Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  At the beginning of both performances I attended, Danielle Wright came out to the audience, welcomed us, and said a version of these program notes to us in person. She also asked us to honor the five murdered trans women in a short silent memorial to them.

  To the first performance, I was able to bring two colleagues/friends who have extensive experience working and volunteering in the Michigan Department of Corrections. One friend is a playwright and scholar who writes about the arts in prisons around the world and coordinates a large student network of volunteers who run drama programs in the Michigan prisons. The other friend had been incarcerated for a couple of decades (her life sentence was commuted in the early 2000s) and has become a leading figure in Michigan reentry initiatives and prison creative-arts programs. In comparison, my experience with prisons was rather limited; however, I had volunteered as a women’s studies teacher in one of the Michigan women’s correctional facilities for four years in the early 2000s.26 All of us were impressed with the sensitivity and care the production brought to depicting life on the inside. My friend who had been incarcerated said they really captured the feeling of the waiting and monotony of the evenings—especially Sunday evenings—and trying to fill the time with cards, such as the staging of the Card Trio (between Carmen, Fresquita, and Mercedes) in act 3. She also thought that the depiction of the pent-up physical energy and tension felt compelling and rang especially true (Escamillo, a retired boxer, is the prison warden and his entrance in act 2 is staged as a choreographed boxing match between two prisoners).

  The group of people directly involved—Danielle Wright, the singers, the musicians in the orchestra, the stage crew—were wonderfully dynamic, highly trained, and much younger than the usual crowd associated with opera (all seemed to be under thirty-five years old). From their biographies in the program, most of them had graduate degrees in vocal performance and all had sung in opera productions before. Many of them had performed in multiple professional opera companies and highly regarded training programs. It was clear that though these young people were at an early stage of their careers, this was not a beginning step for them. All them were accomplished musicians and had professional experience.

  The members of the audience were a diverse group that included friends and family of the singers and people like me who had heard of this performance but had no connection to the performers. Many of the audience members (though not all of us) were under forty years old, a rather rare occurrence and strong deviation from the usual opera crowd. In all my years of operagoing since the mid-1980s, I had never experienced anything like this in terms of a young, highly professional group doing an activist version of a canonic opera, tucked away in unusual venues. The performances during the first weekend took place in downtown Detroit at the Carr Center (on East Grand River Avenue), an arts center with performance space and art galleries that features programming for Detroit youth. The second weekend, the performances were located at the Jam Handy, also in downtown (on East Grand Boulevard). Unlike the Carr Center, with established arts programming, the Jam Handy building feels like a large warehouse that helped “create a raw atmosphere for the prison setting.” Danielle Wright continues in her program notes, “The Jam Handy provides a uniquely ‘Detroit’ backdrop for the production. The space is deconstructed and bare, but is also known to Detroiters for housing creativity in the city through programs like Detroit Soup” (Detroit Soup is a micro-granting dinner that celebrates and funds creative projects in Detroit).27 The Jam Handy sits among the areas of Detroit that have suffered from urban blight and are still undergoing reinvigoration. Unlike opera houses that frequently have their own, or shared, parking lot, attending the evening Carmen performance at the Jam Handy gave me (and a friend) the opportunity to see and momentarily walk in the neighborhood, one far different than those surrounding the Michigan Opera Theatre or Orchestra Hall (where the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performs). The cutting-edge experience of this performance began even outside the theater.

  Opera MODO’s February 2016 production of Carmen has a new relevance for many reasons. The connections to the present moved into the theater and performance. The diversity of the audience felt celebrated; in a production that featured issues around the LGBTQ community, it seemed as though the many members of the gay community in the audience were more visible and welcomed than at other opera performances I have attended. The audience was not only united by our familiarity with the series Orange Is the New Black but also because we all had heard Danielle Wright tell us of the Ruth Ellis Center down the street, the five recent murders of trans people in Detroit, and we had just spent a few moments together in silent tribute honoring their memories and the people they left behind. This experience far exceeded my initial thoughts about an engaged musicology that could examine opera in terms of how it fit into its time and place. Writing about this production makes me feel like opera is approaching a new frontier.

  Challenges in Performing Mozart’s Entführung in Post 9/11 Michigan

  Another opportunity for an engaged musicological practice involves themes in repertory works that are affected by current political situations and now resonate in complicated ways with contemporary audiences. I had the opportunity to be involved in such a situation with a concert performance of Mozart’s late eighteenth-century opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Turkish Seraglio) (1782). I sat on the board of an orchestra in Michigan, in a region that has one of the largest Middle Eastern populations in the world outside the Middle East.28 In a subcommittee meeting I learned of this programming and that the concert was to be the following month (January 2016). While the music is wonderful, this opera contains many unflattering stereotypes of Turkish (and Muslim) people. The opera is an odd genre of being a Singspiel—a hybrid of an opera seria (with highborn “serious” heroic) characters and situations and opera buffa, with more comedic characters and situations. The opera was written before Mozart’s most famous operas (the three Da Ponte collaborations, Marriage of Figaro [1786], Don Giovanni [1787], and Così fan tutte [1791]; and The Magic Flute [1790]), and this opera provides a slightly earlier look at some of the characteristics we have come to associate with the later operas. Hence, it is a great choice for presenting an opera Mozart composed before he fully settled into his later style.

  The comedic element from the Singspiel genre and the presentation of the Turkish and Muslims made me feel a bit uncomfortable in the post September 11 environment, especially for a performance in Michigan. I offered to write something from which a statement (a few paragraphs, perhaps) could be taken and inserted into the program. This would need to be an insert since the official program (cast, notes, advertisements, and the like) for the season was printed months before. I wrote my piece to provide an educational context for the board (which includes the executive director and conductor, both ex officio), thinking that it could be excerpted and revised according to what people decided. I started with a quotation from Ralph Locke’s book on exoticism, the most recent and comprehensive study on this topic.

  “Turkish” operas present a particular problem nowadays. Mozart’s Osmin (in Die Entführung aus dem Serail), for example, is unquestionably nasty, and his nastiness is understood as tied up with his adherence to real or supposed Turkish customs of the day (such as a man’s forcing himself upon a woman or threatening to impale his Christian adversaries). We need to be brought to laugh at certain of his excesses and character flaws—such as his secretly enjoying wine, despite the strictures of the Qur’an—or else the opera does not work. Yet to laugh at Osmin for his graceless womanizing or his religious hypocrisy smacks today of ridiculing the large culture region and the major world religion that he so insists on representing. (Musical Exoticism, 322)

  After Locke’s strong and helpful comments I then continued with an essay containing a detailed discussion so that the board could draw from this material in coming up with a statement for the program insert. My comments ended up being a little longer tha
n I anticipated, but I wanted to present the topic as usefully as possible.

  In our January concerts, we like to commemorate one of the most important and celebrated composers in the Western European musical tradition: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on January 27, 1756. Rather than censor the elements in his music that reflect outdated beliefs of his time, we choose to perform his important works and provide educational and historical context to help us understand how these works fit into their past and how they continue to have meaning in our time today.

  Mozart was in the early generation of Western European composers who incorporated so-called “Turkish” elements in his music. His opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail K.384 (1782) frequently tops the list of classical works written that include “Turkish” or “Exotic” elements in Western European music. Mozart also used these elements in some of his other works (most famously, K.331 the “Rondo alla turca” Piano Sonata and K.219, his “Turkish” Violin Concerto) and he was joined by the leading contemporary composers who also followed this practice (e.g., Haydn, Symphony #100; Beethoven’s “Turkish March” in the finale to his 9th Symphony). Later in the nineteenth century such “Turkish” elements become less common, though they still continued. However, the theme of exoticism—evoking a place, people or social milieu that feel foreign to the intended audience—continued strongly through musical portrayals of China, Japan, India, the Romani (Roma), Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa … the list continues.

  Some of the historical context behind Mozart’s reference to Turkish elements can be seen in the close geographical proximity between Vienna and the Ottoman Empire, the location of modern day Turkey. The last siege of Vienna by the Turkish was in the 1680s and by Mozart’s time in the end of the eighteenth century, the threat was far enough in the past that it was something artists and composers felt more comfortable referring to in their work.

  One of the primary references to a “Turkish” sound was to the Janissary music, an elite troop of the Ottoman empire that had their own bands of musicians (called mehter). These Janissary bands played at functions such as announcing the arrival of special dignitaries and accompanying the military to inspire soldiers on the battlefield. Much of the Western European reference to the Turkish Janissary band was in the West’s perceptions of their music. Large instruments (bass drums, timpani), triangles and cymbals were used for their ability to penetrate through large spaces that could be heard across outdoor open fields. Other musical elements that became associated with a “Turkish” style include: the use of a simple harmonic vocabulary, sudden shifting from one tonal area to another, repeated notes, repeated rhythmic patterns, quick melodic decorations (e.g., short trills, frequent turns), and sudden contrasts in dynamics with an emphasis on loud playing, among others.

  Beyond Mozart’s exotic score, we want to acknowledge several competing elements: (1) the libretto reflects the attitudes of a specific time, the end of the eighteenth century; (2) the European perceptions of that time regarding Turkish and Arabic culture were not fully accurate then, and certainly do not represent our views today; and (3) music is not “innocent” of political content—these works carry cultural meaning.

  In the context of life after the events of September 11, 2001, and the more recent acts of aggression in the past few months (e.g., the San Bernardino, California, attack on December 2 and the Paris massacre on November 13 are only the two largest), we realize that though we are living in a time of religious extremism that has been leading to violent and painful consequences, these actions do not represent the views of most Arabs, people who are Muslim, or people from the Middle East. With our orchestra based in Michigan we live in a region that is home to one of the largest populations of the very diverse communities of people who are Arab, Muslim, and have roots in the Middle East. Our goal is to welcome everyone to our concerts.

  Scholars have long recognized that parts of the world with hegemonic power tend to define other parts of the world in a weaker or less than equal status. In 1978 Palestinian literary theorist and cultural historian Edward Said forged a groundbreaking path by looking at these issues in his book Orientalism and set out helpful constructions for thinking about how the West has defined the East that extends beyond geographical locations and includes ways of engaging other people, culture, and beliefs. In the past decade, ideologies surrounding the “Global North” and the “Global South” have been added to how economies of privilege have shaped our perceptions and interactions with different parts of the world. Symphonies, opera companies and classical music institutions today need to be more assertive in addressing the political content embedded in art. As we strive to share the beauty and energy these works continue to hold, we also recognize the need to engage the ways these works resonate in multiple meanings for contemporary audiences.29

  I sent these comments to the executive director and the one other person on the subcommittee of the board who had also expressed concern about the programming and was supportive of including some statement in the program insert about the context of the work. The board member wrote back right away and said, “Beautifully done.” A few days later, I received a very nervous, yet well-intentioned, phone call from the executive director. I appreciated her desire and energy to talk about this and find a way to handle the situation. From my vantage point, and that is the only vantage point from which I can tell this story, it seemed that she felt I had made a compelling argument but I had moved into very risky territory that would bring a lot of negative attention to something that no one in the audience or board would really notice. Though my statement was not circulated to the board, I think the executive director showed the statement to a few others and came up with a different statement to put in the program insert:

  As with a number of Mozart operas, the plots give offense to some. If you are one of them, we ask your forbearance. Our aim is emphatically not to offend but to share the fruits of one of the great geniuses of classical western music.

  When asked my opinion, I said that I felt this was too general a statement; rather than evade the real issues, it was important to mention something about the real problems pertaining to Islamophobia—people who are Turkish, Muslims, and the stereotypes that are associated with them today. The following sentence was then added in front of the ones above:

  The plot of Die Entführung aus dem Serail is tied up with conflicts between the Viennese and Ottoman Empires at the end of the 18th century—and associated with perceptions of Turkish and Arabic culture at that time—which certainly do not represent our views today.

  I share these comments in an effort to illustrate a few of the challenging aspects of pursuing a nascent model of an engaged musicological practice today. This was a difficult experience on several levels. I did not enjoy picking apart an opera whose music I have enjoyed yet was also making me increasingly uncomfortable in the present political climate. I felt uncomfortable for having enjoyed this opera in the past without thinking of how hurtful its messages were, and I was uncomfortable for the current realization that this portrayal of the broadly conceived “Turkish” was inaccurate and needed some sort of intervention. Additionally, it was not fun trying to bring these ideas to a group of good people, whom I worked with and had admired, and who are dedicated to bringing classical music to audiences today. I felt as though I was an irritating nudge who was implying (not so subtly) that something needed to be done that they had not noticed. It was very awkward to play the role of a social conscience that no one saw the need for. I believe that I did the right thing, and I am grateful to the executive director for her patience and willingness to listen to me, even though I am not sure she fully agreed with my standpoint. 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 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 wher
ein the stakes seem to be so different. The emotional weight of this work is tough when you bring such things to people’s attention and you run the risk of alienating the very people who had been your allies.

  My goal in this book has been to demonstrate a way of asking questions and engaging a range of topics that more closely matched my experience of sitting in the opera house, movie theater, at home, or any other venue for seeing and/or hearing opera performed. I found that the questions I had were not only mine but were also shared by many when I began to talk about them. After I spent time analyzing and writing about the case studies and their cultural contexts in this book, I realized that the type of engagement I had forged with opera could apply to other musical genres, practices, and inquiries. In this conclusion I present this model, with opera as the jumping-off point, for thinking about an engaged musicology. While my analysis has focused on the ways race, gender, sexuality, and nation shape the tools we bring with us to a work, there are other intersectional themes that can be highlighted to reflect how a work has meaning among different audiences. Though we might not have noticed, or want to admit it, the types of questions we bring to our work are directly tied to our perspectives and experiences. Even if we receive a classic education that employs canonical methodologies, relies on recognized readings, and practices approved pedagogies, we are all unique vessels as we acquire this training and embody our differences. A challenge for those of us who study music is the realization that art frequently resonates outside of a single exclusive period, geographical space, or ideology. In performance, the same work is presented to everyone at the same time. However, art touches us in a variety of ways and has very different consequences and interpretations, depending on who we are. We hear, see, feel, and interpret things differently. This book, written by a member trained inside the academic musicological tribe from a vantage point outside many of their shared experiences, honors those differences.