Stage Director

Matt Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies, created in collaboration with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, is a bold operatic meditation on our shifting place in the natural world. Fusing poetic texts from Jorie Graham with visceral soundscapes, Aucoin crafts a work that is at once urgent and transcendent, while Sellars’ visionary staging brings the music into striking visual focus. Together, they invite us to imagine new forms of life, connection, and transformation.

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Music for New Bodies

Sarasota Opera House

Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies (2024) is an uncategorizable work of music-theater: part opera, part song cycle, part vocal symphony. Based on poetry by Jorie Graham, the piece is a portrait of our moment in history as seen through the eyes of a cancer patient undergoing a drastic medical procedure. As the patient experiences the transformation of her own body, she meditates on questions that range from the personal to the cosmic: in a time when life is more and more virtual, what does it mean to have a body? And above all, after our species has poisoned the planet with uncountable toxins, can we still listen to what the earth has to tell us?

“Music for New Bodies” at Meany Center

Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater

Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, bound by mutual admiration and great respect for one another, decisively shaped the music of the early 20th century and, with their innovative ideas, built a bridge between Romanticism and modernism. This evening, featuring works by both composers, unfolds a dialogue between two significant artistic visions that offer different answers to existential and personal questions while complementing each other.

One Morning Turns into an Eternity

Felsenreitschule

With text inspired by poet Jorie Graham and environmentalist Rachel Carson, this new song cycle created by Aucoin and legendary director Peter Sellars has been called “an immersion in vast planetary processes.” Aucoin and Sellars oversee this concert production of this work premiered in April 2024.

AMFS: Matthew Aucoin's Music for New Bodies

Wheeler Opera House

Premiered in April 2024, this major new work is from the creative team of MacArthur award-winning composer Matthew Aucoin, whose commissioning credits include the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, and director Peter Sellars, celebrated for his operatic collaborations with John Adams, Tyshawn Sorey, and the late Kaija Saariaho. Inspired by the writings of visionary poet Jorie Graham and pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, Aucoin and Sellars’s new work offers an immersion in vast planetary processes.

Matthew Aucoin: Music for New Bodies

For more than 400 years, the Black American spiritual tradition has moved over, across, and through the waters—waters of life force, passage, cleansing, resistance, and renewal—depicted in such songs and verses as “Wade in the Water,” “Deep River,” “Crossing Jordan,” and “By the Waters of Babylon.”

The power of water and its spiritual dimensions equally resonates in the beautiful, sacred texts of Bach’s cantatas. Infused with poetry, Bach’s music sounds and speaks to every drop of water, in drought and in full flood, moving and alive.

Shall We Gather at the River

Park Avenue Armory

Following their widely acclaimed collaboration on Lagrime di San Pietro, Peter Sellars, Grant Gershon and singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale reunite with a deeply personal meditation on what it means to say goodbye in times of struggle. The luminous music of the Baroque composer Heinrich Schütz’s serves as the inspiration for this ceremony of remembrance and devotion.

Los Angeles Master Chorale

Stanford University

Following their widely acclaimed collaboration on Lagrime di San Pietro (which was performed at Koerner Hall in 2020), Peter Sellars, Grant Gershon, and singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale reunite with a deeply personal yet uplifting meditation on what it means to say goodbye to those we love. 24 singers will be accompanied by Baroque organ and viol da gamba to create an intimate ceremony of connection across time and space.

Los Angeles Master Chorale, staged by Peter Sellars

The Royal Conservatory of Music

Following their widely acclaimed collaboration on Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro, Peter Sellars, Grant Gershon, and singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale reunite in a deeply personal meditation on what it means to say goodbye during times of struggle. The luminous music of Baroque composer Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (Music to Accompany a Departure) serves as inspiration for a fully staged ceremony of remembrance and devotion, performed by 24 singers accompanied by organ and viol da gamba. Schütz composed this profound exploration of mortality and grief in the 1630s, during the ravages of the 30 Years’ War, and it was dedicated to the memory of one of his dearest friends. The premiere performances of this production made the Los Angeles Times’ “Best of 2022” list, which the artists’ work as “transcendent” and “incomparably moving”: “art that makes you sad yet grateful for every minute of life.”

University of California, Berkeley

The Los Angeles Master Chorale and acclaimed directed Peter Sellars have once again created a stirring, searing, and thoroughly contemporary work from an ancient source. Musikalische Exequien by Heinrich Schütz, the most formidable German composer prior to J. S. Bach, is a musical response to the plagues of his time. It was the first German requiem, and the writing for solo voices is often florid in the Italian Baroque manner, while the choral sections build upon the German chorale tradition.

Los Angeles Master Chorale: Music To Accompany A Departure

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Kaija Saariaho’s intensely moving opera Adriana Mater explores the relationship between a mother and her son as they navigate a world rumbling with the threat of violence. Esa-Pekka Salonen and director Peter Sellars helm this semi-staged production.

Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater

Davies Symphony Hall

Alonzo King and LINES Ballet unearth new corners of Ravel’s enchanting Mother Goose, while Peter Sellars plumbs the depths of Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung in a new staging featuring soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Alonzo King & Peter Sellars

A major new work and first collaboration between AMOC* member and co-founder composer Matthew Aucoin and director Peter Sellars. A musical premiere is brought to life by five vocal soloists and an 18-instrument ensemble conducted by Matthew Aucoin.

Music for New Bodies is an immersion in vast planetary processes: we follow the migration of eels to the depths of the Atlantic Basin; we hear the voice of the ocean floor itself, speaking with superhuman pressure and force; we experience humankind’s impact on our planet, and we also sense the presence of cycles so immense that they are beyond human influence.

Rice University

For the first time, Gustavo Dudamel conducts the return of this remarkable production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars with video by Bill Viola, one of America’s leading visual artists. When the Tristan Project was first performed in 2004, The New York Times hailed it as “a multimedia conception that promised to be so ingenious that listeners traveled long distances to catch it and talked about it for months.” Matching Wagner’s 19th-century desire to expand what opera could be with 21st-century innovation, Viola’s and Sellars’ staging explores the psychological, spiritual, and elemental subtext of the story. This rare opportunity to see the Tristan Project features a globally celebrated cast, headlined by Michael Weinius and Miina-Liisa Värelä.

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act III

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act II

Dudamel Leads the Tristan Project: Act I

Twenty-four singers breathe life and movement into this meditation on death with stage direction by Peter Sellars.

Music to Accompany a Departure

From the creative mind of acclaimed director Peter Sellars comes his very first a cappella staging and most personal work to date. Orlando di Lasso, writing in the late 1500s, knew that Lagrime di San Pietro was to be the last piece he would ever compose, so he packed every measure with an emotionally charged texture that channeled his pain and remorse into a towering work of beauty. With the music committed to memory, the 21 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale—widely recognized as the country’s leading professional choir—transform this sweeping Renaissance work into a breathtaking experience. Modern English translations are projected above the stage, while lighting design by James F. Ingalls and costume design by Danielle Domingue Sumi complement Sellars’ dramatic staging.

Los Angeles Master Chorale: Lagrime Di San Pietro (tears Of St. Peter)

Esa-Pekka Salonen has said “ritual is at the very heart of Stravinsky’s craft.” With the austere and incantatory <em>Oedipus Rex</em>, Stravinsky brings to life a classic Greek myth of power, deception, and heartbreak in a voice that is only his. <em>The Symphony of Psalms</em> turns to an altogether different ritual, cloaking three familiar religious texts in a mantle of drama and timelessness. Salonen and the Orchestra are joined by a cast of stellar vocalists, the SF Symphony Chorus, and legendary director Peter Sellars for this staged event.

Stage Director

Peter Sellars

Events

Past events

May 22, 2026

Music for New Bodies · Sarasota Opera

Nov 1, 2025

“Music for New Bodies” at Meany Center · AMOC / American Modern Opera Company

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