Reviewed by: Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Naomi André Gwynne Kuhner Brown (bio) Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. By Naomi André. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 282 pp. In this bleak age, I sometimes find myself wondering whether musicological scholarship is worth doing. Judging from conversations with colleagues, I’m not the only one thinking this way, but it is rare to see the question acknowledged in print. I was gratified to read this, then, on the very last page of Naomi André’s splendid Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement: “It is one thing to do ‘activist’ work when people are being poisoned by toxic water or when an emergency manager has been appointed to take over a school system (two cases I mentioned in the introduction [End Page 191] regarding Flint and Detroit, Michigan, respectively). It is quite another thing to take a stand on an issue that is not about life and death wherein the stakes seem to be so different” (208). The circumstance in which André served as musicological “activist” was a performance in her community of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). This work features problematic depictions of Muslims that are all the more disturbing in “Post 9/11 Michigan” (204), and as a board member for the opera company, André wrote a thoughtful and illuminating insert for the program. In it, she provided historical context for the opera’s musical and dramatic treatment of its Turkish characters, acknowledged the modern circumstances that had the potential to render the opera particularly hurtful, and concluded, “As we strive to share the beauty these works continue to hold, we also recognize the need to engage the ways these works resonate in multiple meanings for contemporary audiences” (206). The board, fearing to create controversy where perhaps none would otherwise exist, ultimately chose to put a far briefer and more general statement into the program. André shares this story as an example of what she calls “engaged musicology,” a set of scholarly practices that reach out to consider and include present-day circumstances and people—not only composers and other creators but also audiences, performers, and others both within and outside of art music’s inner circle. In contrast (but not opposition) to the “public musicology” advanced in recent years by the American Musicological Society, which seeks to make musicological knowledge relevant and helpful to the broader public, engaged musicology “is more of an ideology that incorporates the vantage points of the current diverse publics interpreting a work” (198). By “incorporat[ing] the shared lived experiences of everyone involved” in the creation of music (1), André’s approach makes musicology feel less like aesthetic or historical escapism and more like a way of meaningfully connecting music and music history to our present grim but still-malleable reality. The topic of “black opera”—opera by, about, performed by, and/or received by black people—is fertile ground for André’s rich demonstration of what engaged musicology looks like. She writes in her first chapter, “I want to resituate the genre of opera from a mouthpiece of the oppressor to a vehicle that can be utilized by anyone. There is nothing inherently ‘white’ or ‘nonblack’ about the music, text, and possibilities within the choices one can make in composing opera” (26). Black Opera focuses on the United States and South Africa, covering familiar pieces like Porgy and Bess and legendary performers such as Marian Anderson, along with newer South African works such as Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s Winnie: The Opera and South African artists whose names may be new to many readers, such as performer-director Pauline Malefane. André notes that in treating the topic of black opera, she deals not only with black creations and accomplishments but also with “music that was at times hostile to blacks in terms of representation, the practice of minstrelsy (here in the United States and in South Africa), and participation in the segregated opera houses as whites-only spaces for the first half of the twentieth century in the United States and nearly the full century in South Africa” [End Page 192] (29). André’s vision...
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Jun 1, 2022
Marcus Hartner 
Open Access