American Opera Research Articles

An Essay about Privacy

Jessye Norman was an American opera singer. She died on October 1, 2019. On October 2, 2019, my wife got a grim diagnosis that put me in a stupor and reminded me, now more than ever, that my generation (that did so much good in the world) stands in line waiting for the Grim Reaper’s call. In a seventy-years (that have gone by too fast) I have watched my peers run from the realms of privacy, spaces where people implemented life plans uninterrupted by neighbours that were discernible, palpable, and real to everybody, to a realm where there is none. Why? This paper takes a stab at answering that question and, in so doing, reclaiming bits of what we have lost with workable ideas, a Michigan statute, the Restatement of Torts, stories, and case law. The undertaking collects things with catch phrases and, with a trove in hand, assembles and weaves together a narrative that will help us. There are guides for the reader to follow to help him through the essay: new beginning, ploughing the ground, tree stumps and stone obstacles, furrowed fields, and so on. It ends with a deep conviction that “we’ve relinquished too much of ourselves to claim anything as private.” Everybody knows something about everybody. Who you are and what you are and where you have been are in the hands of others.

A Conversation with James Maddalena, Part 1

James Maddalena (born 1954) is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston, directed by Peter Sellars. He has since reprised it over a hundred times. It was recorded for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddalena’s role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic.[3] He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers. In addition to American opera, Maddalena has sung a broad operatic repertoire which ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and Verdi to modern composers like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. He is also a concert artist whose regular performances include works by Bach, Handel and Schubert, as well as those by modern composers.

Samuel Barber’s chamber and vocal lyrics in the mirror of performance interpretation (on the example of «Three songs», op. 10 to the words by J. Joyce)

Samuel Barber’s chamber and vocal lyrics in the mirror of performance interpretation (on the example of «Three songs», op. 10 to the words by J. Joyce)

Developing Talents

Developing Talents

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

A Conversation with James Maddalena, Part 2

James Maddalena (born 1954) is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston, directed by Peter Sellars. He has since reprised it over a hundred times. It was recorded for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddalena’s role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic.[3] He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers. In addition to American opera, Maddalena has sung a broad operatic repertoire which ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and Verdi to modern composers like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. He is also a concert artist whose regular performances include works by Bach, Handel and Schubert, as well as those by modern composers. (Part 2 of a 2-part series.)

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

Making an American Opera Career: Conductor May Valentine (1890–1974) and a Woman's Role(s) in the Business of Opera

The Operative Archive: American Opera History – by Colleen Renihan (Book)

[no abstract]

Negotiating Convention: Pop-Ups and Populism at the San Francisco Opera

AbstractTwenty-first-century North American opera houses have attempted to bring in new audiences to make up for a declining and aging population of subscribers through means both traditional and unorthodox. The San Francisco Opera's SF Lab Initiative (2015–2018) was created with such goals in mind. Alternative forms of programming, which I categorize as auxiliary programming, have gained traction as a marketing and aesthetic strategy in recent years, and ultimately signal a dramatic shift in approaches to regional opera production in the United States. While scholars have explored the creation and funding of contemporary operatic productions in the United States, little attention has been given to forms of programming beyond the operatic mainstage. Using interviews with company members and analysis of advertising and reception of the events, I examine the SFO Lab programming as a site of negotiation between operatic convention and experimentation. Based on a populist vision of operatic access, the SF Opera Lab re-contextualized rather than eliminated class and intellectual hierarchies. More broadly, this application of experimental performativity contributes to discourses about Pan-American experimentalism(s) and demonstrates the ways in which a focus on local encounters can yield broad applications for genres and/or scenes beyond opera in the United States.

FEMALE IMAGES IN OPERA CREATIVITY OF THE AMERICAN COMPOSERS

The purpose of this article is to analyze and understand the interpretation of female images in the works of Opera composer’s national American school. One of the reasons, which prompted the author to dive into the problem and answers Opera performances of American composers such as K. Floyd, John. K. Menotti, J. Gershwin. Methods. In achieving this goal, applied the following research methods a namely the source, comparison, systematization, analysis, generalization of the research problem, used many specialized works on the theory and history of culture. Scientific novelty of the work is that needs to expand views about the development of the Opera genre in American music. In addition, the inspection should be disclosed images of women in the perspective of self-identity of American music like the classic design in the field of Opera. This is due to the necessity of paying attention by the singer relative to the faithful and meaningful interpretation of the female character (Clara – George. Gershwin), Susanna K. Floyd, Monica K. Menotti), as in the dramaturgic sense, and the performing, as well as the emphasis on the vocal abilities of the singer and his acting skills. Conclusions. The analysis of this study was to identify patterns in the musical and thematic material of American Opera composers (K. Floyd, John. K. Menotti, J.Gershwin). In the plots of the operas presented by the harsh realities of the treatment of women at that time. In the women's images traced the line of resistance, the struggle for the future bright and strong-willed traits. The suffering and pain which resonates with the despair, but at the end of the story, spill over into the acceptance of his dark fate. Singer, in the performance of these works, will be able to learn the history of the characters, to understand their national and ideological features, for a more accurate interpretation of the characters in the performance of solo numbers in the Opera. Note also that the transformation of women’s images, which provides an opportunity to trace the psychological and spiritual aspects of their development. This primarily happens due to the influence of social, political and historical moments.

Inclusive Publics and Modern Technologies: An Introduction to Three Essays on Early Twentieth-Century American Opera

The three essays brought together in this cluster are immersed in themes that characterize “Americanness” in the twentieth century. They provide a microcosm of critical issues that define opera in the United States during these first decades when the nation helped shape the creation of opera rather than principally being a site for importing European works. Although most of the composers discussed in these articles were born in Europe (Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek) and only a few in the United States (Marc Blitzstein and George Antheil), all of them spent significant time in the United States, and all of the works discussed are either set in the United States, utilize American characters, or tied to important American themes.

There and Back Again: Zeitoper and the Transatlantic Search for a Uniquely American Opera in the 1920s

AbstractThis article argues that in the late 1920s, the German genre of Zeitoper paradoxically became an essential component of the search for a new kind of uniquely American opera, resulting in a transatlantic cycle of mutual influence. This influence was possible because Germans and Americans alike saw the United States as the embodiment of modern life and technology. American producers and composers thus adapted German Zeitoper to bring it more in line with Americans’ self-image. I examine this dynamic by juxtaposing two German and two American Zeitopern, looking specifically at their engagement with jazz, film, race, and American popular musical theater: Paul Hindemith's Hin und zurück, Marc Blitzstein's Triple-Sec (inspired by Hindemith's opera), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in the United States, and the unsuccessful effort to stage George Antheil's Transatlantic (modeled on Jonny and revised under the mentorship of Krenek) in New York. Both Germans’ image of America and Americans’ self-image were as much real as imagined, and although the similarities between them facilitated this cultural exchange, their differences also impeded it.

"Write Us into Existence": An Interview with Sokunthary Svay

Sokunthary Svay is a Cambodian American writer and activist who grew up in the Bronx, New York. Her poetry, essays, and reviews appear in such publications as WSQ, Mekong Review, and Hyphen. Published in 2017, Apsara in New York is her first poetry collection. Svay is a founding member and board president of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA) and has been awarded an American Opera Projects Composers & the Voice Fellowship for 2017–2019 and the 2018 Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poets House. She is emerging as an important critic of and groundbreaking voice within Asian American cultural production. Rejecting the genre of survival memoirs, Svay creates a variety of personae across gender and generation. Her choice of language—Khmer, formal English, and urban vernacular—captures the individuality and complexity of each of these perspectives. As a performer, Svay draws on music and theater to move her poems beyond the page. Anita Baksh, Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York, conducted this interview with Svay in spring 2018.

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis

Book Reviews 157 Bridgett M. Davis. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Pp. 308. Bibliography. Illustrations. Cloth: $28.00. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers chronicles the Davis family’s involvement in “The Numbers,” or underground lottery, in Detroit from 1950s to the early 1990s. The author, Bridgett Davis, is both a novelist and Fannie Davis’s youngest daughter. The World According to Fannie Davis is her first memoir: a highly engaging, well-researched page-turner that diversifies our understanding of black social history and labor by moving beyond the auto industry. The book details Bridgett Davis’s mother and father’s postwar migration from Nashville to Detroit, her mother’s subsequent multidecade career as a black female numbers runner and banker, and the author’s coming-of-age story. A cross-generational “love letter” to her mother that, Davis explains, tells “her story, and mine,” Bridgett Davis stresses and chronicles her mother’s fearlessness, determination, and willingness to transgress the narrow boundaries placed on black women and families to “make a way out of no way” and provide her family with “a good life at great expense” (p. 14). As the book makes clear, Fannie Davis, one of only two black women numbers bankers in Detroit, commanded respect rather than respectability. While the author’s detailed account of her mother’s career in The Numbers is both well-crafted and fascinating, her ability to weave this story within the broader historical context of structural racism, black class identity and formation, and black history and culture stands out, providing a rich social history of postwar black migrants and black Detroit, particularly of the non-autoworking and non-professional segment of the black population that Davis refers to as “blue-collar bourgeoisie” (p. 94). The World According to Fannie Davis is divided into three sections. The first, “Hitsville, USA,” refers to the centrality of The Numbers to black life, culture, and survival in Detroit during the economic downturn of the 1950s and early ’60s and is told through the lens of the Davis family’s migration to Detroit from Nashville. The second section, “Hey, You Never Know,” explores rising black political consciousness, luck, prosperity, and spiritualism in working-class culture; Mrs. Davis’s economic success and the growth of her business; black economic nationalism; and backlash from the police and state as black Detroit and black numbers operators rose in prominence during the late 1960s and ’70s. The third and final section deftly documents Fannie Davis’s ability to adapt and maintain her business—which remained active but slowed 158 The Michigan Historical Review in the 1980s—despite law enforcement crackdowns, inflammatory, and racialized depictions of the illegal “Numbers racket,” and the legalization and expansion of the state lottery. This section, told through the author’s perspective, is interlaced with a discussion of her school years, burgeoning career, and her relationship to her mother’s secretive life story before and after Fannie Davis’s death in 1992. The World According to Fannie Davis sheds important new light on the history of black Detroit. While not a formal work of history, it uses the Davis family’s story to discuss how structural racism impacted black Detroiters’ daily lives and struggles as well as their multi-varied efforts to transcend these imposed limitations. The World According to Fannie Davis should appeal to anyone with an interest in Detroit, urban history, and African American history, and is perfectly suited for classroom use. David A. Goldberg Wayne State University James Berton Harris. Once upon a Time at the Opera House: Drama at Three Historic Michigan Theaters, 1882-1928. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019. Pp. 240. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Cloth: $54.95. The golden age of American opera houses wasn’t really about opera, James Berton Harris reminds us in Once upon a Time at the Opera House. Using the performance facilities in three small Michigan cities as a template, Harris recalls a time when a municipality’s “opera house” was merely its main theatrical space—a home for nonmusical plays, band...

Sounding social justice in American opera: race and gender in Stinney: an American execution

ABSTRACTIn 1944, George Stinney Jr., an African American boy, aged fourteen, was falsely accused of rape and murder; he became the youngest person to be executed in the United States. Seventy years later, Frances Pollock’s opera, Stinney: an American Execution, premiered in Baltimore, Maryland. This article explores how Stinney exposes ongoing issues of race and gender inequality in the United States. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews, I investigate the opera’s collaborative creation process, complex reception, and collective impact. I argue that Stinney serves as a work of musical activism by bringing the marginalized cultural experiences of African Americans, and women of colour specifically, to the fore. Ultimately, Stinney provides an opportunity for diverse audiences to engage in discussions about how we as a society can address injustice and enact social change.

A Historian’s Journey with Sylvia Olden Lee and Camilla Williams, African American Opera Pioneers

This article is a historiography that explores and reflects upon the author’s study of Sylvia Olden Lee and Camilla Williams, African-American women who were each a pioneer in operatic performance. The article highlights Lee and Williams’s contributions to singing performance and pedagogy, and while doing so, the author reflects on her personal journey as a historian and biographer of African-American vocal history.

RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 9 2 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R On 7 May 2017 New York’s Metropolitan Opera o≈cially celebrated with a gala evening the fiftieth anniversary of performances in the ‘‘New Met,’’ a term employed in its initial years to distinguish the current building at Lincoln Center from the 1883 ‘‘Old Met,’’ the ‘‘yellow brick brewery’’ at Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan. That first, 1966–67 season is also o≈cially celebrated by a box of CDs titled The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary Met Performances from 1966–67 (Met Opera B01LYTT7LP, 22 CDs). This o≈cially produced set contains recordings of nine radio broadcasts and the soundtrack from the televised opening night, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, as well as an additional CD of excerpts from seven other broadcasts. Each opera but one has its own two-CD cardboard container with a booklet and illustrations; Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is on three CDs. Also included is a booklet containing more photos and a brief, graceful essay by Barbara Haws, the Met’s current historian. The Met has issued such boxes before, as with their 2013 pair of Verdi at the Met (Sony, B00DWOUY3Y, 20 CDs) and Wagner at the Met (Sony, B00AL6SM0S, 25 CDs), and they have fixed here those sets’ problem of too-snug openings for their CDs. But this is the first Met set devoted to one season only. 1 9 3 R It may be claimed that the 1966–67 season was exceptional as well as historic. There were nine new productions, two of which were of American operas commissioned for the opening season. Old favorites were moved to the new house, many with star performers new and old: Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Martina Arroyo, Renata Scotto, and Mirella Freni, to name only some sopranos, appeared. The ‘‘Three Tenors’’ had not yet burst onto the Met scene, so one had to make do with Franco Corelli, Richard Tucker, Nicolai Gedda, Jess Thomas, Jon Vickers, James King, and James MacCracken, again naming only some of the singers. And there were great mezzos, baritones, and basses. Conductors were more variable, but Karl Böhm, Thomas Schippers , Zubin Mehta, and Colin Davis all made strong impressions. General Manager Rudolf Bing had reason to be proud. The house itself, which is only glimpsed here in photographs, was not quite what we had wanted or expected. The dimensions at the front and on the sides had to be reduced, so the grand staircase was shortened and not very grand, and the huge Marc Chagall murals at either side of the second level were (and are) just behind the glass at the front and hard to see up close. Inside, the auditorium and stage were as planned, but the decor was both overdone and underdone at once. Each tier of seats was faced by white protruding outcrops that looked like ill-designed automobile grills from the fifties, with gold sashes or ropes draped across the tops and gold corrugations on the bottoms – for the acoustics, we were told. The walls were all covered in outwardly bowed wood from a single African rosewood tree that looked exactly like formica – again for the acoustics. The proscenium surround was nondescript (we missed the old house’s proscenium for the first time), ridged in various unappealing ways, crowned with an awful sculpture unconnected with anything musical, and all brightly gilded – so brightly that it had to be painted darker in succeeding seasons because spotlights and other house lighting created a blinding glare on it. The highlight of the hall was the set of tasteful (Austrian) starburst lighting fixtures, twenty-one of which rose to the scalloped ceiling (gilded, of course) when an opera began. In typical New York fashion, enough was not enough, and clusters of small lights, looking like cheap costume brooches, were added to the 1 9 4 F A U L K N E R Y corrugated bottoms of all the tiers. Everywhere you looked there was glitter...

Jennifer Higdon, Cold Mountain. Gene Scheer, librettist, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, conductor, Santa Fe Opera [World Premiere live recording]. Pentatone, American Operas 12686, 2016, 2 CDs.

Jennifer Higdon, Cold Mountain. Gene Scheer, librettist, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, conductor, Santa Fe Opera [World Premiere live recording]. Pentatone, American Operas 12686, 2016, 2 CDs. - Volume 11 Issue 4

“My Answer to What Music Theatre Can Be”: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave

Research Article| April 01 2017 “My Answer to What Music Theatre Can Be”: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave Ryan Ebright Ryan Ebright Ryan Ebright serves as an instructor of musicology at Bowling Green State University. He earned his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and also holds an M.M. degree in musicology and vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory. His research focuses on music for the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on contemporary opera, minimalism, and nineteenth- century lieder. His current project, Making American Opera for the Modern Age, centers on the negotiation of cultural politics, artistic innovation, and the politics of institution and genre in the creation of new American operas from the 1980s to the present. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2017) 35 (1): 29–50. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.1.0029 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ryan Ebright; “My Answer to What Music Theatre Can Be”: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave. American Music 1 January 2017; 35 (1): 29–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.1.0029 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Funding “Opera for the 80s and Beyond”: The Role of Impresarios in Creating a New American Repertoire

Research Article| April 01 2017 Funding “Opera for the 80s and Beyond”: The Role of Impresarios in Creating a New American Repertoire Sasha Metcalf Sasha Metcalf Sasha Metcalf is a visiting assistant professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses on Western art music, popular music, and reception history. Her research examines the interplay between administrators, artists, and performing arts institutions in late twentieth-century American opera. She has presented at conferences of the American Musicological Society and Society for American Music, and she currently serves as newsletter editor of the Society for Minimalist Music. She completed her PhD in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2017) 35 (1): 7–28. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.1.0007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sasha Metcalf; Funding “Opera for the 80s and Beyond”: The Role of Impresarios in Creating a New American Repertoire. American Music 1 January 2017; 35 (1): 7–28. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.1.0007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.