by Naomi Andre
Yet there are also compelling reasons to look at works from the past in terms of how they resonate today. In his seminal essay about the supposed interdependent roles of the author and the reader, Roland Barthes places a new importance on the reader: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” A few sentences later he ends the essay with the bold statement that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”4 I find this a compelling challenge to attend to the voices of the composer and the listener alike. In the case of opera, the “readers” are the people doing the interpreting: audience members.
However, what makes music performance different from reading written texts, as Edward Cone and others have written, is the added role of the performer.5 As I explore in this book, the performing body is not a neutral zone or a blank slate. This body has multiple overlapping identities in terms of the expression of gender, race and ethnicity, and national origin—to name the particular markers I have analyzed in the greatest depth (but certainly not the only important areas of representation). Moreover, the bodies in the audience are also ciphers of meaning that can read, and be read, in multiple ways. I have extended the line of inquiry around artistic interpretation to include these different people: the artists (who, in most cases here, are the composer and librettist), the performers onstage, and the people in the audience.
I am writing from the vantage point of the audience. As a black woman, my voice interweaves my experiences of gender and race. Such racialized and gendered experiences inform Patricia Hill Collins’s “black woman’s standpoint” theory, a model that shows how people who share a social situation may express shared and similar experiences that empower collective consciousness and political action.6 I also am aware that marginalized communities interact with the dominant culture in ways that can be damaging as well as liberating. In his study Education for Critical Consciousness Paulo Freire provides the paradigms of “integration,” the behavior of a flexible democratic system that employs critical thought, and “adaptation,” the assimilation to an authoritarian oppressive regime, as ways to respond to the dominant culture.7 In my study, I read the voices of opera creators, performers, and audiences in an integrative mode inspired by Freire. I do not categorize all of opera as outdated exemplars of an irrelevant genre that speaks only to white, European Western audiences. To do so would both oversimplify and deny the artistic treasures of Western civilization to nonwhite people due only to a perceived scientific difference based on skin color, a misleading visual marker that has no scientific basis.8 Artistic and intellectual achievement based on scientific genetic differences between people of different racial and ethnic categories has been disproved. Vast differences in achievement due to social and economic injustice and systemic prejudice based on racial and ethnic difference are another matter, and those have been assumed in this study. As a genre, opera is not inherently flawed with racist sexist negative stereotypes. Instead, it works as a mouthpiece, a conduit, through which a reflection of a society’s cultural ideology—which may include those stereotypes—can be heard and seen.
Returning to Freire, I find his analysis of overcoming oppression to be helpful in my goals for engaging opera in this book. He outlines a process in which both the oppressed and the oppressor struggle to see each other as more fully human and, thus, they both regain their humanity. As an art that speaks through text, music, and staging, opera employs many of our senses and allows us to see life situations reenacted on the stage in ways that encompass the grandiose as well as the subtle and nuanced. It is a genre that elicits a wide range of our emotions (love, anger, joy, fear, and so on); it makes us think and feel. I find opera to be in an important, albeit unlikely, position to make changes regarding how we can think and feel about ourselves, as well as new situations and, possibly, new groups of people. Freire states that “the pedagogy of the oppressed … is the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation.” Through its role in shaping how we see ourselves and others, opera, as I see it, has a role in this liberation.9
In my work I show how blacks in the United States and South Africa have recently used the genre of opera not just as performers (especially as singers) but also as composers and librettists.10 Not only are operas from the Western European tradition being performed in traditional productions across the world with black performers, but they are also present in avantgarde stagings where the action is placed in all-black settings and given new meanings. Additionally, black artists are working with nonblack artists in interracial collaborations and composing new stories with narratives around black experiences. Opera has become a space where black people are writing themselves into history. In a genre where blackness had been routinely seen in negative stereotypical ways, a new generation across the Atlantic in the United States and South Africa is rewriting the terms for representing blackness in opera.11 I read such a move as empowering and liberating and one that can harness political action.
To help distinguish between current directions in musicology and the engaged musicological analysis I am talking about, the next sections include a discussion of “public musicology,” a recent construction of the American Musicological Society. I then bring in two real-life situations where my training as a musicologist and my experience in charged musical situations presented opportunities to examine what is at stake with an engaged musicological ideology. The first experience is about a cutting-edge recent production of Bizet’s Carmen; the second is about a concert-version performance of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
Public Musicology and an Engaged Musicology
In the August 2013 issue of the American Musicological Society’s AMS Newsletter the president of the AMS, Christopher Reynolds, wrote about three new initiatives: a new member directory, a new blog, and a newly endowed plenary lecture at the annual meeting. The new AMS blog had its genesis in postings to the AMS list (a moderated musicology discussion listserv) in 2011 and discussions at the AMS’s board of directors’ retreat in March 2012 about the discipline’s “relevance and viability to the world at large.”12 Reynolds related that, prodded by an email “lamenting our relative invisibility, many—including [Reynolds himself]—identified the variety of ways in which individual members have successfully made an impact outside of academia and professional journals.”13 Later on Reynolds wrote:
The [AMS] Board wanted to find a way to communicate what it is we do in language that would be accessible to constituencies we want to reach, including performers and concert-goers. After considering various possibilities we agreed at our March 2013 meeting to launch an official AMS blog, which we dubbed Musicology Now.14
In this introduction to the new AMS blog, the emphasis seems to be on the lack of recognition that musicologists receive and the frustration that important information about music is not reaching a wider audience. The target audience as stated are “performers and concert-goers.” The description of the new blog followed.
Musicology Now is a blog from the American Musicological Society, written by its members for the general public. It seeks to promote the results of recent research and discovery in the field of music history, foster colloquy, and generate enthusiasm for the subject matter. Using links, images, and sound, it references conversations within and around the academy and in the principal institutions of music making around the world.15
Here the targeted audience is mentioned as the general public, and through the use of technology (links, images, and sound) the focus “references conversations within and around the academy” as well as the leading international performance institutions. From my further investigation of public musicology in practice, the primary concerns seem to be a desire to make research from the academy known to the classical music community and to discover a way to celebrate the work of people doing musicology outside traditional academic positions.16<
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There is nothing in my construction of an “engaged musicology” that is at odds with the AMS “public musicology”; however, they seem to occupy different spaces. An engaged musicology is more of an ideology that incorporates the vantage points of the current diverse publics interpreting a work. In addition to the traditional tools of musicological analysis, engaged musicology emphasizes how a specific musical work has meaning today. In public musicology the emphasis seems to be more on an educational desire to share the accepted knowledge of specialists with a less-informed audience. It is a dissemination issue rather than how the interpretation engages the experiences of the audience. Public musicology presents a “musicologically correct” discussion of the music. An engaged musicology finds a way to incorporate some of the experiences of the public into an historically informed interpretation.
In a recent alumni publication from a musicology department at an Ivy League institution I saw an article about their graduate students involved in a new “public service initiative.” I was eager to see what they were doing—connections to the immediate community, outreach to public schools, addressing the inequities of education where exposure to classical and art music repertories are left to the wealthier families of the community who can afford lessons for their children—the opportunities could be endless. As I anticipated reading about this, I also wished that there had been a public-service music forum for students when I was in graduate school. Instead of seeing graduate students out in the community “field,” the newsletter showed a picture of graduate students sitting around a seminar table in a classroom working on their laptops participating in a “Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.” My initial response was twofold: I was both disappointed that this was the chosen activity (and not something more grassroots, such as what I mentioned above) and, upon further consideration, also pleased that these students were creating and updating entries and jumping into a realm that would, indeed, have a broad impact on the public who sought accurate and dependable information about music. Subscriptions to the Oxford Music Online dictionaries (the online gateway to the New Grove Music Dictionaries) that are the standard scholarly reference for the most critically correct musicological information are prohibitively expensive for the average person who does not have access through a university or other institutional affiliation. Wikipedia is free (provided you have basic internet access) and serves as the go-to reference for most people who need information on anything, and though the classical/art music entries can be riddled with inaccuracies, it is nevertheless a source people frequently use and trust. Despite my initial reservations, I decided that it was good that these top musicology graduate students were helping to make a public resource on music knowledge stronger and better.
I have characterized public musicology in a way that is not exuberantly flattering because I think it has yet to reach its potential. I honor what I sense to be the energy behind wanting to find a way to bring the knowledge and exciting ideas that musicologists (people who are scholars and lovers of music and, frequently, performing musicians) want to share with others who are not researchers. These “Others” range from professional musicians to elementary music teachers, lawyers with subscriptions to the symphony, and people who never go to concerts and might be intimidated by the gatekeeping around classical music culture (for example, walking into most opera houses is a daunting event when it is your first time). I am encouraged by the recent voices in musicology (including some on the Musicology Now blog) who are questioning and exposing areas for growth and deeper inclusion within the discipline. William Cheng’s recent monograph, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good, moves boldly with a critique of the vicious culture so present in many humanities disciplines (including musicology) and a call to move toward a more compassionate aesthetics for acknowledging what is valued.17 This includes not only a social justice element to our endeavors but also a moral component. As I understand this articulation of justice, what is needed more than a “do no harm” attitude is a reparative mission that helps heal and strengthen along the way. It is this re-envisioning of the experts, audiences, and publics that an engaged musicological practice brings together in the type of music analysis I am presenting in this book.
Trans Carmen in Prison
Another example of a critically engaged musicological practice involves concerts and opera productions that speak directly to the experiences and cultures of current audiences. Let me outline a recent production of Bizet’s Carmen that takes the issues of gender, sexuality, class, and setting in new directions. Whereas U-Carmen eKhayelitsha brought the opera into the townships of South Africa, Opera MODO (a fairly new independent opera company in Detroit, Michigan) sets the opera in an all-female minimum-security prison with a countertenor, alternating with the more traditional mezzo-soprano, in the title role.18 Both singers portrayed a transgendered female Carmen. The publicity materials announcing the opera and soliciting funding for support make the association between this opera setting and the hit HBO series Orange Is the New Black with the connection between a women’s prison and the prominence of a transgender woman character “‘Carmen’ as operatic ‘Orange Is the New Black’ featuring transgender Carmen.” In further statements, the website outlines that this production
will bring a new dynamic to a story familiar to seasoned opera lovers while also appealing to new audiences through a modern and more relatable setting. Finally—and most importantly—we will feature a character from the underrepresented and often misunderstood transgender population. The role of Carmen, in particular, is significant because she is the ultimate seductress who garners power from her feminine beauty and sexuality. A transgender Carmen showcases a role model for the transgender community who is not seen as atypical in regards to her gender, but rather, one who is praised as an ideal of beauty and desire.19
The connection between the prison setting and a transgender woman is provocative, but the element of casting a countertenor to sing Carmen adds another dimension. The sound of a countertenor voice is not a well-known timbre to many people outside the classical music world, and it is not even familiar to all opera fans. A countertenor’s voice is a treble timbre that comes from a man singing in his head voice. This type of falsetto is also described with terms around the vocal mode (second-mode phonation) and pharyngeal production.20 The art of such singing has gained new ground since the important strides by Alfred Deller (1912–1979) in the first half of the twentieth century and has become a newer specialty since the early 1990s. There is a generation of singers who have bought this singing style into prominence (Derek Lee Ragin, David Daniels, Brian Asawa, Darryl Taylor, Philippe Jaroussky, and John Holiday to name just a small group).21
There is an uncanny experience of hearing a countertenor, especially in a live performance. With the level of expertise today, many countertenors can sound like women singing—the vibrato, the richness, and the vocal timbre can make experienced opera listeners wonder about the gender-sex identification of the singer. Most countertenors sing roles in opera that were originally written for the castrato singers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in roles by composers from Nicola Porpora in the seventeenth century through Handel and Mozart in the eighteenth century, and even Rossini in the early nineteenth century. Such an association with music written for castrati only heightens the countertenor’s connection to a gendered ambiguity. While modern countertenors are genetically male singers who have perfected a way of singing that can make them sound like a female singer, the castrato tradition involved the orchiectomy surgery to a young boy before he reached puberty and altered the circulation of growth androgens; hence, the “sex” (genetic identification) of a castrato person once adulthood was reached has been debated and is mitigated through cultural contexts.22
Casting Carmen, one of the greatest sex symbols of unbridled feminine desire and power in opera, as a transgender woman indeed showcased a new role model for the transgendered community. The sonic world of the opera was cut down i
n size (a small chorus, a reduced orchestra) and the performance venues were not traditional stages but large rooms and open spaces where the orchestra was interspersed within the audience and the audience sat just a few feet away from the singers. I was fortunate to attend two (of the four) performances of this production of Carmen. In one performance Carmen was sung by the countertenor and Don Jose was a soprano (sung by a woman). In the other performance, Carmen was sung by a woman performing the role as a man singing as a trans woman and Don Jose was the same soprano who sang opposite the countertenor Carmen.23 The male characters sung by men were Le Remendado, Moralès, and Escamillo, who also doubled as guards for the women’s prison and male chorus.
Though a description of these performances might almost sound kitschy and campy, that was not at all the effect in person. With major funding from the Knight Foundation, the company also partnered with the Ruth Ellis Center, a place for at-risk LGBTQ youth.24 In the program, Danielle Wright, executive director and founder of Opera MODO, wrote an extended welcome and program notes for her vision of the production and its dramaturgy. She also included information about the local trans community in Detroit:
We hope that this production begins a dialogue in metro Detroit about LGBTQ reception and inclusion in society. In order to further facilitate this, we’ve partnered with the Ruth Ellis Center and incorporated a sensitivity training into our rehearsal process in order to be sure we are doing all we can to represent the LGBTQ community appropriately. I never realized how many parallels the story of Carmen has with recent events in the Detroit trans community until we started digging deep. There have been at least five murders of trans women in the past two years—murdered by their partners. Partners who could not understand that they loved someone who finally had the freedom to become themselves. My hope is that in attending these productions, our community will be inspired to grow in its awareness to provide help, jobs, support for the trans community.25