You’ll be hearing much more from HGO’s new resident composer
In its 67-year history, Houston Grand Opera had never had a full-time composer-inresidence until Joel Thompson’s work changed its mind. One of America’s leading opera companies is now his sandbox, as it were.
“I think of it as almost a lab of sorts, for me — especially as an artist — to figure out how exactly I want to balance the solitary endeavor of composition with the very communityoriented and collaborative spirit that’s being fostered at HGO,” says Thompson. “I’m glad I get to be a part of that.”
Thompson’s five-year appointment, which takes effect Aug. 1, comes at an opportune time. A doctoral candidate at Yale, he recently completed the residential coursework portion of his five-year program. What remains is his so-called “dossier” — the portfolio of works it is now his charge to create. Basically, “I have to go out into the world for three years and prove myself,” says Thompson, who also got his master’s at Yale and bachelor’s at Emory University in Atlanta.
HGO seems happy to oblige him. Thompson’s remit includes writing a full-length opera for the Wortham Center’s larger Brown Theater, scheduled to premiere in the 2026-27 season. Meanwhile, he’s already imagining smaller projects, such as an oratorio for the HGO chorus, a song cycle for HGO Studio artists and perhaps a site-specific chamber opera. Most immediately, he’s looking forward to meeting with leaders both at HGO and in the wider community to see what ideas might take shape.
“I’m sort of building the plane as I’m flying,” Thompson laughs.
In recent years, calls for greater inclusion and representation within the opera world have grown too loud to ignore, as the industry undergoes seismic changes. Thompson is well aware of the opportunities that come along with the new position, both for himself and others.
“There’s a chance to create a new pipeline,” he says. “I think opera is an idiom with a lot of baggage as it relates to race and gender and a number of identity markers. To have my voice there is a chance to keep the door open to other voices.”
Thompson’s path to HGO started at the 2017 Aspen Music Festival, where he was a compositional fellow and his orchestral piece, “An Act of Resistance,” impressed the company’s artistic and music director, Patrick Summers. (“I knew within 30 seconds of hearing Joel’s orchestral work that I was in the presence of a rare compositional voice,” Summers said in a statement.)
After Thompson won the festival’s Hermitage Prize, Summers approached him and asked him if he was interested in collaborating on a new project: an adaptation of Ezra Jack Keats’ beloved “The Snowy Day,” the first children’s book to feature a person of color as its main character. Thompson was happy to oblige.
He actually remembered reading the book, originally published in 1962, while growing up in the Bahamas. (His family then moved to Houston for three years before settling in Atlanta.) The hourlong opera’s development was inevitably complicated by the pandemic; before “Snowy Day” premiered in December 2021, HGO released a behind-thescenes documentary about its creation the year before. Yet despite the delay, it was a success: Opening night was livestreamed to 34 countries.
“It deserves to be performed regularly — during the holidays or otherwise — and espe cially in schools,” the Chronicle noted in our review.”
“Snowy Day” was not Thompson’s first brush with acclaim. In 2015, the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club premiered his “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” a choral setting of the dying utterances of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and five more young Black men killed by police. Then working as a choral director at a two-year college in south Georgia, Thompson wrote it “as just a way to journal my feelings,” but it spoke eloquently and movingly to the times.
“Above all, anything that I write, I want it to be honest,” he says. “In the end, each musician is made up of all of the things that they listen to and like; and made up of where they are emotionally, physically and mentally. So being honest is a huge priority for me in my art.”
That honesty is one more reason why Thompson believes his HGO residency is such a perfect fit. “I think in cities as diverse as Houston, we really get to get a front seat at this experiment of American democracy,” he says.
“A lot of what we’re seeing in terms of all of the tragedies and the friction between communities is also a result of the thing that makes us so beautiful, which is our diversity: of opinion, of culture, of ethnicity, of religious beliefs and values,” Thompson continues. “I feel like we can coexist if we put the effort into doing that, and I feel like art and music, especially, can show us the way.”