Relevant Opera, Part I: Defining Relevance

Reports about new Universal Music CEO Max Hole's views on classical music's future launched another round of debate about classical music's relevance. Many raised excellent points; many others recycled inaccurate and unhelpful clichés as justification for either modernization or preservation, such as tales of old-fashioned and stuffy symphonic halls, intimidating clapping etiquette, and the superiority of live video in engaging fans. Though supposedly all steering toward a future of greater relevance, commenters displayed wildly different assumptions about what that even means. With so many paddling in opposite directions, it's no wonder classical arts are as stuck as ever in unsustainable models.

Discussion of the arts' future, whether by Mr. Hole or others, often make a dubious link between 'relevance' and ticket sales, scrutinizing top-selling musical acts for strategies orchestras might employ. Rarely is it asked whether the tactics which generate high ticket-sales for Lady Gaga should, or even could, generate ticket sales for orchestras and opera companies. Mr. Hole describes, among other things, how he'd like to "jump on [his] feet and shout and yell" for Beethoven, but alas, protocol forbids this. So let's say we take his advice and loosen up: does following his implications to a future of commemorative-t-shirt-clad teens tweeting and texting about Christian Tetzlaff seem like a plausible trajectory for classical music? Importing the trappings and protocol of arena concerts won't change the fact that the triggers for excessive spending on Bieber memorabilia simply may not exist in the classical world.

When music execs complain of a lack of emotion shown by orchestras or a lack of Jumbotrons magnifying a conductor's minutest exertions, they show the same lack of imagination that Stephen Fry criticized in his eloquent defense of classical music. They can't imagine people enjoying 200-year-old music with no visual aspect, so instead they catalogue the differences between the symphony and the Celine Dion Spectacular, and call that a path to classical music's salvation. And this is hardly a surprise, given their usual lack of exposure. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating recently sounded off that most politicians have not had a meaningful moment with the arts, emphasizing that the way to appreciate music is to spend time with it, one-on-one, as a listener or a performer. Background music doesn't cut it: real art requires real concentration. Mr. Hole himself claims to have liked the "bits" of classical music he's heard. Are "bits" enough to convey the grandeur of any art form?

To discuss the arts' relevance to today's audiences, we first need to understand entertainment commodities and artistic experiences as wholly distinct entities.

The use of the word "audience" is already a clue. Audience can simply mean the group of people watching something, but it can also be used to indicate a brewing mob mentality, as in, "The audience demands blood." Many of Mr. Hole's suggestions assume this second sense, where the audience is hostile, doesn't want to be there, and needs to be convinced that what they are about to see and hear might have value. But art shouldn't be about convincing the hostile that they haven't wasted their time; it should be about great work, and that's it. I know nothing about jazz, but if I go see the greatest jazz guitarist in the world, I'm not going to berate him for failing to teach me the basics instead of transporting the people who actually know a thing or two about the art form.

But an entertaining TV show is supposed to do exactly that, which is one major difference between art and entertainment media. Whatever you know and feel at the beginning of a TV episode, by the end, you should feel better and have a general sense of the characters and plot lines. Performing this service better and faster gets people to choose a show over its competitor's, and it survives in the marketplace. The audience gets its itch scratched and the show's producers cash in: win-win. In other words, an entertainment commodity's 'relevance' to an audience absolutely involves ticket sales (or the equivalent), as the audience is paying for a fairly well-defined service.

Art does no such thing. It needn't make you feel better (though it often does), it needn't inform you of anything (though it often does)--it need only be good art. Rather than debate what art should or should not be, suffice it to say that the collective definitions, from the broadest to the most personal, greatly exceed the dual tasks of captivating minds and improving moods. Great art forms possess infinite depth: the more you learn and appreciate, the more you realize you have yet to explore. I love Homeland as much as anyone, but admit it doesn't quite make me feel that way.

Art's relevance, then, comes from this place of infinite depth, of its ability to be so many things to so many people. Great art opens itself to anyone, absolutely anyone, who seeks it. Whether its seekers number too few to make art a valuable addition to Mr. Hole's portfolio says nothing about relevance, just marketability. Though funding the arts is indeed a major obstacle, I remain unconvinced that wannabe copycatting of the wealthy entertainment world will build the audiences classical arts need to survive intact.

The Voice Within the Voice

There is a memorable line in David Mitchell's novel, Cloud Atlas, when a fugitive human clone, Sonmi-451, is taken to the "facescaper," ne plus ultra of plastic surgeons, to alter her well-known cloned features. This particular facescaper is regarded as the best in the business, which she attributes to her ability to "see the face within the face." I thought of this recently when trying to describe a quality which I believe many of the most memorable voices have: they reveal the "voice within the voice".

This is the voice beyond the meaning of the words spoken and beyond the aesthetic qualities of the voice heard. In his excellent monograph, A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar calls this the "object voice,"  and delineates the two ways we lose or mask it: either we over-focus upon what a person is saying (the message), or we over-focus on the quality of the sound, as when we listen to a singer (the aesthetics). Both paths lead us to miss the object voice, which becomes completely covered by sound or meaning.

We seem aware that the voices have the power to affect our minds independent of text and aesthetics, and we can see this power in examples from religious or mystical rituals to fiction and Hollywood. Call-and-response patterns in a ceremony, especially with a well-known text, let us feel how vocal sound can penetrate the mind when text has lost all surprise, but beauty of sound has no relevance. To be affected by an outside voice makes us aware of voices' special access to our psyches, to comfort but also to hurt or control. In the sci-fi novel Dune, a caste of witch-nuns called the Bene Gesserit study the psychoacoustic properties of voice in such detail that they can use "the Voice," a special way of speaking which allows one to control the listener like a puppet. No less disturbing are the real cases of schizophrenics powerless to resist the demands of voices in their heads.

Horror movies' numerous demonic possessions, and even Gandalf showing his otherworldly side, use technological tricks to depict this excess of voice beyond sound and meaning, where the voice itself can command power over others. Perhaps it is necessary to alter the actor's voice electronically or by mixing it with another actor's voice because, as Dolar suggests, the excess of voice over sound and meaning is also its excess over and separation from the body. David Lynch depicts this in one of my favorite scenes from Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man has literally too many voices, but also a voice which exceeds the bounds of time and space.

What about voice divorced from body completely? A famous example of this uncanny effect, which Dolar cites in his book, is the mother's voice in Psycho:

[Think] of Hitchcock's Psycho, which revolves entirely around the question "Where does the mother's voice come from? To which body can it be assigned? We can immediately see that a voice without a body is inherently uncanny, and that the body to which it is assigned does not dissipate its haunting effect. (p. 61)

Horror movies also frequently use this "voice without a body" trope (Dolar's book, incidentally, is where I found the title for this blog) in menacing phone calls. Imagine the lack of chills had the opening of Scream been filmed this way instead, or handled via text message.

In music, both technique and technology can be used not just to amplify the voice, conform to a style, or create innovative sound colors (this would keep us within the aesthetic dimension of the voice), but to amplify this sense of the voice's excess over body, and thus give us a peek at the object voice. In The Knife and another solo project, Fever Ray, singer and composer Karin Dreijer Andersson often uses extensive electronic processing of her vocals, the goal being, according to interviews, is to remove the audience's identification with a personality via the voice; ironically, Karin's voice (with or without processing) is the most striking thing about her records. Selective and creative use of electronic processing not only provides aesthetic variety, but creates a mutating voice which belongs to no one. Another famous Anderson made her career in the early 80’s on the same insight: clever and targeted use of technology can create an overall context in which even the plain spoken voice no longer sounds everyday.

The great vocal traditions of the world, of course, had no such technological resources to create a mutating voice, and draw very real boundaries of style which may seem to contrast with the supposedly limitless colors electronic processing can achieve. How is it that vocal technique might also reveal the voice within the voice? Horkheimer and Adorno write:

In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical.... Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 103)

I believe a similar point should be made about the voice: in the "passionate striving" for mastery of a vocal style, a the "discrepancy" of the object voice emerges, and "what is expressed" can be recognized with the idea of the "true universal," a voice within the voice. This implies two things:

First, dilettantism is impossible. While technical perfection, stylistic purity, or other "questionable [unities] of form and content" cannot be the whole goal, the performer's "passionate striving for identity" must include fidelity and respect to the tradition. If a singer stops practicing and declares himself "good enough," this is not a "necessary failure" but a chosen one. There should instead be no end to the striving.

Second, the limits of commercialized music become clear. Passionate striving to attain mastery of a style, as just noted, is about trying and failing for perfection, about Martha Graham's "queer, divine dissatisfaction". Neither the logic of selling infinitely more nor the logic of having sold enough can motivate this passion; striving for commercial success is about commerce, not art. It may be satisfying and one may be good at it, but it's not divine. 

How Valuing Objectivity over Subjectivity Hurts the Arts

Imagine seeing a flustered statistician defending his work to a panel of performing artists.

"You claim these 'statistics' are indispensable for understanding our world," the artists press, "but how is a person to find her way in today's complex society without a solidly developed inner life? Art can develop this--but your work?"

The panel of performers denies funding to the statistician, who goes home to teach basic statistics to rich middle-schoolers on nights and weekends to pay for his shared apartment in Clinton Hill.

Why is it that this scenario seems so preposterous, when the inverse is something artists of all stripes face daily? Now I certainly don't wish the humiliation of statisticians across the land, but I do worry about our cultural bias towards objectivity as the primary way to justify things. Objectivity is crucially important, of course; but it should not diminish aesthetic or qualitative ways of understanding.

Statistician Nate Silver, and his black box of equations and statistical aggregates that successfully predicted the entire U.S. election in 2012, now represents the ultimate in understanding the world. Adele has a hit song and we get an article about the mystical musical gesture called "appoggiatura," and how its frequency in 'sad' music is what makes us cry. Guns, Germs and Steel reduces the clash of civilizations to an accounting of who started with more stuff; Outliers reduces cultural differences into elements in a formula for success with a magic number: 10,000 hours. Even when complex cultural or qualitative phenomena are present, measurable quantities are thought a firmer basis for argument.

Quality and subjective experience do not vanish, meanwhile, but become tethered to luxury. In fact, there is a huge and growing world of connoisseurship and appreciation of aesthetics for its own sake, but mostly around over-priced products. This includes not only luxury furniture, food, or clothing, but now applies to the most mundane daily items, like lip balm or bath products, all of which can be handmade and "curated". Consumers pay a premium for these products specifically to acquire a heightened sensory experience with aesthetic dimensions. In this realm, one can justify purchases entirely on subjective or qualitative grounds.

The problem is that we accept qualitative justifications of luxury purchases, but the same explanations are considered insufficient grounds for justifying time or money spent on the arts. The unalloyed appreciation of aesthetics allowed when purchasing designer furniture (or lusting after it on design blogs) is not seen as something that the arts could give to all citizens, rich or poor. Thus, when seeking money for after-school arts programs, we must draw constant reinforcement from statistical data: playing in the school orchestra reduces a child's chances of dropping out of high school, dropouts are an economic burden on society, and so on. Subjective appreciation of quality and the aesthetic is precluded from being an important way for all people to understand the real, practical world, and made a plaything of the fortunate.

Everyone ends up with a degraded sense of art's value: the economically disadvantaged, who lack the resources for violin lessons as much as for Gucci; and the economically privileged, who must live among our culture's constant insinuations that art appreciation is not a birthright but something you pay for, if you happen to care. It also becomes more and more normalized to see the arts as an individual expense. The humanities suffer a death by a thousand cuts: first, to our respect for them; then, to budgets.

Meanwhile, at initiatives like the Harmony Project in Los Angeles, you can find video upon video wherein underprivileged children talk about what their free music lessons have meant to them. A young girl in Paraguay plays in an orchestra made of trash and says her life would be worthless without music. I find it hard to consider dismissing these individual accounts for lack of some statistical supplement detailing, say, the precise number of children who have publicly said similar things. Their personal stories are, to me, the clearest possible evidence that art matters.

As for objective explanations, is the problem simply that economic competition has grown too intense, and that without pushing the culture to prioritize science over the humanities, we will not have material goods enough to satisfy our people? Alain Badiou writes in The Century:

Let's suppose we want to provide the world's total population with a quantifiable access to nutrition, say 2,700 calories a day, as well as access to drinkable water and basic health resources. This will add up, more or less, to the amount of money that the inhabitants of Europe and the United States spend every year on perfumes.

So after buying their perfumes or whatever else, some U.S. senators fight to cut funding to PBS, while the Paraguay Landfill Harmonic fights to make an orchestra, even out of garbage. We need to consider why, when others fight so hard for a glimpse of serious art, we will go to no end to demean it. With numerous economic and budgetary calamities possible over the next several years, the struggle will be to ensure that the humanities, and their unique ways of helping us understand, be considered one essential part of every person's life.

The Best Online Introduction to Opera

Just a brief post to say that if you're someone interested in learning more about opera, YouTube is a treasure trove of mind-blowing singing performances. The best education in opera appreciation is to listen to a lot of great singers and see what you like, what you start to notice, etc.

To that end, one of the best YouTube channels created by any opera fan belongs to Onegin65. Check it out here. With almost 60 million views to date, he/she must be doing something right!

Why is "Nessun Dorma" on Every Talent Show on Planet Earth?

There have been countless amateur renditions of "Nessun Dorma" on TV talent shows across the world, and this phenomenon perplexes me. How is it that the wider public goes crazy for these performances, but cares little for professional classical music? I cannot believe that so many people who enjoy Paul Pott's "Nessun Dorma" would not enjoy Franco Corelli's.

For better or worse, American Idol, X-Factor, and [Insert Country]'s Got Talent rule television ratings around the globe. You don't attain that level of success without knowing what you're selling, and this product includes a healthy rotation of unpolished dreamers who dream to perform classical music. This is what I'm talking about. Whether tackling "Nessun Dorma" or a few other purely classical (as opposed to crossover) pieces, the spectacle of amateur classical singers doing their best sells well. Real classical tickets sell poorly.

So how can this be? 

Issue #1: "Nessun Dorma" as a moment instead of a piece of music, or, Does Anyone Actually Listen To Paul Potts Sing?

Here's the first obvious thing I missed: "Nessun Dorma" on these shows doesn't lead to stampedes at the opera box office because it is not a performance of opera.

Yes, these shows need good personal interest stories, cathartic moments, triumphs, embarrassments, struggle, heroes, and villains. This sounds exactly like opera, but these components are primarily produced in the TV studio and editing room, not through music itself. The values of classical music--commitment to a beautiful sound, attention to detail, expert control of technique for singers and instrumentalists, etc.--don't really support the needs of entertaining commercial television. Instead we have the familiar camera angles, the shots of judges' faces shifting from skepticism to amazement, and the endless standing ovations of the crowd, all meticulously arranged into a TV segment with the dramatic emotional journey the audience came to see.

Both the live and home audiences get satisfaction, but it's not because of music. If you really care about a musical moment, you don't scream during it; you listen.

Issue #2: Disinterest in musical values, or, Let Me Like What I Like

Everyone who has studied classical singing has experienced this: you board a plane home for Thanksgiving, you mention to your friendly neighboring passenger that you study singing, and now manners dictate that you must pretend to kind of like Josh Groban.

Because we've also experienced this: people become peeved if we say we don't really find these talents that amazing. While we've been holed up in a practice room or music library, most people have learned from commercial music that you like what you like, you get to buy what you like, and those who disagree with you are disparaging your taste, and thus your freedom (to buy). We then emerge from the music academy with several degrees in hand to find that even if people claim to want our opinion on a singer like Potts, direct criticism based on our accumulated knowledge gets branded as "snobby" no matter how delicately it's phrased. Musicians thus learn when to hide the fact that they're educated at all.

The problem here is that when trained musicians judge these talent show performances, they do so relative to musical principles, while the wider audience tends to do so relative to the principles of entertainment commodities. Serious music lovers evaluate whether the musical components came together to produce artistry. The wider audience cares more about whether the moment was exciting, the singer looked impassioned, the high note was surmounted, and the audience overwhelmed--in short, whether they've been watching good TV. My musical critique thus covers principles quite literally irrelevant to most folks' appreciation of a performance, but my dislike of Potts registers and becomes a slam against a moment they enjoyed. It's taken personally.

Issue #3: Repetition vs. relationship

With little free time to waste, entertainment seekers want guarantees that they'll enjoy themselves. The performances on these shows are commodities that come in packaging as standardized as a Coke's, so we know what we're getting and that we're going to like it, and also that everyone else is getting the same thing. There's a lot of comfort in that. As a result, the question is not whether so-and-so is a competent singer with potential, but whether we were entertained. If the current talent entertained us, as Susan Boyle did for many, then it's ready for mass distribution now, unchanged except for the perfunctory makeover.

Listening based on musical principles comes from a desire to understand music and have a relationship with it. We want to know what a singer's strengths are, how she develops as an artist over time, and what new things her voice may be capable of in the future. We want to know how she uses vocal sound to communicate inarticulable truths. A thoughtful relationship over time with an artist, a style, or even a single work is a necessary part of appreciation for all art, and like all relationships, there may be rough spots, things you don't understand, frustrations. It's not entertaining, but it's infinitely rewarding. The classical music of many cultures requires this commitment.

The point is that as consumers of entertainment, we don't want what classical music is: we want repetition over relationship. When I go see most new science fiction movies, I'm really hoping I get to watch The Matrix for the first time all over again. Should someone criticize technical components of The Matrix, informed by a deep love of and relationship with film as an art form, it matters little to me; I just want my show. Ergo, the opera world isn't scooping up hoards of new "Nessun Dorma" converts because nothing in the enjoyment of that aria on TV has prepares one for a relationship with classical music. It prepares them to watch more TV and buy the CD in stores as a kind of souvenir.

Coda: What is an arts organization to do?

I've long been perplexed that various kinds of classical singing seem so resistant to commercial appropriation. The power of commerce to market anything, combined with the internet's ability to find and mine the most specialized of niches, should be easy to wield for anyone trying to either build a commercially relevant classical music audience or develop and market new music based on classical traditions. Instead, big symphonies struggle to hold onto their (literally) dying base, and virtually no contemporary commercial music makes direct use of true classical technique.

I think the above goes a long way toward showing why. To gather new audiences, we need to convince the uninitiated that a relationship with classical music (and this holds true of many other art forms) is worth the time and effort. Embarrassing Hollywood-style ad campaigns in an attempt to be "relevant" don't do this, and in fact insinuate the opposite: opera can be just as slick and disposable as that trash in the multiplex! Instead, we should focus on activities that invite and allow people to start their own relationship to opera. I recently read of opera singers giving a free concert in a park, only to have their company's next show sell out of tickets. This is a perfect example of preparing an audience: let them decide on their own that live, beautiful and professional singing is something they enjoy, then invite them for more.

Let's stop marketing opera as what it's not, and start showing it for what it truly is. It has nothing to do with Paul Potts on TV; that is about entertainment, and people should be free to entertain themselves however they choose. Real art in music is something that needs and includes you within it, builds a relationship with you, and gives you lifelong nourishment. Let's help more people find that.

What We Praise When We Praise a Child's Singing

Consider the following two videos:

These two videos have both gone around the web a lot over the past few years. Both seem to be viewed mostly positively. Both performances seem well practiced and rehearsed; but they show radically different sides of children's singing.

In the first case, we have an 11-year-old girl wailing away in what seems to be an exact facsimile of some adult singer's rendition of the song. We get growls and big sounds, belted high notes, and we are amazed that she is only eleven! What might time bring? But all is not well: many trained singers will tell you that the way this very talented girl mimics adult sounds is not particularly healthy. Moreover, if she sounds so "adult" now, which we praise, how will she sound when she's 30? Will she sound 75? Will she sound the same? Is either choice likely to be satisfying?

On the other hand, we have a 14-year-old boy accurately sing through a coloratura opera aria, and he sounds exactly like a 14-year-old boy soprano. The piece is rangy and difficult, with runs and staccato notes and some chromatic harmony, and YouTube commenters mostly show amazement at his skill. How will he sound when he's 30? Nothing like he sounds now, for certain, but we can guess he'll still sing in tune, in tempo, and with energy, which should serve him well in any style he chooses to sing.

These two videos catch us applauding child performers for totally different reasons, and this difference tells us a good bit about how singing is often perceived and interpreted today.

We applaud Bianca's precocious vocal talent, but what exactly impresses us? We're not applauding any openness of communication beyond her years, or a genuinely moving performance, but the fact that her singing sounds unnaturally grown up. She's an amazing mimic, and she clearly has the pipes and musicianship to mimic convincingly, but this becomes the focus at the expense of actual music. Later in that same season she takes on "Piece of My Heart" by Janis Joplin. It sounds, again, impressively like the original, but it's unsettling to watch this 11-year-old girl sing of "how a woman can be tough".

To be fair, Robin Schlotz taking on Mozart's Queen of the Night in her big vengeance aria could also be thought inappropriate; the big difference lies in how we interpret his sound. We get no delight from how much he sounds like a real operatic soprano, but because he's able to maintain good principles of singing--accurate rhythm and pitch, a healthy sound, good phrasing--through a technically difficult piece. When we applaud, we applaud skill alone. Now Bianca also has musical skill--but if she sang merely accurately, the applause would not have been so rapturous.

Another way you could phrase this: Robin's voice cannot convincingly mimic the sound of a commodity, while Bianca's can. In other words, Bianca not only sounds like an adult, she sounds like a recordable and marketable adult. Robin sounds like a boy, so no amount of talent can make him ready for the adult marketplace. 

You can see in this situation how much decades of listening to a so-called music "industry" affects how people interpret singing. The singing called "good" is the singing most like already-produced recent commercial and pop music. If Disney Channel graduate Nick Jonas doesn't have the technique to sing Les Miserables, people still defend his singing because they can recognize the sound of his pop albums in his attempted Broadway belt. Good singing is singing that sounds like a commercial record we already have. And more and more, technology can pick up the slack for singers with uneven, weak, or even out-of-tune voices. In other words, it can help bad singers sound like preexisting pop music. It can make the bad singers into good singers. 

This is unhealthy for the singing field in general. Bianca Ryan's very real talent requires discussion of the mechanics of her success, including the unhealthy components, to be truly perceived. Robin's talent can only be perceived through such discussion. Without reference to some kind of principles of singing, principles independent of the commercial music world, the public's ability to evaluate and thus appreciate talented singers will continue to erode.

The Orphaned Voice

Like many "traditional" art forms, especially those formerly called "high art," opera singing suddenly finds itself lost. Traditionalists excoriate the larger culture, which they claim doesn’t appreciate opera; experimentalists chastise opera for being out-of-date and too confining; populists criticize opera’s supposed elitism and irrelevance for “normal” folks. No one knows what to do with it.

Many issues receiving a lot of attention and analysis in the art and aesthetic worlds today--the body, language, text, technology, media--interface awkwardly with the operatic voice, which somehow resists assimilation. Operatic singing is to sound effortless and free, while much body and performance art depicts the body straining itself, fatiguing itself, failing itself. As for language and text, lots of modern theatrical or poetic work demands either a clarity that operatic singing cannot deliver, with its tendency to mush words, or direct reference to different modes of spoken language, which operatic technique obliterates. The tension with technology is clear: in the world of sound, acoustic and amplified sound seem diametrically opposed. Visual technology and media work off of recorded or amplified sound and image, again in opposition to the values of acoustic music and live theater, and as for internet art, networks, and other digital-world topics--what could a soprano with tons of vibrato have to say about that?

This awkwardness often leads to operatic singing's exclusion from cutting edge work; on the rare occasions it does appear, it usually signifies a past time, a lost art, something out-of-date and not part of today's world. In fact, it seems as if opera as a stand-in for the idea of Spectacle or Grandiosity appears in contemporary art more than actual operatic singing itself. 

Conservative new works, on the other hand, have no problem using traditional operatic singing. As if most of the aesthetic and intellectual innovations of the 20th century (let alone the 21st) never happened, many operas being commissioned in the U.S. today take a great book (The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, certainly something off of the AP Humanities reading list), then set that text to big sung numbers with soaring lines, some more and some less tonal, seemingly in the pursuit of creating something with the form of a Major Work. Oddly, this seems also to foreground the spectacle and grandiosity of opera over the actual singing, because when a singer in such a piece unleashes her masterful crescendo to a blooming high note, she is fulfilling what we absolutely expect to be there. It is not that, as in Verdi's time, the public expects soaring high notes to be there because you always hear that in opera. It is that the public understands that the soaring high notes make this modern experience into an Opera, something higher and elevated. Therefore, should the soprano miss the note, we still get the shape and are more or less satisfied, because we still recognize our presence at an elevated cultural event. The form, and operatic singing's status as an emblem of that larger form, holds primary importance.

In neither case is the operatic voice, in its most basic and physical qualities, considered a sound that on its own has anything to do with today.

But perhaps the past indicates one way forward. Wordless singing, even now, needs no justification. Otherwise, how could so many bad pop songs with bad lyrics be so fun to sing along with? We don't really care what the words are, except perhaps in a very basic, primal sense in which it's fun to scream words like baby, fire, night. At opera's inception this was just as true, and the creation of opera involved a specific wager: the power of singing could be tethered to evening-length drama to create an even more affecting experience. The tension between music and words, often described as a battle, makes opera possible. Maybe the similar irreducible tension between the operatic voice and media, technology, or even today's conceptions of the body, could be used to forge one new pathway in music theater. 

For it is my feeling that microphones, video, and all the rest of it do not in any way reduce the need to have a developed kind of vocalism as at least one possible resource, if not the foundation of a form of theater. By developed vocalism, I mean something that requires intense and sustained training for years and years so that the singer can use his or her body in a way infinitely more refined than normal people. It is not insignificant to me that many of the world's most exalted forms of traditional theater had some kind of developed vocalism as a crucial part, nor that the world's most exalted singing styles are really hard to do well, even for singers trained in other styles.