CTRL+ALT+Recit

A snippet of revised recit. Carys Rees-Baker, soprano, and Sarah Lawless, mezzo. This post in the final entry in a series of posts about adapting the libretto of Alcina for a modern audience and performers with the help of ChatGPT. We are now in the implementation phase of the Alcina libretto.Like any new text, the act of singing a line—or hearing it land in the room—often dictates a rewrite. A line comes up in rehearsal, a student raises an eyebrow, and I end up back here

This is the fourth entry in a series on adapting Handel's Alcina for modern singers using ChatGPT at Oakland University . There’s a strange kind of alchemy to adapting a Baroque libretto for the modern stage. In our Alcina project—a college-opera re-imagined inside an influencer mansion where social media magic replaces sorcery—every translation choice becomes a philosophical one. When this process began, the goal wasn’t just to modernize Handel’s Alcina ; it was to rebuild

In this third installment of my ongoing series about AI-assisted adaptation of Handel's Alcina , we dive into one of the project’s most...

This is Part II in a blog series about using AI to create a complete libretto rewrite—from concept to organization to libretto. Where I...

This is Part I in a blog series about using AI to create a complete libretto rewrite—from concept to organization to libretto. What...

Over the past 15 years of directing opera, I’ve found that a subset of my students needs an exceptionally clear, transparent rehearsal...

Why Callback Sides Matter As part of our upcoming  Alcina  production, Victoria Shively and I needed to create callback sides for all of...

Welcome! This blog documents a new kind of collaboration—between ChatGPT and our opera team at Oakland University—for our 2025–2026 production of Alcina . While the opera itself was chosen before this AI experiment began, the direction we’re taking it in is entirely new territory for us. So why this project? Like many of you, I’m both excited and uneasy about the future of art in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. If a computer program can generate ideas