Environmental devastation set to song: Matthew Aucoin's Music for New Bodies

Matthew Aucoin, composer and co-founder of Boston's American Modern Opera Company, presented his own Music for New Bodies (2024) as a part AMOC's remarkable six-week, 12-work summer residency at Lincoln Center. It's a tale of environmental devastation – or, more precisely, collective awareness of environmental devastation – and personal rejuvenation, bordering on science fiction and eco-horror, but not without hope.

Dystopic environmentalism can be a difficult story to tell. The resonance of such a message runs the risk of quickly becoming heavy-handed. Aucoin (who also conducted the orchestra), librettist Jorie Graham and director Peter Sellars sidestepped such pitfalls by making New Bodies more a haunting mood piece than a cautionary tale.

The stage was set simply. Each of the five singers had their own platform, with suspended lights above and footlights below, on the stage they shared with the orchestra. Their shadows often played against very large supertitles on a screen at the rear of the stage. But they were in frequent motion, gathering in different groupings and formations. For most of the 70-minute run time, they shared the role of a single protagonist – a woman who, like Graham, has been diagnosed with cancer. They also briefly stepped into roles medical authority or functionary, chatbots or even medical procedures themselves. 

Aucoin's score managed to function as incidental music while being, at times, quite full; the voices commanded the attention, sometimes nearly spoken, sometimes solo or in group harmony. That said, some parts of the score were very effective. A section for flutes and the four members of Sandbox Percussion (who fleshed out the 14-piece ensemble) in the first half was genuinely exciting, as was an oddly satisfying chorale with blocks of white noise dropped within a chorale that more than a little recalled Godspell's glory. Voices that weren't in the forefront often provided as much accompaniment as the orchestra. The space left by not being overt in orchestration allowed the mind room to wander but also left the piece feeling disjointed. A narrative throughline isn't requisite but a feeling of building to something was sometimes lost. Maybe that isn't requisite either, but at times it was hard to tell if one was missing something or just not receiving much. Spoken suggestions of a sequence of events made it hard not to search, but New Bodies was most effective when the mind was left to idle among the blues and greens and anxious voices and ever shifting musical motifs.

That Godspell song could have worked well as a conclusion but perhaps that would have made the mistaken suggestion that the story had an end. In the fifth and final section, the narrative shifted and the singers collectively voiced the planet Earth. She did not seem happy.