RSC Alumnus Matthew Aucoin Receives MacArthur “Genius Grant”
The Rivers School Conservatory was thrilled to learn that Matthew Aucoin, acclaimed alumnus and commissioned composer for RSC’s 2017 Annual Seminar on Contemporary Music for the Young, is the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” Aucoin, who grew up in Natick and Medfield and studied piano at RSC with Sharon Schoffmann from 2002-2008, is a multi-talented musician—composer, conductor, writer, and pianist. He began composing music at the age of 10 and in recent years conducted the premieres of two of his operas—Crossing, at Boston’s American Repertory Theater, and Second Nature, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
"It has been a wild couple of weeks since the MacArthur was announced!" emailed Aucoin. "I’m overwhelmed and grateful, of course. I thought it was a hoax when they called me! I’m thinking of it as a gift of time: time to write music that has not been commissioned by anyone, music that might be wildly impractical and challenging and mysterious, but which I feel compelled to write.
"I studied piano with Sharon Schoffmann, and briefly studied with Steve Halloran. I think it was always clear that I was a composer at heart. I loved playing the piano, and still do, but I had a hard time not inventing my own twists on the pieces that I played! And as Sharon will tell you, it could be very difficult to get me to practice slowly, calmly, and according to her rules. But I’m eternally grateful that she gave me such a solid technical and musical foundation. She was the crucial long-term teacher for me.
"I studied piano with Sharon Schoffmann, and briefly studied with Steve Halloran. I think it was always clear that I was a composer at heart. I loved playing the piano, and still do, but I had a hard time not inventing my own twists on the pieces that I played! And as Sharon will tell you, it could be very difficult to get me to practice slowly, calmly, and according to her rules. But I’m eternally grateful that she gave me such a solid technical and musical foundation. She was the crucial long-term teacher for me.
"You might say that for me, the piano is a box of crayons to color with (in my compositions), but it’s not the canvas I paint on. For great pianists, the piano is the canvas.
"In high school the idea of conducting seemed far-fetched, impossibly ambitious. It was only in college that I gave it a try. But I have to credit Sharon with guessing it before I did. I was probably sixteen or so when she said 'I think you’re going to be a conductor.'
"I’m going to give some of the money [from the fellowship] away; I’m a big believer in the effective altruism movement, and I think we artists should be relatively low on the totem pole of financial support for as long as people are starving somewhere in the world. Some of this money will go to the Against Malaria Foundation, for example."
Aucoin, who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2012 and earned a graduate diploma from The Juilliard School, is currently an artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles Opera and co-artistic director of the American Modern Opera Company. Previously he was an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and an artist-in-resident at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. He has conducted major orchestras in Europe and the United States, and his orchestral pieces have been widely performed as well.
“I remember Matthew well from the years he studied at RSC,” commented Director Gabriella Sanna. “He showed early on how incredibly gifted he was. I knew he would do something great in life, and I’m not at all surprised that he has been recognized with a MacArthur fellowship.”
Aucoin wrote the commissioned work, Finery Forge, for the 2017 Seminar and the piece for two pianos was performed by RSC students Katherine Liu [Rivers’23] and Theo Teng. In introducing the piece to the audience, Aucoin took the time to thank Schoffmann, as well as former Director David Tierney, Sarah Tenney—his first teacher, A. Ramón Rivera, and Halloran.
Aucoin wrote the commissioned work, Finery Forge, for the 2017 Seminar and the piece for two pianos was performed by RSC students Katherine Liu [Rivers’23] and Theo Teng. In introducing the piece to the audience, Aucoin took the time to thank Schoffmann, as well as former Director David Tierney, Sarah Tenney—his first teacher, A. Ramón Rivera, and Halloran.
“A finery forge is a massive hearth in which iron is refined,” Aucoin wrote in the program notes for his piece. “I see the piano as a kind of forge for music: the modern concert grand is an industrial-strength machine, a crucible-like behemoth of interlocking parts, filled with hammers intended to strike musical sparks out of their strings… The piano has a double nature: it is both a stringed instrument and a percussion instrument. It can speak with the force of a hammer striking an anvil, and it can croon like a siren. My new piece, Finery Forge, takes the piano’s percussive nature as its starting point.”
The MacArthur fellowships, which are awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, recognize 20-30 recipients each year for their exceptional “originality, insight and potential.” Each fellowship includes a no-strings-attached award of $625,000, to be distributed over five years.
Click below to read more about Aucoin’s background and work in recent press releases.
Click below to read more about Aucoin’s background and work in recent press releases.
© 2021 The Rivers School. All Rights Reserved
Rivers admits academically qualified students and does not discriminate against students or families on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or ethnic or national origin in the administration of its educational programs, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, athletic programs, and other school-administered programs.