November 30, 2022

Indigenous Director of Opera!! Timothy Long (Muscogee Creek/ Choctaw) Associate Professor and Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music

1 hour 39 minutes

Timothy Long (Muscogee Creek/ Choctaw) Associate Professor and Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music

Timothy Long is a conductor and pianist of Muscogee Creek and Choctaw descent from the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town. He has been praised by critics for his “sharp conducting” (Washington Post), and his orchestras have triumphed with displays of “breadth, depth and color” (Riverfront Times).

Tim’s training as a pianist and multi-instrumentalist led to conducting engagements with such companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, the Prague Summer Nights Festival Orchestra, the Trondheim Sinfonietta, and off-Broadway with The New Group.

Tim has been on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, American Lyric Theater, and the Urban Artist Initiative/NYC. He is an Associate Professor at the Eastman School of Music.

Tim conducted the 2017 World Premiere of Missing, a groundbreaking new work by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 4,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada. In 2019, he conducted a Canadian tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages. These shows reached out with private performances for the Indigenous victims’ families, and offered traditional sacred healing to all audience members.

For more information about Timothy Long and any upcoming events please go to https://timothylongmusic.com/

https://events.rochester.edu/event/eastman_philharmonia_8604

Eastman School of Music will present the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis' How Bright the Sunlight, a work for symphony orchestra and narrator, with a libretto curated by the first Native American US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. The narration, spoken by Joy, is based on both the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address and Joy’s poem, Thanksgiving in a Time of War and Confusion. Timothy Long will be conducting the world premiere as part of Eastman's ongoing Centennial celebrations.

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