Composer · Maine
About
Richard deCosta
I'm a composer based in Maine. For decades, I've written opera, art song and choral music, returning again and again to the human voice. It carries words as well as sound: a thought, a character, an entire world can arrive in a single sung phrase.
My interests stretch from the directness of a simple melody to the far edges of vocal expression—Tuvan overtone singing, Bulgarian women's choirs, sprechstimme, and Meredith Monk's ability to build a world from a vowel. In my own songs, I keep coming back to two essentials: a melody you can carry away, and words that reach you as you hear them.
Short bio for programs & press ↓Worlds worth making
Looking back across the catalog, I can see a habit I never planned. My biggest works sit in genres where nobody else lives.
Some Words with a Mummy is a comic opera after Edgar Allan Poe, bringing voices and theatre organ into a musical world of silent-film comedy and electro swing. A mummy awakens in nineteenth-century Baltimore and has quite a few things to say about modern civilization.
Kai: Death of Dreams, an unfinished space opera, is sung in a language I created for its imagined civilization, complete with vocabulary and grammar.
Uninhabited territory has real advantages. There is no tradition to measure up to, no rulebook, and no one to tell you a theatre organ has no business in an opera pit. You find out what the form wants by building it. The costs are just as real. There is no waiting audience, no company with your genre in its season brochure, and no singer who grew up speaking your invented language. You finish the piece, and then it waits.
My current work includes The Canticles Electric, a developing concert-theatre project bringing poetry, voices and electronics together with light, projection and sculptural stage imagery. The music is its foundation; the visual world grows from it.
Alongside these larger projects are songs setting Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, Christina Rossetti, W. E. Henley and others. They offer a more intimate encounter: a poem, a voice, and the musical shape of a feeling. If you only hear one, start with “Come to Me in the Silence of the Night.”
Hearing the music
Writing for voices also led me into building tools. For years, I could compose a vocal work long before I had any practical way to hear it sung. That experience led me to found Turing Opera Workshop and create Cantai, a singing synthesizer built from recordings of professional singers.
Cantai grew from a composer's need to hear notes and words together—to listen, revise, and discover what the music could become. It brings my work in composition and software development into the same room.
Beyond the score
I'm also a drummer, a Registered Maine Guide and an FAA-licensed private pilot. Away from music, I fish from a kayak and write 6502 assembly for forty-year-old computers. Apparently, I like instruments with character.
For performances, commissions, scores or collaborations, please get in touch. Scores and parts are available on request.
For programs and press
Short bio
Richard deCosta is a composer of vocal music whose catalog spans opera, art song, and choral works, including Some Words with a Mummy, a comic opera after Edgar Allan Poe for voices and theatre organ, and Kai: Death of Dreams, a space opera sung in a constructed language. His songs set Shakespeare, Drayton, Christina Rossetti, and W. E. Henley. He is the founder of Turing Opera Workshop and the creator of Cantai, a singing synthesizer for Dorico, Sibelius, and MuseScore Studio that lets composers hear their vocal writing sung in voices recorded from professional singers. He lives in Maine.