Gregory Spears
(b. 1977)
Love Story
Composed 2021
Gregory Spears is a New York-based composer whose music has been called "astonishingly beautiful" (The New York Times), "coolly entrancing" (The New Yorker), and "some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory" (The Boston Globe).
His latest opera, Castor and Patience, written in collaboration with former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera for their 100th Anniversary and premiered in 2022. The opera, nominated for an International Opera Award, was a New York Times "Critic's Pick." They are currently writing a new opera for Santa Fe Opera, The Righteous, for premiere in summer 2024. Other commissions have come from Bang on a Can, Five Boroughs Music Festival, OPERA America, Christopher Williams Dances, pianist Marika Bournaki, the Present Music Ensemble, the Damask Ensemble, and the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra.
He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Aaron Copland House, the Rauschenberg Residency at Captiva Island, and was a participant and later a composer mentor for The American Opera Project's Composers and the Voice program. He holds degrees in composition from Eastman School of Music (BM), Yale School of Music (MM), and Princeton (PhD). He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen. He currently teaches composition and orchestration at Purchase College Conservatory (SUNY). His music is published by Schott Music and Schott PSNY.
A note from the composer:
Premiered by the New York Philharmonic in the 2021-22 season and scored for countertenor and orchestra, Love Story consists of four contiguous settings of a single text by Tracy K. Smith. Each setting suggests a different reading of Smith’s poem, and the four together form a larger narrative arc reminiscent of a song cycle. Instead of using a series of poems, Love Story tells the story of a relationship’s end by revisiting the same narrative details over-and-over — creating new meaning through repetition. The fourth and final setting incorporates musical material from the previous three, transformed by the passing of time and the changing of seasons.
Instrumentation – two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, strings, and countertenor
Duration – 15 minutes
~ Kenneth Bean
Georg and Joyce Albers-Schonberg Assistant Conductor
Princeton Symphony Orchestra
