Rachel Peters
Manor of Speaking
"Rachel J. Peters writes operas that sound like musicals and musicals that sound like operas, including: Lesson Plan (On Site Opera), Companionship (Virginia Arts Festival, Fort Worth Opera), Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera, Seattle 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), and more; Only Children with Michael R. Jackson (NYU Tisch, Lincoln Center Directors Lab) Tiny Feats of Cowardice with Susan Bernfield (NYC Fringe Festival), Tomato Red (UC Irvine), and Octopus Heart (NYU Steinhardt). Her score for Danielle Durchslag’s film musical, Good Shabbos, is currently in development. She has the distinct honor of writing the only opera score containing a barfing cat ever performed (so far) at Caramoor. Coming soon: Welcome to the Madness (complete with live horses) with Leanna Kirchoff (Opera Steamboat). 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), and The Bacchae (Asolo Rep Conservatory). Concert works include Ethel Smyth Plays Golf in Limbo (Semperoper Dresden), If You Can Prove That I Should Set You Free (Albany Symphony), I Live Here (Galapagos Art Space), 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, National Sawdust, Ars Nova, Joe's Pub. She 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 garnered multiple OPERA America Female Composer grants and has several libretti published by E.C. Schirmer. She is a proud alumna of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, The American Opera Project, and John Duffy Institute fellowships, as well as residencies at Yaddo and Millay Arts. She holds a double B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and an MFA from NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. She serves on committees for the Dramatists Guild and National Opera Association, and she is part of the inaugural Jewish Composers Working Group of Asylum Arts/The Neighborhood. Rachel originally hails from St. Louis and settled in Brooklyn, a borough with an exceptionally high concentration of composers."