Artist Profile: Matthew A. Aucoin ’12 on Music Composition From Harvard to ‘Eurydice’

As a child, Matthew A. Aucoin ’12 started off as many classical musicians do — with piano lessons. Soon, however, he realized he had the irresistible urge to create, rather than replicate, the notes he saw on musical scores.

“I was not very good at practicing scales and doing what a teacher would’ve told me. I always wanted to treat the piano as a box of crayons with which I could color and make things up,” Aucoin said.

Music has been a part of Aucoin’s life for as long as he can remember, from watching opera productions in his hometown of Boston to directing student-run groups like Harvard College Opera. He has also ventured into performing in indie rock and jazz bands.

Despite not having attended an official music school, Aucoin remembers his years at Harvard fondly for the “unbelievable profusion of opportunities” to make music on campus. It was at Harvard where he conducted an orchestra for the first time and premiered original music — a dizzying sandbox of possibilities for the aspiring composer and conductor who could not yet decide which passion on which to hone in.

“It was fantastic, because there were not a lot of teachers breathing down our necks. I really feel like it was this playground in which kids basically have to act like administrators and music directors and take on all these responsibilities,” Aucoin said.

Aucoin extolled his college years as “the years to do everything” and urged students to explore a range of potential skills. He wryly acknowledged that to live out his college years on an infinite loop would be “exhausting.” Nevertheless, he reaffirmed how privileged he felt to make music for a living and how his time at Harvard allowed him to expand his artistic horizons wider than he had ever thought possible.

By the end of his senior year, Aucoin was hired as an assistant conductor for a production of Thomas Adès’s opera “The Tempest,” a contemporary opera directly inspired by Shakespeare’s play of the same name at the Metropolitan Opera. To complement his burgeoning career as a conductor, Aucoin moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree in composition at Juilliard, but he soon found it incompatible with his conducting demands. Taking a leap of faith, he decided to drop out to work as a freelance composer. Conducting was still on his roster — he briefly assisted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — but the core of his work was, and still remains, music composition.

“My life became a lot less stressful when I decided for myself that the thing that matters most to me is writing music,” Aucoin said.

Nevertheless, with his formidable artistic bandwidth, he has continued to conduct some of the most prominent orchestras in the country. To him, conducting is a “vacation”: a respite from the “lonely and intense” work of composing. It also gives him the opportunity to reconnect with works from the standard operatic canon, repertoire he not only does not shy away from but welcomes as inspiration for his own writing.

Aucoin spoke warmly of Giuseppe Verdi, the 19th-century composer whose operas “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” he conducted with the Los Angeles Opera and Houston Grand Opera, respectively. Performing Verdi, a master of dynamic dramatic pacing, as well as works by other composers of old has been “unbelievably useful” for Aucoin in creating musical works as ambitious as operas, which can (not wrongfully) be perceived as superfluous or boring.

“I find that by conducting older pieces, I learn things about pacing that you might not notice if you spend all your time just sitting at a desk,” Aucoin said.

Now, Aucoin is eager to share these valuable lessons with others. Between rehearsals for Boston Lyric Opera’s production of “Eurydice” — which he composed — he can be found in Harvard’s Music Building teaching Music 187R: “Opera Workshop.” In this opera creation lab where students get a handle on writing and performing contemporary operas, Aucoin is especially considerate of his students not only as musicians, but as individuals.

“I want to get to know them all as individuals and as artists, and to understand what they’re interested in. And also outside of music, what they care about in the world and how to bring that into an artistic practice,” Aucoin said.

An eager mentor, Aucoin finds that teaching at Harvard complements his work on “Eurydice” especially well, with both endeavors being deeply social exploits. “Eurydice” had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera in 2020 and its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2021. Its libretto is based on Sarah Ruhl’s play of the same name, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth from Eurydice’s perspective: something hitherto unknown in all operatic adaptations of that perennial and celebrated myth. From early Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s austere “Orfeo ed Euridice,” to Jacques Offenbach’s irreverent comic opera “Orpheus in the Underworld,” none tell the story quite like Ruhl and Aucoin do.

Aucoin also shared that he was astonished at how readily Ruhl’s play lent itself to an operatic adaptation.

“I read ‘Eurydice,’ and I thought two things. One, I thought, ‘This is such a miraculous tone of voice,’ because it is desperately sad and also extremely funny. And it has a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ quality of magic to it that I found a really good fit for opera. And the second thing I thought was that the play is already very close to being the size of a libretto, because Sarah’s characters generally don’t speak in long Shakespearean monologues,” he said.

It is this poignancy and incisiveness that Aucoin finds so compelling about the retelling of the myth that he is helping to bring to life. He spoke about Ruhl’s personal connection to the work, which she wrote soon after her father passed away, and how audiences can feel the rawness of her grief.

When asked what he hoped viewers would take away from the opera, Aucoin was quick to say that he never wants to “dictate anything about an audience’s experience.” However, he was grateful that the piece resonated in ways he did not anticipate, from people with experiences losing spouses or family members to dementia, to those imagining what an already-deceased loved one’s journey through the afterlife might be like. Suffice to say, “Eurydice” promises a fresher, more female-centric retelling of the myth we know and love.

“I think our opera is much more about questions of memory, loss, family connections, the tension between romantic and family love,” Aucoin said, comparing “Eurydice” to other operatic adaptations of the myth. “So the longer I’ve spent with the piece, the more I think that we’re up to something totally different.”

Boston Lyric Opera’s production of “Eurydice” runs at the Huntington Theatre from March 1 to March 10.