AOP's Composers & the Voice is a two-year, tuition-free fellowship for composers and librettists that provides experience writing for the voice and opera stage.

The Composers & the Voice training program is a competitive biannual fellowship offered to composers, librettists, and composer/librettist teams. Created and led by Composers & the Voice Artistic Director Steven Osgood, the two-year fellowship includes a year of working with the company’s Resident Ensemble of Singers and professional instructors followed by a year of continued promotion and career development through AOP and its strategic partnerships. Since launching in 2002, C&V has fostered the development of 84 composers & librettists.

“Hearing singers discuss in detail their experience learning and performing a new piece revolutionized the way I write for the voice.” - Gregory Spears

Composers & the Voice is made possible in part by a generous multi-year award from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Grants for Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Past AOP Composers & the Voice fellows have received grants and honors from the following organizations: Aaron Copland Fund for Music, ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Music Center, the American Composers Forum, OPERA America, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, the Fulbright Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Douglas Moore Fellowship, Tapestry New Opera Works, the Frederick Loewe Foundation, New Dramatists, and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation.