Engagement, Participation, and Situated Learning in a Children’s Opera Chorus Program

Abstract

In recent years, opera companies throughout the United Kingdom have begun to provide educational programs for children that offer opportunities for “apprenticeship” training in the context of professional opera productions, alongside formal choral musicianship training. This article outlines a qualitative case study of a recently established children’s opera chorus program located in a northern England city, in which I investigated the extent to which the children became engaged with opera as a genre through their participation in the program. This study also considers the extent to which such programs affected children’s emerging cultural identities and musical preferences in an acculturative sense. Findings suggested that the authenticity and situatedness of the learning experience had a positive impact on the children’s engagement, with those that had participated in main-stage productions being most likely to state that they wished to pursue opera or musical theatre as a career in later life.