Video Operas You Can Watch on Your Phone

Making video operas you could watch on your phone occurred to Jason Cady, Aaron Siegel, and Matthew Welch a few years ago in a bar in Brooklyn, at a meeting of Experiments in Opera, the company they began in 2010. Cady, Siegel, and Welch are composers. Cady plays pedal steel, Siegel plays jazz drums and vibraphone, and Welch plays bagpipes and is getting a doctorate in composition at Yale. “Opera’s one of the few places that all the weird traditions we come from can fit into,” Welch said. They formed Experiments in Opera to produce one another’s works, so that they would feel less isolated. Over the next five years, mostly using grants, they commissioned forty-five works from thirty-five composers, themselves among them.