Carnegie Hall

Matthew Aucoin (Graduate Diploma ’14, composition; Arnhold Creative Associate) is an American composer, conductor, and writer, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is a co-founder of the pathbreaking American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) and was the Los Angeles Opera’s artist-in-residence from 2016 to 2020. His orchestral and chamber music has been performed, commissioned, and recorded by leading artists and ensembles, including Yo-Yo Ma, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Brentano Quartet. In 2023, The Met Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featured Aucoin’s Heath on its first European tour in several decades. He is also well known for his operas, which include Eurydice, Crossing, and Second Nature. These works have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Boston Lyric Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Canadian Opera Company, among others. The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Eurydice was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2023. Aucoin’s newest theatrical work, Music for New Bodies, is a collaboration with director Peter Sellars, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham. The work was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera, AMOC*, Aspen Music Festival and School, and Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. This summer, he will make his Tanglewood conducting debut leading Sellars’s production of Music for New Bodies. His other recent conducting engagements include appearances with the Los Angeles Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, Ojai Music Festival, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, Rome Opera Orchestra, and many other ensembles. His book about opera, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, was published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He has taught at Harvard University, and his essays regularly appear in such publications as The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

Jessie Montgomery (BM ’03, violin; Arnhold Creative Associate) is a Grammy Award–winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweavesclassical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness.Montgomery is an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience, and her works areperformed regularly by leading orchestras and ensembles around the world. In June, she concluded athree-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer in Residence. Montgomery’s music contains a breadth of musical depictions of the human experience—from statements onsocial-justice themes to the Black diasporic experience and its foundation in American music to wistfuladorations and playful spontaneity—reflective of her deeply rooted experience as a classical violinist and childof the radical New York City cultural scene of the 1980s and ’90s. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet anda former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists. During her tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she launched the Young Composers Initiative, which supports high-school–aged youth in creating and presenting their works, including regular tutorials, reading sessions, and public performances. Her curatorial work engages a diverse community of concertgoers and aims to highlight the works of underrepresented composers in an effort to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces. Montgomery has been recognized with awards and fellowships including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, andMusical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliatedwith the Sphinx Organization in a variety of roles, including composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, its professional touring ensemble. Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She serves on the composition and music technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Caroline Shaw (Arnhold Creative Associate) is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in music, several Grammy Awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Her recent projects include the film and television scores to Fleishman Is in Trouble (FX/Hulu), Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere (A24/Apple), and Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick (a live orchestral score co-composed with Andrew Yee); vocal work with Rosalía on the album Motomami; the score for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible, directed by Lyndsey Turner; Justin Peck’s Partita with New York City Ballet; the premiere of Microfictions Vol. 3 for the New York Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth; two albums on Nonesuch, Evergreen and The Blue Hour; and tours with Sō Percussion featuring songs from Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (Nonesuch). Shaw has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Damian Woetzel became Juilliard’s president in 2018. He is also the artistic director of the Vail Dance Festival. Since retiring in 2008 from a 20-year career as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, Woetzel has taken on multiple roles in arts leadership, including director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program (2011–2018). Other projects include DEMO at the Kennedy Center; Spaces by Wynton Marsalis for Jazz at Lincoln Center; Kennedy Center Honors tributes to Natalia Makarova, Patricia McBride, and Carmen de Lavallade; an arts salute to Stephen Hawking for the World Science Festival; Turnaround Arts performances at the White House; the White House Dance Series hosted by Michelle Obama; and numerous collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma nationally and internationally. In 2009, Woetzel became founding director of the Jerome Robbins Foundation’s New Essential Works Program, which initiated grants to support new dance works in the wake of the financial crisis, and in response to the COVID pandemic, he advised the Alphadyne Foundation on grants to support artists. Woetzel, who served on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (2009–2017), holds a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. The recipient of the 2015 Harvard Arts Medal, Woetzel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.