Thompson’s five-year appointment, which takes effect August 1, comes at an opportune time. A doctoral candidate at Yale, he recently completed the residential course portion of his five-year program. What remains is his so-called “dossier” – the portfolio of works he is now responsible for creating. Basically, “I have to go out into the world for three years and prove myself,” says Thompson, who also earned her master’s degree from Yale and her bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta.

HGO seems happy to oblige. Thompson’s tenure includes writing a full-length opera for the larger Brown Theater at the Wortham Center, slated to premiere in the 2026-27 season. Meanwhile, he is already imagining smaller projects such as an oratorio for the HGO choir, a song cycle for HGO studio artists and perhaps a site-specific chamber opera. In the immediate term, he is looking forward to meeting with HGO leaders and the wider community to see what ideas might take shape.

“I’m kind of building the plane as I fly,” laughs Thompson.

In recent years, calls for greater inclusion and representation in the world of opera have grown too loud to ignore, as the industry undergoes seismic change. Thompson is well aware of the opportunities that come with a new position, both for himself and for others.

“There is a chance to create a new pipeline,” he says. “I think opera is an idiom with a lot of baggage when it comes to race and gender and a number of markers of identity. Having my voice is a chance to keep the door open to other voices.

Thompson’s path to HGO began at the 2017 Aspen Music Festival, where he was a member of the composition and his orchestral piece, An Act of Resistance, impressed the company’s artistic and musical director, Patrick Summers. (“I knew within 30 seconds of hearing Joel’s orchestral work that I was in the presence of a rare songwriting voice,” Summers said in a statement.)

After Thompson won the festival’s Hermitage Award, Summers approached him and asked if he was interested in collaborating on a new project: an adaptation of Ezra Jack Keats’ beloved “The Snowy Day,” the first children’s book to feature a person of color as its main character. Thompson was happy to oblige.

He actually remembered reading the book, originally published in 1962, when he was growing up in the Bahamas. (His family later moved to Houston for three years before settling in Atlanta.) Development of the hour-long opera was inevitably complicated by the pandemic; ahead of the premiere of “Snowy Day” in December 2021, HGO released a behind-the-scenes documentary of its premiere the previous year. Yet, despite the delay, it was a success: the opening night was broadcast live in 34 countries.

“It deserves to be played regularly – on holidays or otherwise – and especially in schools,” noted the Chronicle in our review.

“Snowy Day” wasn’t Thompson’s first hit. In 2015, the Men’s Glee Club at the University of Michigan premiered its “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed”, a choral setting of the dying words of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and five other young black men killed by police. While working as a choir director at a two-year college in southern Georgia, Thompson wrote it “just as a way of recording my feelings,” but he spoke eloquently and emotionally at the time.

“Above all, everything I write, I want it to be honest,” he says. “In the end, each musician is made up of everything he listens to and loves; and made up of where they are emotionally, physically, and mentally. So being honest is a huge priority for me in my art.

That honesty is just one more reason Thompson thinks her HGO residence is so perfect. “I think in cities as diverse as Houston, we really get a front-row seat to this experiment in American democracy,” he says.

“Much of what we see in terms of all the tragedies and friction between communities is also the result of what makes us so beautiful, which is our diversity: of opinion, of culture, of ethnicity, of religion beliefs and values,” Thompson continues. “I feel like we can co-exist if we work hard to do so, and I feel like art and music in particular can show us the way. “