Description:

Part of the Music Studies Distinguished Speakers Series 

Presented by Naomi André, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Since its beginnings, opera as a genre has explored “real” portrayals. This has been expressed through discourses around verisimilitude, naturalism, verismo, and the depiction of events from history with historical (and sometimes still living) people. In many ways, nineteenth-century opera fulfilled much of the same cultural business that the movies achieved in the twentieth century. Today, the screens have advanced to include TV, computers, and cell phones. Opera in the twenty-first century also continues to evolve as its cultural position caters to wider audiences (not only the wealthy elite) with a broader mission that has engaged social justice to include the movements around Me Too, Queer and Trans lives, and Black Lives Matter. 

Coupled with the scholarship of others, my own research into the construction of Black Opera (Black participation in opera through composers, librettists, subjects for plots, singers, and those involved with production behind the scenes) has highlighted the insidiousness of exclusion. Black folks in the United States have been involved with opera since the nineteenth century; the erasure of this participation is painful and has caused harm. An unexpected place to carefully repair this harm is through a recovery of this history and to engage with the present golden age of Black Opera. In this talk I will touch on Blue (2019, Tesori and Thompson), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019, Blanchard and Lemmons), Omar (2022 Giddens and Abels), and The Factotum (2023 Liverman and Jackson).