Long Beach Opera

"Be ambitious. Don't try to deal in the realm of the possible. Create a new possible" - Anthony Davis. Experience this "new possible" on November 15th at 5:00 PM PST with the 2020 Songbook featuring 20 world premiere music videos from today's most exciting emerging composers, all selected and mentored by some of Opera's greatest composers. longbeachopera.org/ungala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMyED-IrWpg

Hunter Prueger is a Salt Lake City-based composer and performer. His music is often characterized by a unique approach to color, texture, and instrumentation. As a composer for our 2020 Songbook, his piece details the 2020 decision by officials at Brigham Young University to allow same sex relationships, only to reverse the decision later in the year. BYU

Phillip Golub is a composer and pianist from Los Angeles, and is a mentee composer for our 2020 Songbook. Now based in New York City, his music strides the boundary between the spontaneous and the premeditated, making the act of interpretation the central concern of his work. A wide array of influences from Charles Ives to Anthony Braxton, Thelonious Monk to Michael Finnissy inform his practice

Jessie Cox is a composer, drummer, and scholar, currently in pursuit of his doctoral degree at Columbia University in the City of New York. Growing up in Switzerland, and also having roots in Trinidad and Tobago, he resides in New York City. He has written over 100 works for various musical ensembles, including electroacoustic works, solo works, chamber and orchestral works, works for jazz ensembles and choirs. As a composer for the 2020 Songbook, his piece looks at breathing, and how that relates to both the pandemic and the contemporary Black experience.

A man who needs no introduction to LBO audiences, 2020 Songbook mentor Anthony Davis won a Pulitzer Prize for his opera, The Central Park Five which was produced by Long Beach Opera in 2019. As a composer, he is best known for his operas, including X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which played to sold-out houses at its premiere at the New York City Opera, and Amistad which premiered at Chicago Lyric Opera. The recording of X received a Grammy Nomination for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Pulitzer Prizes Lyric Opera of Chicago Recording Academy / GRAMMYs

Niloufar is a kamâncheh player, composer, and improviser from Tehran, Iran, trained in Persian Classical music. She composes and performs a wide range of music from classical Iranian music to improvisatory and experimental music. Her compositions incorporate aspects of contemporary Iranian poetry, which bring the enigmatic image of complexity in Iranian literature into her compositions. Her 2020 Songbook composition tells of the plight of female musicians in Iran who are forbidden to sing, and the struggle against this oppressed expressive art.

A native of Syracuse, New York and now LA based composer, George Gianopouplos has written a piece for our upcoming 2020 Songbook music extravaganza. His art song deals with the profound polarity of the contemporary American experience through poetry of Claude McKay.

An Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation Canadian based artist, Olivia Shortt's composition for the 2020 Songbook explores all things lost and found, and brings attention to the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirited people. They work as an artist manager, a performer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, improviser, composer, sound designer, theatre artist, teacher, activist, curator, and producer. Olivia Shortt, Artist Page

2020 Songbook mentor George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he serves as Area Chair in Composition and Faculty in Historical Musicology. Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lewis’s recent opera based on the W.E.B. Du Bois short story The Comet, will be paired with Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea in a world-premiere production in collaboration with Anthony Roth Costanzo and Yuval Sharon for LBO’s 2021 season.

This Sunday! Mark your calendars for our 2020 Songbook and be the first to experience 20 premieres of brand new works by emerging composers led by industry leading composers Du Yun, Annie Gosfield, George Lewis, Anthony Davis and David Lang! Learn more at longbeachopera.org/ungala : Marcus Norris 'GLORY'

Composer-performer Leila Adu has firmly carved her name into the space where electropop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter meet. Hailing from New Zealand, Britain and Ghana, Leila has performed her original piano songs and improvisations alongside international artists at festivals and venues in the UK, mainland Europe, the US, Russia, Ghana and Asia. Contributing to our 2020 Songbook as a composer, her piece explores themes of environmentalism as seen through multiple lenses of her own cultural background, the Buddhist faith and our country's indiginous people.

2020 Songbook mentor, Annie Gosfield, whom the BBC called A one woman Hadron collider is a composer based in New York City. Gosfield has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the American Academy in Rome (Fromm Composer in residence), The Siemens Foundation (to combine art and industry in factories) and held the Darius Milhaud Chair at Mills College. Annie Gosfield's not frequently updated but actual composer page BBC John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The American Academy in Berlin American Academy in Rome Siemens Foundation Mills College

Known for her relentless originality and unflinching social conscience (The New Yorker), Award-winning composer Du Yun ’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes; in 2018 she was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow; and in 2019, she was nominated for a Grammy Awards in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and we are thrilled to have her as a mentor composer for our 2020 Songbook.

LA-based 2020 Songbook composer Marcus Norris' first foray into making music came in the form of producing rap beats on pirated software, installed on a Windows 98 computer that he MacGyver-ed together from spare parts. His strophic ballad for the 2020 Songbook showcases the social connections that may or may not be able to occur during lockdown. www.longbeachopera.org/ungala

NYC-based composer & 2020 Songbook mentee Clifton Joey Guidry III premieres a work that confronts the effects of bipolar disorder & the bottomless destabilization it causes. Clifton Joey Guidry III is not only a versatile bassoonist, but an improviser & composer of experimental and daring new works. Projects include spearheading & leading Sounds of the African Diaspora, a competition for composers from the African Diaspora. www.longbeachopera.org/ungala