“EMILY & SUE: AN A CAPPELLA POP OPERA”
Image description: The Adhyâropa Records album cover of “Emily & Sue,” featuring the faces of two women facing away from each other. “Music by Dana Kaufman” and “Libretto by Aiden K. Feltkamp” appear in white below the blue title “Emily & Sue.”
Adhyâropa Records presents Emily & Sue, an a cappella pop opera album from L.A.-based composer Dana Kaufman and librettist Aiden K. Feltkamp released in November 2022. Featured artists on the release are soprano Jasmine Muhammad and Iris Vocal Trio. This piece focuses on the little-known romantic relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Letters between Emily and Sue, as well as Emily’s poetry, document an intimate relationship that was not socially acceptable or legally recognized in 19th-century Massachusetts. The plot of Emily & Sue extrapolates from Emily and Sue’s correspondences and explores the themes of isolation, queerness, and forbidden love.
Emily & Sue was commissioned by Amherst College (which owns Dickinson’s house) and is available for downloading and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp & Adhyâropa Records. A film version of the opera directed by Ron Bashford, created in collaboration with Four/Ten Media and filmed in Dickinson’s actual room, is being screened at events around the United States. The opera has been performed at Amherst College and the National Opera Center and by Lowbrow Opera Collective.
Watch the single “If you were here/Sunrise comes!” from Emily & Sue
About Dana Kaufman
The work of Los Angeles-based composer-librettist Dana Kaufman centers disruptive opera and vocal music, accessible and inclusive stages, and the intersection of pop culture and classical music. Hailed as “whirlwind” (Gramophone), “ingeniously derived” (Sequenza21), and “dramatic…and powerfully funny” (Observer), Kaufman’s music has been heard in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her works have been featured at venues and festivals such as Carnegie Hall, New York Opera Fest, Contemporary Music Center of Milan, the National Gugak Center (South Korea), Seattle Opera’s Tagney Jones Hall, The Tank, Jordan Hall, Boston New Music Festival, National Opera Week, Hartford Opera Theater, Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall (Croatia), Ravinia Festival, Lowbrow Opera Collective, and Opera on Tap Chicago; they have been commissioned by GRAMMY-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko, the Louisville Ballet, Carlow Arts Festival (Ireland), Synchromy, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, Paradox Opera, and many others.
A Fulbright Research Fellow in Estonia, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, winner of an OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grant (supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation), and four-time American Prize honoree, Kaufman has given lectures at the LA Opera, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Leuphana Universität Lüneberg, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Music by Women Festival as a frequent speaker on gender diversity in composition and composing for trans voice. Kaufman received her Bachelor of Arts in Music and Russian (magna cum laude) from Amherst College, her Master of Music in Composition from New England Conservatory, and her Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from University of Miami Frost School of Music as the first Frost student to be a Dean’s Fellow. She is Associate Professor in Music Composition at University of California, Riverside.