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Conservatory of Music

Laura Kaminsky Featured in Opera News

“I care about the fate of the world we inhabit. So what I can do is write music that deals with things that I care about, that I think need to be attended to.”

Composition Professor Laura Kaminsky is featured in the April 2019 issue of Opera News, which describes her as “a key player in contemporary American opera.”

The article describes her success with As One, which has quickly become the most performed new opera in North America, before going into detail about her upcoming premiere of Today It Rains at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle, which tells the story of Georgia O’Keeffee through the lens of her 1929 train ride from New York to Santa Fe.

Kaminsky describes her relationship to O’Keeffee and the work by saying, “It wasn’t so much that I’m a great, passionate fan of her actual work..I respect it enormously and I love some of it…[but] it is her strength and originality that sparked my imagination.”

Kaminsky’s next commissioned opera is based on the 2008 immigration raid in Postville, Iowa.

Kaminsky describes her approach to composing by saying, “I tell my stories in music. And I can’t fix the world by being a lawyer or a politician–because I’m not. And I’m not a surgeon, so I can’t make people healthy. But I care about the fate of the world we inhabit. So what I can do is write music that deals with things that I care about, that I think need to be attended to.”

Read the full article in the April 2019 issue of Opera News.