Seeking Advice for a New Opera, Laura Kaminsky Consulted the Experts: Her Students

With her new composition Time to Act, Boston Conservatory professor Laura Kaminsky doesn’t just give voice to tough questions about school shootings in America, she sets them to music on an operatic scale. With librettist Crystal Manich, Kaminsky has created a vehicle that suits the enormity—and complexity—of the crisis, expressing the fear and grief wrought by gun violence, while asserting art’s unifying power.

The opera condenses intractable debate over the issue into a simple plotline: A group of high school drama students are preparing to perform Sophocles’s Antigone when a new student enters the mix, carrying a dark secret that forces the actors to engage firsthand with the play’s themes of individual conscience, state authority, free will, and self-determination.  

Time to Act weaves together threads pulled from Greek tragedy, newspaper headlines, everyday high school life, and contemporary opera. And through an ongoing collaboration with Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Kaminsky and Manich have also interwoven crucial feedback from music students of the “lockdown generation,” as some have dubbed Gen Z because of the active shooter drills that were so formative to their childhood.

A libretto workshop last fall gave Boston Conservatory students a singular opportunity to help shape the opera’s narrative, develop authentic characters, and craft dialogue that felt true to life. During that workshop discussion, Kaminsky, Manich, and dramaturg Amy Hutchinson also heard from students about their own lived experience with gun violence and how high-profile school shootings such as Columbine and Parkland impacted them as children.

“[We] took all of the great suggestions and questions that we received from the vocal arts students and the audience, and made some rather large reshapings of the piece,” Kaminsky says. “You know, an innocent question can lead to a new idea.” 

Now, after several libretto revisions and the completion of the full score, Boston Conservatory students are preparing to play those same characters in Time to Act’s collegiate and New England premiere this coming April. Following the production, Boston Conservatory cast members will perform a semi-staged production—to be recorded live—at one of New York City’s most innovative venues for contemporary music, National Sawdust in Brooklyn. The Grammy Award–winning contemporary classical label Bright Shiny Things, in collaboration with Chair of Vocal Arts Isaí Jess Muñoz, will produce an original cast recording album from the live performance, currently slated for release in spring 2027.

Making opera from reality

A committed teacher as well as a composer, Kaminsky says she’s “ecstatic” to see her new work brought to life by Boston Conservatory students who, like the characters in the opera, turn their complicated reality into thematically rich storytelling. 

“It’s that whole learning curve of performing a new opera, and that the subject matter is something that I thought would be powerful and relevant for them, that it could lead to not just musical conversations but cultural, societal, political conversations, ethics conversations,” she said. “So, I was overjoyed when Boston Conservatory signed on to this project.” 

Kaminsky first visited Boston Conservatory in 2023, when students performed her chamber opera, As One, and led talkbacks with audiences following each show. “I just felt the energy was great and the kids were so serious and inquisitive and open and that, if there was ever an opportunity to do another project, I was open for it,” she says. In short order, she joined Boston Conservatory’s music faculty, “And then, this unfolded in the most beautiful and organic way.” 

The initial concept for Time to Act originated with Boston Conservatory alum Kostis Protopapas (MM '99, piano), artistic director of Opera Santa Barbara, who reached out to Manich after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Both Protopapas and Manich were deeply moved by press statements and speeches that Parkland’s theater students gave in the months that followed the tragedy, drawing inspiration from the interplay of theater education and social activism.

After Manich completed a first draft of the libretto, Protopapas invited Kaminsky to compose the score. Along with dramaturg Hutchinson, the creative team developed the work over several iterations, while a commissioning consortium gradually coalesced around the project. Pittsburgh Opera, Opera Santa Barbara, and Opera Montana—which is led by alum Michael Sakir, MM '09, conducting)—joined forces with Boston Conservatory at Berklee to bring the opera to fruition, with Pittsburgh Opera giving the professional premiere in February 2026 and Boston Conservatory the collegiate/New England premiere in April 2026.

“A genuine seat at the creative table”

To serve as a commissioning and creative partner for a new opera is an “extraordinarily rare and profoundly exciting” opportunity, says Muñoz, who helped broker the consortium arrangement and is steering the collaboration on the Boston Conservatory side. The Boston productions will be stage directed by David Gately and conducted by Andrew Bisantz, both associate professors in the Vocal Arts Department.

“Boston Conservatory students have been given a genuine seat at the creative table,” says Muñoz. “They are helping shape a work by one of the country’s most-performed living opera composers, and doing so within a fully professional ecosystem that includes National Sawdust, Grammy-winning producers, and the Bright Shiny Things label.”

Muñoz will coproduce the album with Elaine Martone, whose many Grammy wins include three for Producer of the Year, Classical. Students will be in the best of all possible hands, Muñoz says, citing Martone’s decades-long track record with orchestras and artists around the world—and yet another nomination for Producer of the Year pending at the 2026 Grammy Awards.

“Opportunities like this don’t simply prepare students for the field—they transform their artistic lives,” he says.

Learn more about Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s degree programs in vocal arts and composition, as well as Time to Act’s collegiate premiere, April 16–18, 2026.