The past is still present.
​
The 1619 cycle is a collection of six, one-to-two-and-a-half-hour operas by composer Joseph C Phillips Jr. The cycle, through live music performance, immersive film, dance, and innovative staging and lighting design, presents stories reflecting and illuminating several consistent themes throughout the history of the United States, reflecting the predacity of American life but also highlighting the human stories of joy, love, and resistance in the face of that oppression. Initially inspired by both the 2014 The Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and by the 2019 New York Times The 1619 Project, the 1619 opera cycle is a unique project; one that broadens those first inspirations, beyond black and white, in order to reckon with historical nuance and context and as writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz expressed, “[h]ow might acknowledging the reality of US history work to transform society.” 

For the 2023-2024 academic year, Joseph C Phillips Jr was awarded a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University in which he will spend time doing more research on the 1619 opera cycle through meeting and talking with various historians and faculty at Princeton and other institutions, and beginning to composing operas #2 and #3 in the six-opera cycle.

1619 Opera #1:
​So Far Behind Now Because of Then

1619 Opera #2:
​Title TBD

1619 Opera #3:
​Title TBD

1619 Opera #4-6:
​Titles TBD


Splash page 📸: Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction (1934), Aaron Douglas
Header 📸: Louisville, KY survivors of Ohio River Valley flood, 1937