Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  22. Much has been written about South African black and colored choral traditions (see Olwage, “Discipline and Choralism” and “Scriptions of the Choral;” Jorritsma, Sonic Spaces; and Muller, Rituals of Fertility) with a special emphasis on migrant workers and the isicathamiya and mbube singing styles (Erlmann, “Migration and Performance”; Coplan, In Township Tonight!). The Eoan Group, a coloured arts and civic organization based in Cape Town since 1933, had an active opera company in the 1950s–1970s and provides an exception to the all-white opera scene before 1994.

  23. The Cape Town Opera presented the world premiere of African Songbook: A Tribute to the Life of Nelson Mandela at the Artscape Opera House in 2010; after the premiere the title was changed to Mandela Trilogy. The work was commissioned to capture three periods in Mandela’s life by two nonblack South African composers, Péter Louis van Dijk and Mike Campbell. The work has been revived in Johannesburg and Durban (2010); Cardiff, Wales (2012); Munich, Germany (2014); Ravenna, Italy (June 2016); and in the United Kingdom (Wales, Ireland, and England, August–September 2016). http://mandelatrilogy.com/index.php/performance-listings.

  The Cape Town Opera website describes the work as “an encounter with traditional rural music, a jazz musical, and an opera—representing the diversity of expression in contemporary South Africa.” http://www.capetownopera.co.za/touring/mandelatrilogy.

  24. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, set in the Stellenbosch wine region outside Cape Town, performed by the University of Cape Town opera program, September 2010. Puccini’s La Bohème translated into Xhosa as Abanxaxhi and adapted into the present time in South Africa by the Isango Ensemble, March 2012. This adaptation has been produced on film as Breathe Umphefumlo (directed by Mark Dornford-May, Fortissimo Films [2015]). With a different name (Dimpho di Kopane) the Isango Ensemble also translated Bizet’s Carmen from the French into Xhosa, adapted it into modern-day Khayelitsha as U-Carmen eKhayelitsha in 2005.

  25. In the United States there are a few all-black opera companies, such as the Harlem Opera Theater and Opera Ebony, who are doing excellent work with productions, vocal competitions, and support for getting more black people interested in and performing opera. A comparison between the United States and South Africa is also influenced by the different racial/ethnic populations in both countries. For the United States, the white majority is contrasted to a variety of underrepresented people who are black, Latinx, Native Americans, and from multiple Asian countries.

  26. Portobello Opera became Dimpho di Kopane, which is now the Isango Ensemble opera company.

  27. For information about The Passion of Winnie, see Meersman, “Singing Winnie in Toronto.”

  28. Mfundi Vundla (b. 1946) is the creator of the first English soap opera in South Africa after apartheid, Generations. He got involved with the Winnie opera project after hearing about The Passion of Winnie (when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was denied a visa by the Canadian government to attend the premiere) and helped turn the work into Winnie: The Opera through his experience with film, television, and media. He helped revise the libretto and procure funding for the State Theatre premiere.

  29. The distinctions between musical theater genres—such as opera, operetta, and musical—are complicated and deserve rich discussion. My point here is to use the composer’s designation for the work as an opera and, in my subjective opinion as an opera scholar, support this categorization for the emotional and musical weight and pathos in Winnie: The Opera.

  30. As a side note, projected animated scenes in the background is beginning to feel like a South African characteristic, given the work of William Kentridge with his several opera productions; this was quite an integral feature of his acclaimed 2010 production of Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose, Kentridge’s first production to premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He followed this with a 2015 production of Alban Berg’s Lulu at the Met that also used animated scenes projected in the background.

  31. Tutu, “Special Investigation,” 555, paragraph 2.

  32. Ibid., 569–70, paragraphs 59–60.

  33. Ibid., 570, text after paragraph 60.

  34. Holiday, “Forgiving and Forgetting,” 54.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Tutu, “Special Investigation,” 578, paragraph 99.

  37. In the program for the premiere, there were longer descriptions for each scene in the “Opera Synopsis.”

  38. The Mothers of the Missing bring to mind several international women’s organizations that have worked nonviolently for human rights and justice. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina have a close resonance with the mothers whose children disappeared during the “Dirty War” in the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Other related groups include the vast international network of the Women in Black and—possibly—the Black Sash organization in South Africa that began in 1955 and still continues today.

  39. Program booklet, “Opera Synopsis.”

  40. Thanks to my colleague Donato Somma for bringing my attention to the Amagqirha of the Xhosa tradition and their visual connection to the Mothers of the Missing.

  41. Program booklet, “Music notes from the Composer.”

  42. Thanks to my colleague Donato Somma for bringing to my attention this fact about the TRC hearings and how they were reported on in the news.

  Conclusion

  1. hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, 1.

  2. The discourse around performance practice in musicology is an example of the ways musicology as a discipline reconstructed (through treatises, contemporaneous accounts, and other historical documents) ways to perform music from Gregorian chant through the Renaissance and beyond that incorporated traditions not written down. The discipline has also been self-reflective in how much we can ever fully know about the complete authenticity and historical accuracy of such performances; it is impossible to recreate such performances exactly, partially because we are different people living in a different world with the experience of hearing music that has come after the period we are recreating.

  3. André, Voicing Gender.

  4. Barthes, “Death of the Author.”

  5. A select list of writings on this rich topic include Cone, Composer’s Voice; Abbate, Unsung Voices and “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?”; Cavarero, For More than One Voice; Levin, Unsettling Opera; Eidsheim, Sensing Sound and “Sensing Voice.”

  6. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 21–32.

  7. Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, 21.

  8. A helpful overview of the arguments around the construction of race and its failed scientific basis can be found in Roberts, Fatal Invention.

  9. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53.

  10. With one exception (Carmen Jones, written for Broadway in 1943 and made into a film in 1954), the operas this study come from productions since 2000. Several of the operas were composed after 2000: Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), From the Diary of Sally Hemings (2000), Winnie: The Opera (2010); some of them from before: Bizet’s Carmen (1875) and Porgy and Bess (1935). I focus, however, on more recent adaptations of the older works (U-Carmen eKhayelitsha [2005] and the Lori Parks production of Porgy and Bess [2011]).

  11. For an overview to this topic, see André, Bryan, and Saylor, Blackness in Opera.

  12. In the “President’s Message: Covering the AMS” in the previous year’s AMS Newsletter (vol. 42, no.1 [February 2012]: 2), Anne Walters Robinson also mentions public musicology as something to focus on: “How can we do ‘public musicology’ better?”

  13. Christopher Reynolds, “President’s Message: Three New AMS Initiatives (Public and Private),” AMS Newsletter 43, no. 2 (August 2013): 2.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid. This description of the AMS blog was given by its inaugural curator, D. Kern Holoman, someone chosen by the board.

  16. This assessment is based on an investigation of the Musicology Now blog and two conferences billed as being Public Musicology. The first conference, “The Past, Present and Future
of Public Musicology,” Westminster Choir College of Rider University, January 30–February 1, 2015, http://musicinnewjersey.com/conference. The second conference, “‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me’: The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel, a Public Musicology Conference Hosted by Colorado College, October 7–8, 2016” (on Musicology Now, this conference is also mentioned as being co-sponsored by the AMS: http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2016/03/a-billy-joel-conference-this-fall.html). An article that moves in other directions and begins to expand the focus is Bonnie Gordon’s “The Perils of Public Musicology,” Musicology Now, February 22, 2016, which brings up challenges around race in terms of the University of Virginia’s Arts Mentors program (which she founded and coordinates) and musicology debates.

  17. Cheng, Just Vibrations.

  18. I am getting the sense that in the 2010s a new movement of small opera companies with predominantly younger singers performing edgy productions of canonic repertory opera has begun. Alex Ross has written about it recently in The New Yorker, “Operatic Startups: Small Companies in New York Take on the Met,” April 4, 2016, and I have heard of other companies doing similar things. What seems to be a new, and I feel very welcomed, direction with Opera MODO is their care and sensitivity around representation and social justice as they meaningfully incorporated current issues around violence to the LGBTQ, and especially trans, communities.

  19. https://www.patronicity.com/project/transgender_carmen_as_operatic_orange_is_the_new_black#.

  20. Negus et al., “Falsetto.”

  21. A provocative situation exists in the context of black male singers who have risen to prominence as countertenors in opera careers. There are several black countertenors who are professionally employed in top opera companies (Derek Lee Ragin, Darryl Taylor, John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen) and others I have heard coming up in smaller venues.

  22. For more information about premodern and modern discussions around “sex” and “gender” see Laqueur, Making Sex. For more information about theorizing gender in the castrato and opera see André, Voicing Gender, and Feldman, The Castrato.

  23. Opera MODO performed Carmen in Detroit on February 19 and 20, 2016, at the Carr Center (311 East Grand River Avenue) and on February 26 and 28, 2016, at the Jam Handy (2900 East Grand Boulevard).

  24. The mission of the Ruth Ellis Center is “to provide short-term and long-term residential safe space and support services for runaway, homeless, and at-risk lesbian, gay, bi-attractional, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.” http://www.ruthelliscenter.org/about-ruth-eliss-center.

  25. Danielle Wright, program notes to the Opera MODO production of Bizet’s Carmen, February 19, 20, 26, and 28, 2016, in Detroit, Michigan.

  26. I wrote about this experience in “Teaching Opera in Prison.”

  27. The quotations are from Danielle’s welcome in the program notes to the performance of Bizet’s Carmen, February 19, 20, 26, and 28, 2016, at the Carr Center and the Jam Handy. Detroit Soup has become associated with the Jam Handy since 2010 given their use of the space for their dinners. For more information, see http://detroitsoup.com/faq.

  28. “Demographics,” Arab American Institute Foundation (2014). Michigan is ranked second in the United States (after California) for having the largest population of Arabs. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aai/pages/9843/attachments/original/1460668240/National_Demographic_Profile_2014.pdf?1460668240.

  29. My comments also included a select bibliography: Dirlik, “Global South”; Locke, Musical Exoticism; Pirker, “Janissary Music”; Rushton, “Entführung aus dem Serail, Die”; Said, Orientalism.

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