Lewis Coenen-Rowe (Music, 2011) is taking his fourth opera, STUMPED, to the Fringe as part of Scotland’s international showcase.

STUMPED is a new miniature opera exploring deforestation through scenes from five ancient stories that look at what happens when you interfere with trees. These stories alternate with conversations between two users of an internet forum. As the opera goes on, the two worlds begin to merge.

Lewis is a composer of primarily opera and chamber music. In addition to STUMPED, he has written and performed three operas, Collision (2016), The Storm (2017), and Last Thursday (2018) as well as vocal music and other music with word. His compositional studies began with a music BA, with Dr Deborah Pritchard at Univ, followed by an AHRC-funded MSt with Profs Robert Saxton and Martyn Harry at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and an LAHP-funded PhD at King’s College London.

Lewis has worked with the Oxford Philomusica, the BBC Singers, the New Music Players, Ensemble ANIMA, the Cavaleri Quartet, Mark Simpson, Jonathan Powell and Richard Casey, as well as many student musicians. As a musicologist, he has written on the analysis of modern and contemporary classical music as well as ecomusicology and intersections of musicology and environmentalism. Currently, he is working at the environmental arts charity Creative Carbon Scotland.

Find out more about STUMPED here.

Photo: Campbell Parker

Published: 22 July 2024

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