Iron Opera is an ongoing musical project in which sculptors and iron artists write songs about melting iron, pouring iron, and making sculpture within the cast iron community. The Iron Opera project officially opened at the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art at Sloss Furnaces Historic Landmark on April 4, 2025. On that day, “Iron Opera 1 - Overture” was released as a five-song EP by Allen Peterson, Matt Toole, and Pyrophonic Sound.
The five songs on this demo EP are in a variety of styles/genres. The compilation is not yet a complete opera or connected with characters and a plot the way that a piece of musical theatre would be. The project may grow into that eventually, or may simply become a series of separate albums as an ever-growing collection of songs about casting iron and making art. "Overture” is only the first chapter of the Iron Opera project.
We named the project "Iron Opera" in part because we enjoy the ridiculousness of pairing two very different creative pursuits into a single exploration. Cast iron, with all of the sweat, grit, and grind of that process, combines with a whimsical, often light-hearted musical art form that often includes sweat, grit, and glamour. It’s in part an homage to the late, great iron caster Andy “Griff” Griffiths of Camarthen College, Wales. Along with others, he enjoyed laughing about the idea of a musical version of our cast iron practice. We finally decided on the title “Iron Opera” because the word “opera” is originally an Italian word that means “work” as in a work of art, but also to build, to make, to create – and this lines up really well with the spirit of our Iron Communitas.
Matt Toole on Iron Opera’s start as “Iron… The Musical!”
I met Andy “Griff” Griffiths at Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale, England, in 2006. We were having laughs about iron casting as performance art, which led to the concept of performing iron as musical theatre. It became a running joke that came up whenever we got together at various iron conferences or symposiums.
We kept building on it while I was on sabbatical in Cork, Ireland, doing a project called “Iron R1” with artist James Hayes. When Andy brought his crew over to be a part of it, we once again spent time together. As we are prone to do after working hard in the day, we would all get together in the pub and howl at the idea that two completely dissimilar art forms such as cast iron and musicals could exist together. We titled the running joke “Iron… The Musical!”, which had to be uttered with a flourish of jazz hands. As it turns out, that year we were on the cusp of a batch of musicals with unlikely themes, such as “Book of Mormon” and “Spiderman”, while years later “Hamilton” and “Waitress: the Musical!” continued to push that envelope.
I tend to run with a joke until it either turns into something or people tell me "that's enough". So I am jazzed to see that real musicians could manifest this vision, and actually make something that becomes bigger than the sum of the parts. We wish that Andy, with his background as a professional musician, could see what is happening with this idea that we enjoyed together years ago. Iron Opera is a lighthearted take on presenting our cast iron art community as song, our history in the oral tradition. Life is to be sung aloud to preserve our stories — so everything is a song!
If you are interested in the Iron Opera project, please reach out to us by email at: