I have completed my master’s degree in music composition and will reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA), and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
 
          II. Opera Performance as Discourse
 
          The second week of my master’s degree I was selected to compose a new opera for CCPA 2017 OperaFEST. In the first production meeting with Head of Opera Andrew Eggert and Assistant Professor of Opera and Voice Scott Gilmore I tossed around several ideas for what this opera collaboration could become. One of the ideas I presented was a meta-opera where the audience is watching people who are themselves watching an opera—an opera within an opera.
 
            Ideas grew quickly out of this framework--

• the opera these characters are watching is being protested for the way it portrays minorities and women
• their inner monologues are shedding light on real issues within the opera canon
• the goal is to have the audience reflect deeply on the ethical implications of revered cultural institutions that perform outdated and damaging stereotypes.

 
            Eventually six characters were born, each with different motivations and appraisals of the situation:

• Artistic Director
• Board Member
• Tourist
• Philanthropist
• Critic
• Conservatory Student

 
          I was able to derive separate motivations for each character from the following quote by Susan McClary, taken from foreword to Catherine Clément’s crucial book Opera, or the Undoing of Women:
 
          ...the extent to which she modeled herself after her favorite heroines when she was young; the obvious love of           opera she still maintains; her desire to transmit to her son some sense of opera that does not passively accept           the stories it articulates; and yet, of course, the recognition that ‘her kind’ are the inevitable victims of an art            form that demands submission or death of the woman for the sake of a narrative closure.
 
 
            (To watch the premiere of “…for the sake of a narrative closure” click here. Click here to view the score and libretto.)
 
          I feel extremely fortunate when anything I have created grows to have a life outside of my imagination. But “…for the sake of a narrative closure” has expanded beyond anything else I have composed to date. The premiere led to a short article on Roosevelt University’s website. This article attracted the attention of several people interested in having this piece as a part of their women and music courses as well as others interested in producing performances. Scott Skiba, Artistic Director of Cleveland Opera Theater and Director of Opera Studies at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music (BWU), was one of these people. Scott was hoping to produce “…for the sake of a narrative closure” for the 6 women in the 2018 graduating senior class at BWU as a part of their capstone project. My only stipulation was to work together, add new sections, and change the libretto if the women felt the text did not fully represent their experiences. Together, the cast, Scott and I devised a new opening section that highlighted the sound world of the protest in relation to the controlled soundscape of an opera hall. We also created a new closing section that led directly into a conversation with the audience by having the performers break the fourth wall and ask the audience “what is opera to you?” Additionally, Scott created a profound staging where eventually each character embodies the death of a famous opera heroin, leaving the stage silent and full of dead women. The picture is clear at this point in the drama, THIS is what we have created as a society with the opera canon. 
           The performance, on May 3rd at BopStop in Cleveland, OH was profound and enlightening. In the talkback with the audience I learned a lot about the student’s perceptions of the work. Because the work is a cappella they all described a deep-seated trust they had to build with one another in comparison to other opera scenes that lean on a pianist or orchestra. They also expressed relief in learning a work that allowed them to reflect deeply on their own fears and apprehensions as graduating and aspiring opera singers. I had an opportunity to talk about my own ideas of broadening the concept of performance to be more inclusive, and getting rid of the perceived hierarchy where performers are relaying the composer’s intentions to the audience. This naturally led to a discussion about creating devised operas that signify a wider range of experiences and subjectivities. Scott and I are hoping to continue this project and create a series of short operas that explore different ethical issues regarding the opera institution. This project may happen with professional groups around the US, more on that soon! 
            Finally, if you are in the Chicago area and want to see a production of “…for the sake of a narrative closure” Thompson Street Opera is performing this as part of their Faulty Systems series in January 2019! Check here for updates!
            I want to close with the two overarching lessons I have learned from this project so far. First is an age-old adage that we cannot predict the outcome of creativity and exploration. "... for the sake of a narrative closure" started as a simple idea and grew into a concept that sheds light on important social issues both within and outside of the opera institution. The second lesson from this project is the need to broaden ideas of western music and art performance. “…for the sake of a narrative closure”  and it’s hopefully subsequent operas, are only able to tell an impactful story when the performance is seen as something that includes the generative process through devising with performers, and includes the audience with a genuine conversation about the stereotypic portrayals of women and minorities within the opera canon. Through this, the performance has a wider range of signification and allows art to do what it does best— communicate. Were this type of approach adapted to fit other performance entities, I wonder if the art world would see an erasure of ethical issues that seem to run latent within these institutions? More on this next time... thanks for reading! 
 

          ​I have completed my master’s degree in music composition! I have decided to reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts to talk about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
 
I. Fundamental Questions, The Origin of the Chaconne
 
          Connecting Cultures Through Music is a defining aspect of my master’s degree; it is the project I walked into school knowing I wanted to pursue. Through the Performing Social Justice Seed Grant at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) I was able to begin this ongoing project that uses music as a form of discourse to reduce intergroup conflict between refugees living in Sweden and native Swedes. This work opened a number of doors, including an invitation to present at the University of Malta School of Performing Arts Annual Conference in March 2018. It also attracted to attention of various faculty at CCPA, through whom I was awarded the Matthew Freeman Social Justice Award from the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation. Because I began my degree program with seeds already planted for Connecting Cultures, my ideas for this project were influenced early in my master’s coursework.
            The first graduate school course was Music Style and Literature, a required seminar for all CCPA graduate students that involves a fairly intense amount of reading and discussion. The students came to class prepared to examine readings and find new ways of appraising their own musicking. Our professor, Dr. David Kjar, was particularly good at finding reading that encouraged intense discussion and highlighted the subjectivity of life, culture, and music. Throughout the course of the semester the readings became more and more reflective of issues beyond music. This fueled the class discussions, and forced me to acknowledge holes in my own thinking. One day, while discussing Suzanne G. Cuscik’s On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight, one classmate asked, “Why is the diversity of who plays in the orchestra important?” This nuclear bomb of a question sent a seemingly endless wave of discussion through the classroom.
 Collectively the class tried to answer this question, but it struck me that none of us could really address it fully.  It felt similar to times when people discuss issues of global warming, but cannot answer at the most basic level what is causing climate change. There was a sense in the room that the majority of people see some sort of importance in diversity of inclusion within classical music. These motivations were rooted in nebulous ideas of multiculturalism, inclusion, class-mobility, and post-modernist identity politics. My best answer to this question at the time was that classical music institutions could stop complaining about declining ticket sales if diversity and inclusion were truly at the heart of its mission. This discussion had an immense impact on me, and has caused me to reflect deeply on classical music in relation to its surrounding world, and find supported reasons for a multicultural approach to musicking that involves diverse representation.  
To begin understanding this issue, I embarked on a case study of the chaconne. This study demonstrated our ancestors’ ability to hijack the inherent hybridity of music and create a musical form that proliferated in unpredictable and tremendously important ways. The chaconne, taken from Incan culture in the Andes of South American and brought to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in the early 17th century, became a prominent western musical form and was a catalyst to western concepts of vertical harmony and harmonic progression. It influenced Monteverdi while he was laying the foundation for the opera canon we have today, was central to early concepts of dance and music performance in the Sun King’s court through Jean Baptiste Lully, and became a source of inspiration for none other than J.S. Bach. Additionally, the chaconne continues to have immense influence on popular and classical music today. This 400-year trajectory is a beautiful example of diversity within a music tradition. What’s more, this case study draws attention to the less-than-equitable ways diversity has historically been incorporated in western musical culture. In the case of the chaconne, half of its branch through history is missing because Spanish conquistadors cut it off at the root by obliterating the Incan culture. What type of musical hybrid could have been created if this had not been the case? And even more profound, what kind of cross-cultural conversation could that have elicited between these cultures through that music? This example calls for not only diversity in terms of musical style, but also the addition of diverse representation within music traditions.
Music is a frustratingly wonderful tool of communication.  It falls in an ambiguous liminal space, somewhere between being a nearly unrivaled communicative tool in terms of emotional expression and affect, and yet an extremely poor communicator in terms of precision and consistency. This combination of affective power and ambiguity is a huge reason the appropriative nature of the chaconne, and many other musical styles, is possible. The goal of Connecting Cultures Through Music is to take advantage of music’s unique communicative abilities, and slowly through improvisation and cultural contact build pieces of music with both diversity of style and representation. This music will hopefully be a hybrid that connects disparate groups, and reduces conflict while increasing humanization of perceived out-group members. Music, at its core, is a multicultural endeavor. Western music institutions were not created in a vacuum. If you enjoy the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, or any European folk music you should recognize the colonial attitudes that made that music possible. And we should learn from these mistakes of our ancestors, and create music that communicates to a wide range of people while maintaining ethical and diverse representation.