The Golden Boy was created in collaboration with Anusree Roy as part of the third round of exercises at Tapestry’s 2011 LIBLAB workshop. Whereas the second round was designed for the librettists to lead the way, this round was designed as a composer-driven exercise. I began by sharing with Anusree some sketches I had been working on of excerpts from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I explained my ideas about how I wanted to use these excerpts as structural anchors for an opera of sorts, with the goal of bringing the themes of Blake’s poems into contemporary life. We then spent the better part of an afternoon in candid conversation, sharing stories from our childhoods, and parted ways for the evening each feeling freshly inspired.

By the next day, Anusree had produced a libretto that was so emotionally charged it seemed to possess its very own heartbeat. It was like the very essence of our conversations had been breathed into one compact scene. This heartbeat was the foundation upon which I built the music; a driving pulse to carry the tension forward between the barrage of volleys slung from the mouths of both mother and child. Anusree’s text structured the rise and fall of tension so expertly that I didn’t need to make very many decisions as I went about setting the words to music. I proceeded simply with one mantra in mind: heartbeats and breaths—and the music wrote itself. The resulting scene was later adapted and compiled alongside a selection of the Blake poems with a few other thematically related scenes to form the two-act opera Storybook: winner of the John Weinzweig Grand Prize at the 2015 SOCAN Competition for Young Composers.

- Darren Russo