5 Questions to Music director Stephen Lewis

May 20, 2026 | Portland, OR:  Deep Water premieres June 18-21 in Portland! We sat down with Music Director and Pianist Dr. Stephen Lewis to talk about his work bringing this new opera to life!

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When did you first hear about Deep Water, and what made you know this was a project you wanted to join?
​I heard about this project first from the composer, Caroline Louise Miller, who is an old and dear friend from our time as grad students at UC San Diego. I’ve admired their music for how they blend exciting, interesting avant-garde ideas with a genuine emotional depth. Caroline first told me about composing an opera a few years ago and I suggested that they reach out to Lisa Neher and New Wave Opera. At the time, I wasn’t on the board of NWO yet, but the fact that NWO was taking on new music opera premieres like Deep Water is part of why I joined NWO.

What makes shaping opera different from shaping concert chamber music or instrumental only music?

Great question! Opera involves several crucial layers not present in instrumental concert or chamber music: the human voice, the dramatic elements of character and plot, and the physicality of staging. The trickiest difference in working with singers is in tempo and rhythm: both are fundamentally shaped by breathing and the texts being sung, nuances that instrumentalists do not need to deal with. Rhythm and tempo with singers is something flexible, living, breathing, emotional, and heart-based. Opera adds on top of this the internal and external lives of the characters and their physical actions on stage, all of which needs to be accounted for in my role as music director. The immense complexity of all of these elements in opera is part of what attracts me, as a notable complexity junkie, to conducting operas.

What are you most excited for audiences to hear in the score?

I’m super excited for the moments in Deep Water where Caroline’s music suddenly shifts from a singer-songwriter idiom to something wildly experimental. I want the audience to feel their stomachs drop out from underneath them with the sheer audacity of Caroline’s musical juxtapositions, like being sucked into a vortex of swirling colors and sensations and then being deposited on strange new worlds.

Music Director Stephen Lewis leads the ensemble in last fall's production of Marie Curie Learns to Swim. Photo by Ary Finch Photography.

How do you balance being both a performer (pianist) and a music director, in rehearsal and in performance?

It’s not so different than being on the conductor’s podium: as the music director and pianist, my whole body and musical self embodies and becomes the music. As my body moves in time with the music, on the keys and in my head and shoulders movements, I transmit that information to the singers while also reacting to what the singers are sending back to me. Rehearsals are partly for me to find the best, most expressive, and truest ways to embody the music while performances are, as always, exciting, real-time adventures in holding everything together and communicating with the audience.

What makes the musical world of Deep Water compelling to today’s audiences?

Deep Water shows Caroline developing their musical style from the music I remember them writing years ago to incorporate more and more contemporary pop idioms into their overall style. These styles—singer-songwriter, musical theater, pop, etc.—are bridges for audiences to cross over to reach the more challenging, unusual sounds of the avant-garde. There are many potential meanings of tonality and atonality, of pop genres and classical/avant-garde genres, of highly ordered rhythms of popular music to the fecund, powerfully expressive excesses of avant-garde gestures found in Deep Water. Today’s audiences, conditioned by neo-liberal capitalism and Hollywood surface glamour, often reject avant-garde music out of hand since it confronts and challenges listeners rather than flattering or seducing them with the musical equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup. Deep Water’s music is a confident, warm, welcoming hand to pull audiences onto a wild adventure that will provoke, challenge, and edify any who have the courage to engage with it from beginning to end.

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