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[The Gonzales Cantata] is honestly, probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show. I know. I'm totally freaking out about it ... I spent all day obsessing about this, and watching clips of it online, and listening to the music, and I have to tell you, in my opinion, it is both great and kind of moving ... this is so cool, I could not contain myself.
— Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
Another theme I’m very interested in is getting inside the heads of complicated antiheroes and finding a connection to them – a kind of empathy and love without necessarily a redemption. I think there’s value in that struggle as a way of dealing with history and understanding the present.
— Interviews with Alicia Byer
Melissa Dunphy, 33, has presented major works using the self-produced Fringe Festival model, which could well happen with Ayn (about The Fountainhead author Ayn Rand), which, like Solitro, she's writing for doctoral requirements at Penn.
— Philadelphia Inquirer
Then, there's Melissa Dunphy: a young and talented composer building her reputation as part of a new generation of Philadelphia composers one piece of a time.
— Sound American
Peter Davison, the festival’s artistic director, said: “This will be a unique event. Melissa Dunphy’s piece received a standing ovation at its premiere performance and many were moved to tears."
— Wirral News
The final piece on the program was Melissa Dunphy’s stunning 2010 “What Do You Think I Fought for at Omaha Beach?” Excerpts from veteran Philip Spooner’s testimony before the Maine Senate, in a hearing on the Marriage Equality Bill, its music ranges from the Coplandesque to the martial.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
This piece demonstrates to me how a true artist is able to take even a most unlikely source of inspiration and yet create a new work of art from it.
Top Five Political Satires in Opera: Number 2. The Gonzales Cantata
— WQXR Operavore
Best of all was Melissa Dunphy's "June." [...] The first of the two songs explored Lauren Rile Smith's poem about the lethargy of summer heat with great poetic control, neatly scaling back the electronic activity when necessary but ultimately conveying, with considerable mastery, the delirium of congested thought patterns. More, please.
Dunphy likes to put quotation marks around the words “classical” when talking about classical music. She’s interested in music, but especially “the way different genres influence me.” She says her best work is usually inspired by important public events.
— Newburyport Arts
The final work of the evening was “Tesla’s Pigeon,” a new song cycle by the endlessly inventive Dunphy, whose smash-hit full-length oratorio The Gonzales Cantata rocked the 2009 Fringe Festival.
— Penn Gazette
Make Major Moves got the Fringe veteran - Melissa presented her concert opera “The Gonzales Cantata” at Fringe 2009 -on the telephone to talk about Kanye West, the decline of the Philly Orchestra, the new classical scene, her rock band Up Your Cherry, and how Nikola Tesla fell in love with a bird.
— Philadelphia Weekly: Make Major Moves
"I think that music is very linked to language, and I think it's linked to us physically very much. We have a heartbeat, and our heartbeat is kind of in triple time ... when we walk, we walk in duple time ... and we have this pitch range in our voice, and every language has a different kind of pitch contour ..."
— InsidersTalk
A newly commissioned work by Melissa Dunphy followed: “What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?” Dunphy’s music was exceptional, with supple lines effectively depicting the words of a veteran, and acerbic harmonies specifically setting the text “I’ve seen so much, so much blood and guts.”
— Kansas City Star
Australian-born Melissa has already achieved a level of success and recognition on a national level, including a spot on The Rachel Maddow Show for another large choral work, The Gonzales Cantata.
— KCMETROPOLIS.org
Macbeth shows Khan's willingness to experiment, focusing on Macbeth and his wife in a 90-minute paring driven by Melissa Dunphy's beautifully haunting music.
— Philadelphia Citypaper
Simon Carrington gave his reasoning behind selecting Dunphy's work as the winner. "There were plenty of excellent pieces in the sweet-sounding modern idiom which SCCS would make very beautiful, but the strongest (and most individual) piece was Melissa Dunphy's What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach? - a bold and highly effective setting of a thought-provoking text.
Composer Melissa Dunphy has provided a soundscape for an assortment of exotic instruments played onstage: a Chinese ehru, Tibetan ringing bowls, and a varity of drums and gongs. The result not only heightens the atmosphere of the play, but in fact signals how we're supposed to feel about the action.
A few days before starting her doctoral studies at Penn, Melissa Dunphy Gr’14 woke up to discover that she was a celebrity. The torrent of interviews and articles wasn’t confined to the arts and culture sections, either. Instead, the 29-year-old composer’s name was popping up on everything from the Huffington Post to Fox News.
— The Pennsylvania Gazette
"All right, check out this amazing "Shot of the Morning" that's become a hit online: this teenage girl [sic] playing Bach's Prelude in C, and apparently it's so easy, she can do it upside down! At least her parents can't be mad at her for not practising her piano, right?"
— Fox & Friends - Fox News
Fellow graduate student Thomas Patteson, who attended one of the performances, observes, “The Gonzales Cantata is effective both as a work of art—the music is exquisite—and as mordant political commentary.”
— University of Pennsylvania SAS Frontiers
...confident, charged composition and orchestration, [with] pragmatic inventiveness in the cantata's construction, [and] frequent wittiness and use of irony.
— J's Theater
Her Gonzales Cantata - more PDQ Bach than Nixon in China - uses Handel's formality and symmetry as a starting point, humorously colliding with Gonzales' anything-but-symmetrical train of thought, quoted from the 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
Take heed, folks, not only should you go see this work – you should examine how this 29-year-old graduate student has received more press about her cantata than most major composers do when they win the Pulitzer Prize
— Sequenza21
Lovely conductor/composer Melissa Dunphy has seamlessly re-created former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 judiciary hearings as an opera, with epic results.
— CityPaper (Philadelphia)
Dunphy is just as passionate about politics as she is about the arts. She veers away from musical theory to cheer on Barney Frank for his blunt comments at a recent health care town hall. But she does not espouse any political bent in the opera.
— Edge Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA melissa@mormolyke.com 717-214-6121
