Opera Master Class: Derek Bermel, composer & Sanrda Cisneros, librettist

Guest artists Sanrda Cisneros, librettist, and Derek Bermel, composer, present a master class. This session explores excerpts from their new opera, The House on Mango Street with students from the Voice & Opera Department. Q&A to follow.

Free and open to the public with support from the Sally Fleming Master Class Fund.

BIO – DEREK BERMEL

Three-time Grammy-nominated composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel’s engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language. He has collaborated with a dizzyingly eclectic array of artists – including Wynton Marsalis, Midori, Paquito D’Rivera, Luciana Souza, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), and Gustavo Dudamel – and his commissions include the Pittsburgh, National, Boston, Saint Louis, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New Century, Los Angeles, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, Tanglewood, eighth blackbird, ASKO/Schoenberg Ensemble/Veenfabriek (Netherlands), Guarneri, Ying, and JACK String Quartets. He has been recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator of concert series and his many honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, Fromm and Koussevitzky commissions, American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a clarinetist, he has performed on five continents in wide ranging repertoire, as orchestral soloist and chamber musician.

He has been Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, Artist-in-Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Composer-in-Residence for the Seattle Symphony, and Director of Copland House’s CULTIVATE emerging composer’s institute. He currently serves as Curator of the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Bermel’s discography includes GRAMMY-nominated Intonations (Naxos), Migration Series (Naxos), and Voices (BMOP/Sound), CanzonasAmericanas (Canteloupe), and Soul Garden (New World). Forthcoming is a disc of his string quartet music for Naxos with the JACK Quartet.

BIO – SANDRA CISNEROS

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist whose work explores the lives of the working-class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, several honorary doctorates and national and international book awards, including Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, the Fairfax Prize, and the National Medal of the Arts awarded to her by President Obama in 2016. Most recently, she received the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized among The Frederick Douglass 200, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for international literature.

In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two non-profits she founded: the Macondo Foundation, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2020, and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, which ran for fifteen years. She is also the organizer of Los MacArturos, Latino MacArthur fellows who are community activists. Her literary papers are preserved in Texas at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Sandra Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico and earns her living by her pen. She currently lives in San Miguel de Allende.

SMTD OPERALAB

SMTD OperaLab serves as an incubator for new work, establishing a collaborative learning environment for singers, instrumentalists, composers and librettists. OperaLab brings renowned artists to U-M to workshop projects ahead of their professional premiere, giving students the opportunity to participate in the creative process. Committed to works with social and political relevance, OperaLab engages the broader U-M and Southeast Michigan communities in their development and presentation.

Led by SMTD professors Caitlin Lynch and Jayce Ogren, OperaLab is generously supported by grants from the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, the CRLT Faculty Development Fund and the Sally Fleming Master Class Fund.