Matthew Aucoin limns the music of language in his ‘Song of the Reappeared’

For composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin, the music of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra formed the soundtrack to a significant chapter in his early career. From 2013 to 2015, he studied with Riccardo Muti as the CSO Sir Georg Solti Conducting Apprentice, a period during which he also wrote his first opera, Crossing. Through this apprenticeship, Aucoin “learned a great deal, not only about conducting, but also about composition and orchestration,” he said in a recent interview. 

“What better lesson could there be for someone who wants to write orchestral music than listening to the Chicago Symphony rehearse the entire repertoire every week?” he said. “I remember there would be days when I would sit in a CSO rehearsal for two and a half hours, and then I would go home and orchestrate for six hours, and the sound of the orchestra would be in my ear.”

Since concluding his CSO post, Aucoin has continued to pursue both composition and conducting. As the Los Angeles Opera’s artist-in-residence from 2016 to 2020, he conducted a new production of Philip Glass’ Akhnaten and composed a new opera, Eurydice, which was co-commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Aucoin also is the co-founder of the American Modern Opera Company and author of The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, a book published in 2021.

This season, Aucoin returns to Symphony Center as the composer of a CSO commission, Song of the Reappeared, featuring soprano Julia Bullock and conductor Petr Popelka in its world-premiere performances Dec. 4-7. The three-movement work, described by the composer as a concerto for voice and orchestra, sets to music several Spanish texts by Raúl Zurita, a Chilean poet known for using his art to resist political oppression.

On his choice of these particular texts, Aucoin said, “Last winter was pretty dark, I think, for a lot of us. It was a difficult time. The world seemed heavy, often, and I found that I needed a voice in my ear who was like a lightning bolt, who just had this life force and this conception of art as life-affirming and non-violent resistance. And so, I turned to the South Americans, because many artists, musicians, writers and visual artists from South American countries have been really good at engaging in political struggles, while also being colorful and imaginative artists.”

As a young man, Zurita survived political imprisonment and torture during the cruel military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. Upon his release, the poet was banned from entering any bookstores in his home country, but he nevertheless found creative ways to share his words with the world, such as writing poems with stones in the desert or with airplane contrails in the sky.

Song of the Reappeared is inspired by Zurita’s INRI, a 2003 poetry collection that memorializes the many victims who were “disappeared,” or covertly executed, during Pinochet’s regime. “The book is full of images of resurrection and return. It’s this kind of defiant, joyful reunion of all these people he loved who were lost,” said Aucoin. “So, it struck me that this poetry really wanted to be set to music. It’s such fiery, beautiful language — almost biblical in how intense the images are.”

“Julia has this ability to be a truth-teller in her singing. She cares about telling the truth. Personally, psychologically, you feel that what she’s giving you is authentic." — Matthew Aucoin on soprano Julia Bullock

Aucoin’s composition takes the listener on a journey from terrifying descent to triumphant ascent. The first movement, “El mar” (“The Sea”), evokes images of victims’ bodies being thrown out of airplanes into the ocean. “There’s this fierce, dance-like, wild instrumental section,” said Aucoin. “It is a movement that’s full of, I would say, a kind of shock.”

“The middle movement is much more tender and lyrical and expansive,” he said. Titled “Una ruta en las soledades” (“A Path in the Solitudes”), this movement dramatizes a passage in which Zurita’s speaker, who seems to be one of the dead, addresses his lost beloved. Musically, the English horn emerges as a co-soloist with the soprano.

The final movement, “Rompientes” (“Breakers”), “is like an image of resurrection — this image of the ones who were lost returning into the sky, this image of the waves of the Pacific lifting us up,” said Aucoin. “It’s this feeling of, even though we’ve lost so much, there is this life force, that goes even beyond the human species. So, it begins in a dark place, and I would say the piece ends in a kind of exultation.”

Aucoin is thrilled to have Bullock, a longtime friend and collaborator, perform as the soprano soloist for the world premiere of this piece, which he composed with both her voice and the sound of the CSO in mind. Bullock “has this ability to be a truth-teller in her singing,” said Aucoin. “I think a lot of singers just try to sound beautiful. Julia does sound beautiful, but she cares about telling the truth. Personally, psychologically, you feel that what she’s giving you is authentic, and I felt that she was someone who could really deliver this poetry.”

Exploring the connections between music and literature, especially poetry, has been a throughline for Aucoin, who studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham as an undergraduate at Harvard University. Aucoin’s latest work of music theater, Music for New Bodies, is based on Graham’s poetry and staged by director Peter Sellars. The piece has been performed in Houston and at the Aspen Music Festival, and additional performances in New York and Los Angeles are planned, as well as a studio recording to be released next year.

“Language is always full of music,” said Aucoin. “We are communicating musically all the time, through our tone of voice and through the musical shapes of our language, but we’re not always conscious of it. I love activating language. I think of it as tapping into a power that is inherent in it — it’s deep in there — and singing it can help unlock these worlds of meaning.”