Biography

Martin Brody is Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music (Emeritus) at Wellesley College. He served as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome from 2007-10 and as Fromm Resident in Musical Composition at the Academy in 2001. He has also been a Visiting Professor at I Tatti in 2021 and 2023.  He has received numerous awards for his musical compositions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commissions from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fromm Foundation. He writes extensively about post-war modernism in music and currently serves on the editorial board of Perspectives of New Music and as President of the Stefan Wolpe Society.

Project Summary

This will be a collaborative project with an ensemble of virtuoso musicians to prepare the premiere performance of a chamber operetta, The Carp. The creation of this work was launched at I Tatti several years ago, with art historian, Dario Gamboni. Through their shared ideas, Gamboni and Brody outlined an unanticipated project: to create a chamber opera together, as librettist and composer respectively. The piece they have produced is based on a 2003 news story about a talking fish, who purportedly appeared in a fishmonger’s store and whose enigmatic and apocalyptic message came to be a source of relentless interpretation. The music for The Carp, scored for four singers and five instrumentalists, is a comic rendering in a hybrid genre: a cross between an opera and a cantata, in which a clarinet produces the sounds of the articulate fish and the singers both comprise a chorus and assume fluid roles as characters in the story.  The Carp is also a testament to the range of creative collaborations, both intentional and serendipitous, that are nurtured at I Tatti.