Kevin Day has always expressed himself best through music. Growing up in Arlington, Texas, a severe stutter left him afraid to speak. But he was never afraid to sing out in choir in church, or play tuba and piano in school bands. His family struggled financially, sometimes going without electricity or a car, and as a teenager Day endured anxiety and depression. But his father taught him how to compose music on his laptop, leading Day to compose his first work for a senior year performance by his high school symphony orchestra, which he conducted.
“From that moment on I knew this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” says Day, who will receive his doctorate in composition from the Frost School of Music this December. “Music was my way of expressing what I was feeling. Performance was liberating. If I couldn’t speak, I could play.”
Now Day is channeling powerful feelings into one of music’s most dramatic platforms – grand opera. He is the commissioned composer of the first of three operas for the Cincinnati Opera’s Black Opera Project, a groundbreaking, nationally prominent project engaging Black artists to develop new works centered on Black stories. Day’s opera, named “Lalovavi,” premieres on Juneteenth 2025. Created with poet/librettist Tifara Brown and director/dramaturg Kimille Howard, it is an Afrofuturist fable with mythic themes of loss, power, destiny, and cultural survival.
Day, who is 28 and has never written an opera before, is dazzled at having been given the chance to create something so musically, dramatically, and culturally monumental. “I’m still in shock that this is happening,” he says. “It’s a huge opportunity. It’s insane.”
That opportunity arrived two years ago, via Morris Robinson, a renowned bass singer and artistic advisor to the Cincinnati Opera. Robinson led other Black opera artists in persuading the troupe to create the Black Opera Project in 2019, inspired partly by the impact of the heroic Afro-futurist film “The Black Panther.”
“We knew there was a critical need to create and develop works that represented the vastness and beauty of the African American experience,” says Robinson. “Cincinnati Opera bought into this vision.”
Morris brought Day on in 2021, after hearing the Fort Worth Symphony play Day’s “Lightspeed.” The triumphant piece is less than three minutes long. But that was enough to compel Morris to message Day on Instagram, asking if he’d like to compose an opera.
“I was like ‘sure?’” says Day, laughing. A conversation with Morris soon convinced him.
Though new to opera, Day has created over 250 works which have been performed by top instrumental soloists, wind bands, chamber ensembles, and symphony orchestras throughout the United States and abroad. He’s a winner of the BMI Composer Award and a three-time ASCAP Morton Gould Finalist. He composed “Lalovavi” this winter during a coveted residency at the famed MacDowell artist fellowship program in New Hampshire. Day spent most of his past two years at Frost studying remotely, while working as an assistant professor of composition at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada – a position he recently left to focus on his music.
When the Cincinnati Opera brought Day and his collaborators to town for a workshop, he got a taste of opera’s emotional sweep and world-building capacity by watching their productions of “Aida” and “Lucia di Lammermoor.” He researched contemporary operas by Black composers Anthony Davis (including “The Central Park Five” and “X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X”) and former Henry Mancini Institute artistic director Terrence Blanchard.
Day grew up singing in church choirs and has always tried to convey feeling and narrative in his compositions. Opera offered a way to bring all that together in a powerful new platform.
“That’s what I love about this process, combining these two worlds that have been part of my experience and using both voice and orchestration to portray these powerful emotions," Day says.
A longtime fan of Afro-futurism, Day and his collaborators decided it offered the epic scale needed for grand opera, and a way to avoid familiar tropes of Black oppression and struggle. “We thought ‘we need something bigger’,” says Day. “Kamille Howard said in a meeting “when do we as Black people get to escape?” We’re very excited about this. We get to imagine anything.”
“Lalovavi” tells the story of Persephone, a young woman who’s been kidnapped and raised in the dystopian city of Atlas, who has a rare gene that holds the promise of immortality. She escapes on an adventure to discover her true home and determine her own destiny. The title means “love” in Tut, a subversive language invented by enslaved Black Americans that Day and Brown incorporated into “Lalovavi” – another groundbreaking aspect of the piece.
Associate professor of composition Dorothy Hindman, Day’s mentor at Frost, says the Black Opera Project is a fitting outlet for his exceptional talents. “Kevin is a marvelous composer and sincerely lovely human being,” Hindman says. “He has given this project his all and more... and he did it with tremendous grace, thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit. I think this was a pivotal experience for him, and really showed him what he is capable of as a composer.”
Day credits the Frost School with fostering his individual artistry, and his inclination to combine musical styles, including gospel, R&B, and even hip hop, with classical music – an excellent talent for composing a dynamic contemporary opera.
“We were encouraged to not just write one way but to learn to write in many styles, to merge and blend genres,” he says. “My whole musical style is fusions of music I’ve known, loved and performed, and blending that with this contemporary classical way of looking at things. I’m grateful that at Frost I was in a place that let our creativity take over, where I could write the music I wanted to write.”
