Listening First: How Julia Bullock Finds — and Gives — Voice

by Casey Weldon

Julia Bullock answers the telephone, already mid-thought.

She’s at her home in Munich, Germany, where it’s early evening. We’re talking about choral archives and Langston Hughes and the architecture of a Mass concert, when another voice enters the room.

“Well, I — hello,” she says, shifting tone instantly. “My 2-year-old just walked in. I’m just finishing this interview, darling.”

There’s no irritation in the Grammy-winning soprano’s voice. No theatrical whisper. Just warmth. Then she folds seamlessly back to the conversation, parsing the political tensions surrounding the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

If you’ve followed Bullock’s career, you recognize that pivot. It’s the same quality that allows her to move from George Frideric Handel to John Adams, from Samuel Barber to Billy Taylor, from recital stage to opera house to museum gallery. She is almost always in transit — landing from a delayed flight, packing for another, rehearsing in one country while programming in another.

But what makes Bullock singular isn’t just range. It’s attention.

Listening is her primary instrument.

“The first thing I asked for was resources,” she says. “I need context. I need history.”

She’s speaking about her role as Festival Director of the 2026 Cincinnati May Festival. But that philosophy predates it. Whether she’s building History’s Persistent Voice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or performing Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera, she begins by asking what came before her.

When the May Festival first approached her about the role, Bullock happened to be in town with her husband, conductor Christian Reif, who was leading the Festival’s resident orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, that week. The couple’s lives are frequently intertwined — his baton and her voice crossing cities and seasons. They met as students at Juilliard; now they navigate international careers with a young child.

“That week we walked around the building,” she recalls of walking around Music Hall, the May Festival’s home since 1878. “They shared some of the history of the building, some of the history of the Festival, and we talked about possibilities.”

Matthew Swanson, Director of Choruses for the May Festival, remembers what followed.

“When we approached Julia, the first thing
she did was ask us for more information,” he
says. “Repertoire history. The history of the Festival. Of Music Hall. Of singing in Cincinnati. Of the Orchestra.

“She absolutely devoured that material.”

Bullock resists the idea of arriving anywhere with a pre-packaged vision.

“I didn’t want to come in and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got this great idea’ that’s totally out of context,” she says. “It’s not about sharing my individual voice in that instance. It’s about finding multiple places of resonance after I feel informed.”

“I only feel overwhelmed,” she adds, “if I don’t have the resources to start homing in on recurring themes. I then decide if those themes coincide and resonate with my own preoccupations.”

That search for resonance — for buried or under-amplified voices — has defined Bullock’s work for more than a decade. With the Met Museum project she created, History’s Persistent Voice, she braided songs developed by enslaved people with new works by Black women composers. For her Perle Noire concert, she reframed Joséphine Baker through newly commissioned texts and choreography. 

For her reimagining of John Adams’ El Niño oratorio about the biblical nativity, Bullock amplified the voices of the women and Latin American poets that Adams used to tell a story often flattened into pageantry. The CSO presented that version of the production, Nativity Reconsidered, in 2023, featuring Bullock’s vocals and musical selections with the musical arrangement — shorter and with a smaller roster of performers — by her husband.

Again and again, she returns to the same principle.

“I don’t feel that there’s any reason to obscure elements of history that make us uncomfortable,” Bullock says. “If something is tense or complicated, that’s actually where the work is.”

When she discovered that 2026 would mark 70 years since the May Festival first invited Black performers — Leontyne Price and William Warfield singing excerpts from Porgy and Bess — Bullock chose to respond by including selections from the work on closing night and singing Bess herself.

“I was like, ‘OK. That’s meaningful,’” she says. “That’s a place to respond.”

Her decision is dialogic.

“I think the piece gave Black artists a space to be heard in multidimensionality,” Bullock says. “At the same time, the Gershwins profited greatly from the voices and musical expressions they drew from. There’s tension there.”

She doesn’t try to smooth it over.

Swanson describes Bullock as “extremely inspiring and curious — intellectually curious — in the way that she assembles programming.” What stands out, he says, is how she listens.

“The minute she throws out an idea, she’s open to what lives next to it,” Swanson adds.

Bullock confirmed that ever-present push and pull.

“If I throw out a piece, someone might suggest something in response,” she says. “And either we go with it, or I’ll say, ‘Actually, no, I don’t like this.’ Or, ‘That’s not quite the message I want to get across.’ Or musically, ‘it’s not something I’m interested in sharing — so let’s find something else.’”

Even in chaotic moments, that clarity holds. After arriving home near midnight from a late flight, Bullock woke early for a call with composer Carlos Simon to talk about a selection for the May Festival.

“I was throwing everything in and out of a suitcase,” she says, laughing throughout the recollection. “They’re on speaker. And I’m like, ‘Let’s talk very seriously about the organization of this Eclectic Mass.’”

This is her life: Airports and archives, rehearsal rooms and research threads, children wandering into interviews while she’s debating liturgical structure. Always on the move. Always mid-conversation.

Balancing performance and direction doesn’t exhaust Bullock, she insists. It energizes her.

“When I’m in a state of having to perform and also think about production,” she says, “I just get into a rhythm of generosity. The energy I need just continues to be refilled, because the people around me are totally available, totally committed.”

Late in our conversation, Bullock circled back to something more personal.

“I didn’t go into this thinking, ‘I’m going to program this many Black composers,’” she says. “But it’s something that has preoccupied my life — because I’ve been forced to be preoccupied with it since I was born.”

Back at home in Germany, the room has quieted. Reif is likely preparing for his own rehearsals. Another trip looms. Another stage.

Bullock’s voice — speaking, not singing — remains steady, thoughtful, alert.

Listening first. Then answering.

And always asking who else deserves to be heard.