Michael Abels has a special affinity for Detroit and its classical music scene. It was here that the Los Angeles resident attended the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Unisys African-American Composers Forum in the 1990s and met fellow Black composers of his generation for the first time. Since then, the accomplished composer for stage and screen has had a long and fruitful relationship with the DSO, which has performed various pieces of his over the years.
Abels, whose work in Jordan Peele’s movies will be instantly recognizable to film fans, views his title as composer in residence for the orchestra’s 2025-26 season as the natural culmination of this long-standing relationship.
“I’ve had a lot of great experiences in Detroit,” he says, “and being composer in residence feels like a logical conclusion to me for that — and maybe not even a conclusion.”
The DSO will perform several of Abels’s pieces throughout the season to mark his residency. On the calendar this fall are Unbound (Oct. 9-11), a tribute to Jesse Owens, and Global Warming and More Seasons (Nov. 7-9), orchestral pieces from earlier in Abels’s career. In the winter, the DSO will perform Frederick’s Fables (Feb. 28, 2026), music to accompany the narration of children’s stories from a collection of the same name. “They’ve chosen a wide variety of types of music that I’ve done, which makes me smile because I’ve done a lot of different things,” Abels says.
The DSO also will play a never-performed orchestral suite from the opera Omar (Feb. 6-8, 2026), for which Abels and librettist/composer Rhiannon Giddens won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in music. Omar is based on the true story of a Muslim scholar from West Africa who was abducted and sold into slavery in the U.S. in the early 1800s, and in signature Abels fashion, the music that helps tell the story blends multiple genres.
“The opera was a huge opportunity to bring in all of the types of music that we come to think of as American music, which is a true melting pot of different traditions,” Abels says. “There are references to Protestant hymns, and because he was sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, there are references and allusions to Porgy and Bess. The earliest transcribed melody of an African person in the United States is the melody that we begin the opera on.”
Successful concert composer that he is, Abels is perhaps best known for his genre-bending film scores: “gospel horror” in Get Out, eerified hip-hop in Us, and sci-fi meets horror meets Western in Nope. (That those movies constitute the core of Peele’s horror filmography to date is no coincidence. Peele and Abels are like — to reference a thirdhand comment from Steven Spielberg after the release of Get Out — the great Spielberg and John Williams themselves.)
“I cannot predict the turns of a creative career,” Abels says, referencing the sweet spot of finding and choosing projects that are both enticing and a good fit. “That’s an interesting challenge to have, although it’s one that I’m very lucky to have.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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