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

As a composer, Aucoin is committed to expanding the possibilities of opera as a genre. His own operas, which include Eurydice and Crossing, have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Boston Lyric Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Canadian Opera Company, among others. The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Eurydice was nominated for a Grammy in 2023.

Aucoin’s most recent work of music-theater, Music for New Bodies, is a collaboration with the legendary director Peter Sellars, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham. The piece has so far been performed in Houston (co-presented by DACAMERA and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music) and at the Aspen Music Festival, and will travel to New York and Los Angeles in future seasons.

Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music has been performed, commissioned, and recorded by such leading artists and ensembles as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the pianists Conor Hanick and Kirill Gerstein, the Brentano Quartet, and singers including Anthony Roth Costanzo, Julia Bullock, Erin Morley, Davóne Tines, Danielle de Niese, Paul Appleby, and many others.

Last year, the MET Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featured Aucoin’s orchestral work Heath on its first European tour in several decades. Aucoin has also received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Ojai Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Chicago’s Symphony Center, the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, and other leading musical organizations.

His recent conducting engagements include appearances with the Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, the San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, and many other ensembles.

Aucoin’s book about opera, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, was published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He has taught at Harvard University, and is a regular contributor to leading publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

“As a composer, Mr. Aucoin twists familiar harmonies and sounds with elements of jazz and other complex rhythms. His opera librettos feature allusions to mythology, religion and history woven around the passions of larger-than-life characters. Singers who have worked with Mr. Aucoin say he crafts arias that read like poetry but also attends to technical details like placing a line’s longest note on its most beautiful vowel.”
– The Wall Street Journal

”If reconciliation is to happen at all, ‘Crossing’ suggests, it has to be on this primal level, by way of the ghosts that we carry with us, yearnings that we share, phantoms that opera can explore beyond the reach of words. Aucoin’s ambition, it seems, is to create an art form saturated with poetry that ventures where poetry, on its own, cannot go.”
– The New Yorker

”And as those who heard his A.R.T. opera ‘Crossing,’ about Walt Whitman’s nursing of the wounded and dying during the Civil War at the Shubert Theatre Friday night discovered, Aucoin doesn’t need to be compared to anyone. The piece is richly detailed, psychologically nuanced and philosophically provocative. Aucoin is very much his own man.”
– WBUR

”[Aucoin’s] refreshing approach to program design completely ignored the traditional overture-concerto-symphony formula: each half of the concert offered seven shorter works or excerpts played without interruption, in the same fashion an individual would experience music from a streaming source such as Spotify.”
– San Diego Story

“Like few other composers or curators of any age, Aucoin has a keen interest in learning and demonstrating how different genres and eras are linked. He is also devoted to championing the unique ability of music, literature and art of all kinds to mirror and amplify the gamut of human emotions.”
– The San Diego Union-Tribune

”Conductor Matthew Aucoin elicited a dynamic performance, an especially notable achievement since most of the string players fled the pit during the ferocious actual thunderstorm that lashed the open-air theater and added to the drama during [Doctor Atomic’s] Act I.”
– The Wall Street Journal

“Mr. Aucoin demonstrated his piano virtuosity in his own parts, from rumblings in the bass register to right-hand minor key trills that set the teeth on edge.”
– Superconductor