Rinde Eckert

Rinde Eckert is an award-winning writer, composer, librettist, musician, playwright, vocalist, director, and educator. Possessed of a crystalline tenor and resonant falsetto, his intense vocal style indicates classical and rock training, while his libretti are complex, often paradoxical reflections of the pressure and instability of contemporary life. His work, while accessible, makes flexible otherwise fixed definitions of plays, dance pieces, operas, and musicals. After serving as librettist with the Paul Dresher Ensemble during the late ’80s, Eckert released three acclaimed singer/songwriter albums including 1996′s Do the Day Over. He served as vocalist/lyricist on Jerry Granelli UFB’s Sandhills Reunion in 2004. Eckert and guitarist/composer Steven Mackey formed prog rock quartet Big Farm and issued a lone, self-titled effort in 2013. In 2018, he released the globally acclaimed solo album The Natural World, which navigated musical genres from Indian classical to Americana. In 2022, with the Kronos Quartet and Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, he issued My Lai, a mono-opera composed for him by Jonathan Berger.
Eckert was born in Mankato, Minnesota, but raised in Iowa. His parents were opera singers. Soprano Renata Tebaldi’s recordings of Giacomo Puccini’s operas proved an early influence. During the folk boom of the mid-’60s, he fell so hard under the spell of Scotland’s Jean Redpath singing “Auld Lang Syne” and “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” that he learned to play the guitar and began writing songs. Eckert earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Iowa, and achieved a Master of Music degree in classical voice from Yale. Following graduation, he served on the faculty of the Cornish Institute between 1980 and 1982 and was resident stage director of the Cornish Opera Theater.
Eckert began his career in the 1980s, writing librettos for composer Paul Dresher (Shelf Life, Slow Fire) as well as composing dance scores for choreographer Sara Shelton Mann and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. In 1992, he began composing and performing his own music/theater work with The Gardening of Thomas D, an homage to Dante that toured in the United States and France. That same year, he released Finding My Way Home for Japan’s DIW label; a unique blend of avant-garde, singer/songwriter, and radio drama, the album included appearances from guitarists Bill Frisell and Will Bernard. The two guitarists also assisted him on 1994′s Lee Townsend-produced Do The Day Over, on which Eckert not only sang but played accordion and piano on as well. Critically acclaimed in the U.S. and Europe, it offered originals as well as covers of tunes by Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson. The following year, he released Story In, Story Out on Intuition. Once more produced by Townsend, the set offered two bands performing a pair of narrative suites. The first, Three Days in the Sun, was performed by Jerry Granelli UFB and chronicled a hitchhiking trip from 1974, while the second, Four Songs Lost in a Wall, featured Eckert on accordion and keys, guitarist Bernard, drummer Jim Kassis, and bassist Clark Suprynowicz. Eckert concluded the 1990s with the premier recording of the one-man opera Ravenshead. Eckert wrote and sang the libretto to accompany composer/guitarist Steven Mackey’s score after a commission from the Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band, who backed the singer on the recording.
In 2000, Eckert won an Obie Award for And God Created Great Whales, a musical adventure into the damaged psyche of a composer trying to create an opera based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. In 2003, Granelli asked Eckert to write lyrics for a series of pieces the drummer composed as “an audio movie or play” and to perform them with an ensemble that included guitarist Christian Kogel and clarinetist Francois Houle. A recording titled Sandhills Reunion appeared in 2004. The following year, he appeared with Wayne Horvitz on the New World Records’ recording of Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices, And Soloist. ‎Eckert received a Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award for lyricist/librettists from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and performed the premiere of Horizon, an homage in song, sketch, and rumination to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2006, Eckert premiered Orpheus X, a contemporary musical theater retelling of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth (in which a rock star is obsessed with an unknown woman who was mowed down by a taxi he was traveling in). The following year, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the work. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for music composition.
Over the next several years, Eckert remained intensely busy. In 2008, his 12-person, two-act play Fate and Spinoza received its premier performance at Wright Hall, University of California, Davis), while Eye Piece, a multimedia work premiered at the University of Iowa. That same year, Orpheus X premiered in Asia at the Hong Kong International Theater Festival. His efforts won him an Alpert Award for theater work in 2009. In 2010, his and Mackey’s Dreamhouse was recorded by the pair with Synergy Vocals, Catch Electric Guitar Quartet, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and conducted by Gil Rose. That year, the writing/performing duo enlisted bassist Jason Treuting and drummer Mark Haanstra in the prog rock group Big Farm, and began writing and recording their debut. In 2011, Lonely Motel: Music from Slide, a collaboration between Mackey and Eckert, was recorded with Eighth Blackbird for Cedille Records. It took home a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. Eckert also taught residencies at William and Mary College, University of Maryland, and Wesleyan University, and directed Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters at Yerba Buena in San Francisco.
In 2013, Big Farm completed and released their self-titled debut album on Naxos. It received global critical acclaim and the band briefly toured in support. Eckert also directed composer Jonathan Berger’s Visitations (a pair of one-act operas) at Stanford University and began collaborating with composer Paola Prestini on The Aging Magician. 2017 saw various premieres of The Aging Magician and its debut recording by Attacca Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. That year, Eckert and Kronos Quartet also performed Berger’s My Lai with a libretto by Harriet Scott Chessman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to sold-out houses.
In 2018, Eckert released The Natural World. Produced by Lee Townsend, it was his first completely solo album wherein he performed all vocals and instruments. It followed a two-month cross-country journey playing free solo concerts in venues ranging from living rooms to festival stages. The album explored the aesthetic terrain where classical meets vernacular and earthly meets the spiritual ranging across genre forms from Americana and blues to art song and Indian music. A return to the kind of singer/songwriter albums Eckert had released earlier in his career, its opening track was a reading of the folk song “Black Is the Color” that had influenced him so greatly as a teen.
In May 2022, Eckert and Kronos Quartet, with Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, released a studio version of Jonathan Berger: My Lai for Smithsonian Folkways. ~ Thom Jurek