a moment to get to know the opera’s talented young composer, Matthew Aucoin! Second Nature is an original work by this award-winning composer, pianist, poet and conductor, who has been called "the next Leonard Bernstein" (Wall Street Journal) and "Opera's Great 25-Year-Old Hope" (New York Times). Read on to learn more about how he got his start as a young composer and his inspirations behind this eco-friendly opera!

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Name: Matthew Aucoin
Age: 26
Hometown: A small town near Boston, Massachusetts

What’s your favourite kind of music other than opera?

"So many kinds... indie rock, jazz, non-operatic classical music.

What was your favourite 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, in Chicago. 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."

What’s the point of having people sing a story instead of just telling it like in a movie or a play or a TV show?

"Yeah, why do opera singers sing? It risks looking pretty silly, right? Well, try something out at home: imagine you’re having a conversation with your friend, and you start to get into an argument. At first you’re talking normally, but then you start to get mad. You can feel your cheeks getting flushed, you can feel your pulse, and you raise your voice. At the moment when you raise your voice, listen to yourself: you just sang. When we raise our voices—if we’re really excited or overjoyed or angry—we push them closer to music. (Imagine yourself yelling “MOM! MOOOOOOOM!” You’re basically singing.) And opera is the world of that music—the music of human passion, of the things that we express in music because speech doesn’t say it strongly enough. It’s a way of letting our passion and emotions out into the world without hurting each other."

What’s your advice for someone interested in being a composer?

"Listen. Just listen to and absorb as much music as you can—and not just music; listen to the music of the world around us. And if you want to make music up, find some friends that you want to make music with!"'

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To learn more about Matthew and his past works, go to his website.

Reprinted with the permission of Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Photo credits (top - bottom): Matthew Aucoin, photo by Steven Laxton; Matthew Aucoin, photo by Steven Laxton; Matthew Aucoin, photo by Steven Laxton; Betty Allison, Charles Sy, Megan Quick, Emily D'Angelo, and Bruno Roy in ​Second Nature ​(COC, 2016), photo by Chris Hutcheson.