AKIN: TRUE BUT DOUR, truebutdour, troubadour. A multimedia chamber opera that traced the relationship between a father troubadour and the son who follows in his footsteps. These singer-poets traveled throughout twelfth-century Europe, functioning as the “human newspapers” of their day, singing of the historical, the political, the amorous.

The father is a shining exponent of the classic tradition, singing of love, idealized or bawdy. Upon reaching manhood, the son, who has been coached well by his father in the singing traditions, sets out on his own, his curiosity taking him through the centuries until he arrives in a strange urban landscape, what seems like a displaced Eden, in the early 1990s, where he witnesses brutality, confusion, liberated sexuality, human cruelty and plague. But the son has not forgotten the lessons of his youth. The twentieth-century troubadour resolves to sing of these exhilarating and nightmarish experiences in the belly of the beast––his loves, his losses, his rage.