2.1 - Rachel J. Peters
Composer/librettist Rachel J. Peters (she/her, b. 1977) writes all manner of works for the stage. Her operas include Lesson Plan (On Site Opera), Companionship (Virginia Arts Festival, Fort Worth Opera), Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera), Sketchbook for Ollie (Lyric Opera of Kansas City);The Wild Beast of the Bungalow (Oberlin Conservatory) and Three Amputators with Royce Vavrek (Arctic Chamber Music Festival); No Ladies in the Lady’s Book (Utah Opera), Staggerwing (Opera Kansas), and Men I’m Not Married To (Cleveland Opera Theater) with Lisa DeSpain; Steve (Boston Opera Collaborative), Everything Comes to a Head with Margi Preus and Jean Sramek (Decameron Opera Coalition), Pie, Pith, and Palette with Marvin J. Carlton (The Atlanta Opera), and Welcome to the Madness (complete with live horses) with Leanna Kirchoff (Opera Steamboat). She has the distinct honor of writing the only opera score (so far) containing a barfing cat ever performed at Caramoor. This season, a new, expanded Staggerwing makes its way across the country.
Rachel’s musicals include Only Children with Michael R. Jackson (NYU Tisch, Lincoln Center Directors Lab), Tiny Feats of Cowardice with Susan Bernfield (NYC Fringe Festival), Write Left with John Walch (Playwrights Horizons Theatre School), Tomato Red (UC Irvine), and Octopus Heart (NYU Steinhardt). Her score for Danielle Durchslag’s film musical, Good Shabbos, is currently in development. Scores for plays include the critically acclaimed Stretch (a fantasia) (New Georges) and Tania in the Getaway Van (Flea Theater) by Susan Bernfield, Transatlantic by John Walch (Arkansas Rep), The Bacchae (Asolo Rep Conservatory), and several works by Stan Richardson.
Concert works include mini-monodrama Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo (Semperoper Dresden, Resonance Works Pittsburgh), If You Can Prove That I Should Set You Free (Albany Symphony), Jack's Vocabulary (Hartt SPASM), I Live Here (Galapagos Art Space), Canon I (Two Sides Sounding), And Then (BayPath College), and Fronds: The Wisdom of Fanny Fern (Walt Whitman Project). Rachel’s extensive catalogue of songs has been performed at Lincoln Center, Second Stage, National Opera Center, Symphony Space, New York Festival of Song, National Sawdust, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub, and cabarets and theatres nationwide. Rachel contributed to the new generation of The AIDS Quilt Songbook and to Michael R. Jackson’s Dirty Laundry and Zachary James’s CALL OUT albums.
Rachel has held residencies as composer and/or librettist at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Yaddo, Brush Creek Arts, Millay Arts, and Soaring Gardens. She has received Anna Sosenko Assist Trust and multiple ASCAPlus awards. OPERA America awarded her a Female Composers Discovery Grant to write Manor of Speaking…with Kevin Thomas Townley, Jr., the first wholly original work for Stephanie Blythe’s alter ego, Blythely Oratonio; other such grants went to Sarasota Opera for Rootabaga Country and to collaborator Leanna Kirchoff for their opera Friday After Friday. Rachel is a proud alumna of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, The American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice, and the John Duffy Institute for New Opera. She holds a double B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and an MFA from New York University’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. She serves on committees for the Dramatists Guild and National Opera Association, and is a member of the inaugural Jewish Composers Working Group of Asylum Arts/The Neighborhood. Rachel is currently Manager of Programs and Initatives for Composers Now and Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Atelier.
Rachel originally hails from St. Louis, where she grew up singing in children’s choruses at the MUNY, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. She has settled in Brooklyn, a borough with an exceptionally high concentration of opera composers. Much to her bewilderment, she is still mistaken for this woman online.
