For ‘More Seasons,’ his ‘Vivaldi in a Mixmaster,’ Michael Abels shakes it up

Composer Michael Abels calls More Seasons, his playful deconstruction of the famous Baroque-era string concertos, as “Vivaldi in a Mixmaster.” 

The 12-minute, single-movement orchestral fantasia by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Abels, More Seasons (1999) serves as a witty, genre-blending homage to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, as it fuses Baroque themes with jazz, blues and funk idioms in a "Mixmaster” style, i.e., a 20th-century genre fusion.

Under Jane Glover, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform Abels’ More Seasons in concerts April 22-24, 2027.

A master of many genres, Abels is acclaimed for both orchestral works and film scores, including Jordan Peele’s box-office hits “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope.” Abels won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his first opera, Omar (2022), co-written with Rhiannon Giddens. (Lyric Opera of Chicago will present Omar for three performances Oct. 23,  25 and 28.)

A native of Phoenix, Abels grew up on a farm in South Dakota, raised by his grandparents. While on the farm, he had piano lessons from a very early age. Throughout his youth, ‘‘I was always interested in every style of music. I may have been trained on classical piano, but I listened to everything, all the music I heard on the radio,” Abels said in a 2025 Q&A session at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. “If I heard something that grabbed me, it didn’t matter if it was classical or jazz or rock or folk music. The minute I heard a different genre, I would ask what is that? If it really was ’just one word for every note,’ why did country sound so different from disco? And I had to know why.”

While composing Omar, Abels was surprised to find similarities in writing for opera and film. "I grew up thinking I didn’t like opera, but I had a teacher who told me that opera was the original film. And that stuck with me. I also noted that the harmonic language of the epic film scores was similar to opera. I certainly saw the relationship between opera and film. They are very similar in terms of sweep and scope, especially with the epics.

“But I think right now, it’s more important to point out the differences between the two genres. One of the key differences is that film music is made to follow the emotional language dictated by scenes. In other words, music’s job is to enhance, not to create, emotion. In opera, often music is setting the tone because the music is the primary art. The music sets the tone and then the singer sings into that expression.

 “So, in opera it is music and then emotion. In film, it is emotion and then music. I look at those two things as very different. And that is just one of the many many, many differences in writing opera vs. writing for film.”