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Melissa Dunphy (born 1980) is an Australian-American composer best known for her vocal, political, and theatrical music. She is most notable for the Gonzales Cantata, a 40-minute choral piece in Baroque style that sets the text of the parts of the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy hearings in which former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified. It was featured on the Rachel Maddow Show in 2009; Maddow described it as "probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show." Dunphy completed her doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and is currently on the composition faculty at Rutgers University.

Early life
Born in Brisbane, Australia, Dunphy was raised in an immigrant household. Dunphy's father was a greek immigrant, and her mother was a refugee who fled from China to evade the Cultural Revolution. Dunphy first began piano lessons at age 3. Her mother introduced her to music after reading that "kids who studied classical music are better at math."

The Boghouse
In 2016, Melissa Dunphy and her husband, Matthew Dunphy, discovered privies while renovating a  former magic theater that they had just purchased in Old City. After excavating the first privy (which extended 19 feet below the property), they found hundreds of ceramic artifacts,  glass bottles, oyster shells, and animal bones dating back to the early 1700’s. Refusing to sell the items, the Dunphy's kept the artifacts and are still in the process of cleaning centuries worth of composted human feces and mud from the various broken shards and artifacts, and slowly piecing them back. Melissa and Matthew have a podcast named The Boghouse where they talk about their experiences buying the magic theater, and the chaos that followed their discovery of thousands of pre-revolutionary artifacts.

Gonzales Cantata
Conceived while Dunphy was at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, the cantata has a libretto taken entirely from the transcript of the Gonzales hearings, which Dunphy found dramatic. Because Dunphy wished to highlight the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee was made up entirely of men, with the exception of Dianne Feinstein - and also because there are more female opera singers than male - she reversed the genders and cast sopranos as Gonzales and as the male senators. Orrin Hatch is an alto, because he was more sympathetic to Gonzales and it needed "a different vibe"; Feinstein is a male tenor. The cantata includes an aria for Gonzales called "I Don't Recall," in which the soprano sings the title phrase 72 times, the same number of times that Gonzales said it in the hearings. Dunphy reports that she asked John Ashcroft for permission to arrange his song "Let the Eagle Soar" as a "companion piece," but he turned her down on grounds of "artistic differences."

The piece is generally Baroque in style, with some use of more modernist dissonance in the orchestration. Julian Sanchez described the cantata as "sort of like Henry Purcell filtered through late John Adams"; other reviewers mentioned its similarity to Handelian opera or to P.D.Q. Bach, or pointed out the use of "Coplandesque harmonies when characters were being folksy."

The work premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September 2009. It was staged as a cantata or oratorio; characters wore red or blue dresses depending on party affiliation, with tiaras as well as sashes bearing their names. American Opera Theater staged the work as an opera in February 2011; reviews were less positive, with critics saying that Dunphy's parody of Baroque music compared unfavorably to P.D.Q. Bach and criticizing her out-of-period use of dissonance. Anne Midgette, criticizing the piece's lack of a coherent message, wrote, "Performed as a cantata, this piece may be an amusing diversion; staged as an opera, it reveals its dramatic deficiencies and loses some of its zany humor."

Awards and honors
Dunphy has received awards from NATS Art Song Composition which won first place for her song cycle Tesla's Pigeon, and choral work What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach? which won the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers Competition and has been performed nationally by ensembles including Chanticleer and Cantus. In 2024, Dunphy was awarded and Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. She was the recipient of a 2020 Opera America Discovery Grant for Alice Tierney, an opera commissioned by Oberlin Conservatory which premiered in 2023 at Oberlin and Opera Columbus.

Dunphy has been a composer in residence with the Immaculata Symphony Orchestra since 2010. She also previously worked with Volti Choral Arts Lab from 2013-2014, Volti Choral Institute in 2016, and the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus from 2015 to 2018.