Works & Process Will Host Experiments In Opera: Custom Of The Coast By Kamala Sankaram And Paul Muldoon

Works & Process and Experiments in Opera present Custom of the Coast by Kamala Sankaram and Paul Muldoon on Sunday, February 9, 2025 at National Sawdust, 80 N. 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249 at 4pm. Tickets start at $25.

Don't miss this first look at a new opera intercutting the life stories of an eighteenth-century Irish pirate who was sentenced to death and an Indian-born, Irish dentist who died in 2012 after being denied an abortion. Composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Paul Muldoon will participate in a moderated discussion. Prior to world premiere at the 2025 Kilkenny Arts Festival, excerpts will be performed as the culmination of a workshop that was part of the production's residency at Potash Hill and sponsored by Works & Process LaunchPAD and Experiments in Opera.

Artist Ensemble

Anchal Dhir, Voice

Rocky Duval, Voice

Danny O'Mahony, Accordion

FLUX Quartet

-Tom Chiu, Violin

-Conrad Harris, Violin

-Will Hakim, Viola (guest)

-Felix Fan, Cello

Composer Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music, creative music, and contemporary opera. She has been commissioned by the Glimmerglass Festival (as 2022 artist-in-residence), Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, and the PROTOTYPE Festival, among others. Known for pushing the boundaries of form and style, she has created work for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (as 2023 artist-in-residence), an opera for the trees of Prospect Park (as winner of the 2021 Creative Time Open Call), an augmented reality music walk for Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, a techno-noir featuring live datamining of the audience, and the world's first virtual reality opera, among other pieces. As a biracial Indian-American and trained sitarist, Kamala has drawn on Indian classical music in many of her works, including Thumbprint, A Rose, Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers, and Jungle Book. Dr. Sankaram holds a PhD from the New School and is currently a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music. www.kamalasankaram.com

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist and translator. He was born in Co. Armagh in 1951. Muldoon is the author of thirteen collections of poetry including Frolic and Detour (2019), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Maggot (2010), Horse Latitudes (2006), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Hay (1998), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Meeting the British (1987), Quoof (1983), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Mules (1977) and New Weather (1973).

He has also published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages. Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004 and as poetry editor of The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He has taught at Princeton University since 1987 and currently occupies the Howard G.B. Clark '21 chair in the Humanities.

Paul Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2006 European Prize for Poetry, the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from ten universities.

Paul Muldoon has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.' Roger Rosenblatt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as 'one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.'

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