ABOUT THE OPERA

Amidst a social backdrop of the nation wrestling with its monuments and troubled histories, The Captivity of Hannah Duston investigates the legacy of the first American woman to have a public statue in her honor, Hannah Duston of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Controversial even in her lifetime (1657-c.1737), Duston’s story of her abduction by Native Americans during the King William’s War and her escape and slaying of her captors raises many ethical questions. Notable authors, Cotton Mather, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Sarah Josepha Hale retold the story over a period of 150 years—contradicting and attacking each other’s version of the story, employing Duston as a narrative pawn, much like current broadcast media anchors spin stories to their demographic's political leanings.

Grammy Award-winning composer Lansing McLoskey and librettist Glen Nelson use historic texts by notable authors, set into a contemporary frame, to call into question absolute notions of history and truth, and employ the Duston accounts to provoke a reassessment of national heroes and their stories.

HISTORY AND TIMELINE

06/2018: McLoskey received a Latter-Day Saints Commissioning Grant program award from the Barlow Endowment to work on libretto and musical score composition.

05/30/2019: Musical performance of excerpts at HC Media at Harbor Place, Haverhill, MA (location of the statue)

PRESS

“McLoskey’s music vividly captures the emotions of the narrative as well as setting an idyllic frontier scene.”

“spacious, Coplandesque harmonies”

“carries dramatic weight”

“a complex and thoroughly troubling story.” (BOSTON CLASSICAL REVIEW)

WORK SAMPLES

ARTISTS

Lansing McLoskey

Glen Nelson

COMPOSER

Lansing McLoskey has been described as "a major talent and a deep thinker with a great ear" by the American Composers Orchestra, "an engaging, gifted composer writing smart, compelling and fascinating music" by Gramophone Magazine, and "a distinctive voice in American music.” His music has been performed in 21 countries on six continents, and he has won more than three dozen national and international awards, including two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation (Italy) fellowship, the 2018 Aaron Copland House Award, the Robert Avalon International Composition Competition, the Omaha Symphony International New Music Competition, the Kenneth Davenport National Competition for Orchestral Works, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition, and the Charles Ives Center Orchestral Composition Competition. He has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, Pew Charitable Trusts, Barlow Endowment, Copland House, the New Spectrum Foundation, the International Joint Wind Quintet Project, and numerous ensembles. Professor at the Frost School of Music, he has given masterclasses/presentations at more than thirty schools and festivals, and has been the Composer-in-Residence at half-a-dozen festivals. His music is released 16 CDs on Albany Records, WergoSchallplatten, Innova, Capstone, Tantara, Beauport Classics, and published by Theodore Presser, American Composers Press, Mostly Marimba, and Subito Music. He is an avid surfer, cyclist, and skateboarder. (lansingmcloskey.com)

LIBRETTIST

Glen Nelson is the author of Joseph Paul Vorst (and cocurator of the artist’s first museum retrospective) and twenty other books—some of these as a ghostwriter. Three of them have been New York Times bestsellers. He has curated solo gallery exhibitions of Annie Poon, Casey Jex Smith, Hildebrando de Melo (Angolan artist), and the American lithographs of Joseph Paul Vorst and has written exhibition catalogs for each of them. He is the librettist of three operas by Murray Boren— The Dead (James Joyce), The Singer’s Romance (Willa Cather), and The Book of Gold (original libretto)—and a number of other concert works (song cycles and choral works) in collaboration with composers. His rock opera, The Bridge (Ambrose Bierce), with music by the indie band, Fictionist, had a recent transformation into an evening length ballet by SALT Contemporary Dance, with choreography by Brendan Duggan. A commissioned oratorio with composer Ethan Wickman, To a Village Called Emmaus, is to premiere in April 2019, conducted by Craig Jessop.

Guerilla Opera ensemble and creative team after a scavenger hunt experience and musical performance on May 30, 2019.

Emergence: A Haverhill Story

Composer Lansing McLoskey and librettist Glenn Nelson in a talk-back after the musical performance on Friday, May 30, 2020.

Hannah Duston Monument in Haverhill, MA (2019)

This Hannah Duston monument in Haverhill, MA is said to be the first monument erected to a woman in America. We performed a premiere of two scenes of this opera in HC Media at Harbor Place, a venue directly a cross from the monument on Friday, May 30, 2019.

Duston-Dustin Garrison House

Collaborator in “Emergence: A Haverhill Story,” a scavenger hunt experience in collaboration with three venues. Patrons traveled to one of two historical sites to explore perspectives of the controversial Hannah Duston story, one through historical documentation, the other through oral history as told by family descendants. All patrons then congregated to a third venue to hear an opera in development that explores this story through unreliable narrators on Friday, May 30, 2020.