Exactly three years ago tonight, Rootabaga Country premiered at the Sarasota Opera House. It was the beginning of a brand new chapter in my life and career. After 12 years at an intense full-time day job (and others before that), my first composing commission of this scope gave me the resources and the courage to take the leap I had been wanting to take for so long.

Rootabaga Country was chosen from a competitive pool of applications for Sarasota Opera’s youth opera commissioning initiative, which was established in the 1980s. Mine is the sixth opera born from that initiative. Like almost everything else I’ve written since then, the subject was nothing I ever predicted I’d be working on. Through an unexpected turn of events, I had to abandon my original plan for the application and landed on adapting Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, but it obviously turned out to be the best way forward! It was a joy to live in the world of Gimme the Ax and his children, Please Gimme and Ax Me No Questions for the year and a half leading up to opening night.

Since the Sarasota premiere, the piece received a production by Vivace Youth Chorus. Plans were afoot for more performances this year, but unfortunately, they all fell through long before anyone had even heard of coronavirus. I hope that someday, when children can sing within coughing distance of each other again, Rootabaga Country can have another life. We could all use a little boost from our families (biological and/or chosen) right now, I think. For the moment, though, there’s a whole playlist of clips from this premiere production available right down below! And there are plenty of fun photos from the run on my Gallery page. Enjoy!