# Thoughts on the Future of the Performing Arts in the US



## artsalternatives (Sep 17, 2020)

An alternative take on the future of the performing arts organization in the US: http://www.tinyurl.com/artsfutures/


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

How about this as a radical idea. As the world changes and moves more online, more manufactured and more and more fake, we cultivate live theatre and music as an experience that is more authentic?

N.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

artsalternatives said:


> An alternative take on the future of the performing arts organization in the US: http://www.tinyurl.com/artsfutures/


It's a world wide problem, not only the US.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

The Conte said:


> How about this as a radical idea. As the world changes and moves more online, more manufactured and more and more fake, we cultivate live theatre and music as an experience that is more authentic?


That won't get you very far. Live theatre and music will have to innovate, but I have no idea in what directions.


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Bulldog said:


> That won't get you very far. Live theatre and music will have to innovate, but I have no idea in what directions.


Why? If you believe in the power of an artform, then the artform is enough. There is a possibility that opera will die out (some would say it already has looking at today's singers). However, there will always be a remnant, however small that will hunger for something more authentic than that on offer by the leaders of the world. It's also possible that the way the world is going, the lack of opera will be the least of our problems.

N.


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## annaw (May 4, 2019)

The Conte said:


> Why? If you believe in the power of an artform, then the artform is enough. There is a possibility that opera will die out (some would say it already has looking at today's singers). However, there will always be a remnant, however small that will hunger for something more authentic than that on offer by the leaders of the world. It's also possible that the way the world is going, the lack of opera will be the least of our problems.
> 
> N.


I agree. I feel that the lack of singers is at the moment one the most threatening things for opera. I don't think there's a single 21st century recording in the standard repertoire which would seriously compete with the powerhouse recordings of 50s, 60s, and 70s. I have no idea where the great singing tradition of the previous century has disappeared in such a short period of time.

The second problem seems to be that there's no one to write new operas or those which are written are not _necessarily_ as easily approachable for general audience. If we stopped producing new films and the cinemas only showed the old classics, it wouldn't be surprising that its popularity would decrease. I have nothing against contemporary classical music but much of it seems to remain very far from an average person on the street. It doesn't require an higher level of erudition to appreciate something like Beethoven's 5th or Verdi's _Rigoletto_. I'm a young person and many of my friends enjoy going to opera when I invite them. I don't think it's a question of opera being unapproachable as an art form in general but it just needs to start moving again.

Performing arts, particularly theatre and classical music, run deep in European cultural consciousness and have survived for hundreds of years. I don't think we'll just let them die. It's part of our national heritage which countries try hard to retain. If we lost that, what will be left of our culture?


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## vivalagentenuova (Jun 11, 2019)

I'm with those who think that opera is basically dead. If you put together a few threads on this forum you can see why. The quality of singing has deteriorated. The quality of staging and production has deteriorated and been taken over by directors who force their concepts on works and end up not presenting the opera you went to see but the director's work (seriously, just write your own damn play). The quality of new works is very low. When was the last time a composer wrote an opera that caught on outside the dedicated community of opera goers? That used to happen all the time, now it almost never happens. That's not sustainable.

As an opera lover and someone who believes in government funding for the arts and for artists, I honestly couldn't justify spending millions of people's tax dollars on a new Bayreuth production.

As for the article, to be honest I think it's totally absurd.


> Build the solutions, target your constituents. Push tactical content alternatives through channels that engage your audience around those insights…that is co-created in service of that truth….and, through insights gleaned from the response, build out and introduce new thinking in response to evolve and grow the conversation, to continue to engage your audience in service of your mission.


Is that supposed to mean something other than: "innovate"? "Build the solutions" is the most bogus sort of corporate babble. Vague appeals to the knowledge economy, innovation, and tech-based "solutions". It's the same sort of meaningless drivel we've been fed by consultants and politicians since the nineties. I honestly can't decide whether it's a parody or not.


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## neofite (Feb 19, 2017)

vivalagentenuova said:


> As for the article, to be honest I think it's totally absurd.


Agreed!

The content of this thread is much better than the article.


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## Guest (Sep 17, 2020)

Bulldog said:


> That won't get you very far. Live theatre and *music will have to innovate, but I have no idea in what directions*.


Well, innovation is about _*new*_ directions I would have thought. Maybe we could innovate in a _*backwards*_ direction and write new classical music whilst wearing wigs?


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

At some point, just not doing what everyone else is doing must qualify as innovative. If we just limit innovative to something no one has done before, there is mostly just stuff that hasn't been done before for a reason.


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## zxxyxxz (Apr 14, 2020)

Opera needs better singers.

But aside from that what we need is people to be exposed more to opera and classical music. Classical is very different to electtical instruments. 

Opera will always be a more niche thing but strong convictions and passion can help it survive.

Innovation for innovations sake leads to flash in the pan out of fashion in a week things. Opera needs to be more approachable. Though period dramas are always popular so I don't see why opera can't be.

Hmm make classical music appear less snobbish maybe? I don't know how you would do that? 

Perhaps the secret will be in the selling of the theatre experience? Everything seems to be mission statements and customer experience these days.

In rambling conclusion fresh blood and sell the live experience.


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## artsalternatives (Sep 17, 2020)

The Conte said:


> How about this as a radical idea. As the world changes and moves more online, more manufactured and more and more fake, we cultivate live theatre and music as an experience that is more authentic?
> 
> N.


Are you suggesting that online "experience" isn't authentic? Why? What makes something authentic?


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## artsalternatives (Sep 17, 2020)

vivalagentenuova said:


> As for the article, to be honest I think it's totally absurd.
> 
> Is that supposed to mean something other than: "innovate"? "Build the solutions" is the most bogus sort of corporate babble. Vague appeals to the knowledge economy, innovation, and tech-based "solutions". It's the same sort of meaningless drivel we've been fed by consultants and politicians since the nineties. I honestly can't decide whether it's a parody or not.


Hmm - to each their own, I suppose. When the article talks about context / agon, I think it speaks directly to the issue that you're having with directors "who force their concepts" onto works. You call "co-create in service of that truth" parody...but isn't the absence of that practice the root of the problem that you have with directors' "concepts" and what you perceive to be the "very low" quality of new work?


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## MAS (Apr 15, 2015)

I want to go see *Dune* in a real movie theatre, or failing that, in a restored _Drive-In Theater_! I want to shelter in an air-conditioned movie theater when the weather gets too hot.

I want to go hear and see *Aida* again, or *The Ring* at the San Francisco Opera again, or hear *Mahler's 8th* at the San Francisco Symphony again, or *Sing-along Messiah* once more, or twice more, or get my ears pinned back by the fortissimo chorus of _Dies Irae_ in Verdi's *Requiem*.

I want to go to *Denny's* across the street from Disneyland to order their extra crispy hash browns with my breakfast.

I even want to go to another *MET in HD* presentation (without Plácido, please).

So, I have _some_ hope.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Opera is a centuries-old, music-based art form substantially dependent on a centuries-old singing tradition. That tradition is mostly unsuited to contemporary music (actually, to my ears, most contemporary classical music sounds unsympathetic to singing of any kind), and much about the way contemporary operas use the voice tends to grate on me. I'd say that Wagner and Strauss pushed vocal writing about as far as it could be pushed without making the voice into something ugly. 

I'm sure my position on this is biased by my own experience as a singer, but I'm inclined to think that on the whole opera has had its day, though musical theater as a broad category is probably timeless and will persist, with singing styles and techniques suited to its musical idioms.


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

vivalagentenuova said:


> . . . As for the article, to be honest I think it's totally absurd.
> 
> Is that supposed to mean something other than: "innovate"? "Build the solutions" is the most bogus sort of corporate babble. Vague appeals to the knowledge economy, innovation, and tech-based "solutions". It's the same sort of meaningless drivel we've been fed by consultants and politicians since the nineties. I honestly can't decide whether it's a parody or not.


I don't think the article proposes a solution. Instead, it is basically a hidden admission that the author has no solution, so the answer must be for someone else to find it. "You should make this happen" is not at all the same as "here is how you make it happen." (And "here are vague guidelines to finding those ideas" is not the same has having those ideas now.) The latter is what low-level employees do every day, and the former what management takes huge amounts of credit and pay for doing (while counting on others to actually do something tangible).

It is the kind of silly "advice" that one gets from management consultants. My two favorite examples of this are:

- A book called Thunderbolt Thinking, by a consultant, which actually contains the advise that if you do not know the answer to a problem, ask yourself if you did know the answer what would it be? (This is not the same as saying that when you hit a wall trying to solve a problem the solution, assuming there is one, is often blocked by assumptions formed during the process of making that dead end. It can help to clear your head and start over, with a clean slate. Or break a hole in that wall by thinking of something that might seem completely crazy but aimed directly at the problem, and work backwards from that as a workable solution might come from just thinking in a new direction.)

- At one company where I worked, it was clear that our new owners were likely to shut us down (which they eventually did). After the first wave of layoffs, with promises that there would be no more (which was a lie, of course), management became "concerned" about low morale. They didn't actually have any idea on how to improve said morale, so they had each team hold meeting for us to make suggestions, with the opening dictate that such ideas could not cost any money from the company. My initial response was that with that constraint, the only thing that they might do is give us a little more control over our own jobs, which was met with an immediate "no, we don't want to do that." My reply to that was that if such ideas could not cost any money, and could not result in management releasing any of its strangle hold on our jobs (nor, realistically, anything they could do to ensure us that there would be no more layoffs, like give us contracts), then there really wasn't anything that they could do. Their brilliant solution in the end was to require each team to have a team lunch offsite . . . on our own time and paid for out of our own pockets. You can imagine what that did for morale.

Edit: I do like the image that accompanies the article. It is not surprising, however that the author is, of course, or appears to be, a consultant. (If I were to be very cynical, it almost sounds as if the author is just proposing to break the Broadway monopoly into a thousand smaller pieces, where he can, perhaps, get more jobs for himself. I am not necessarily opposed to the idea that the current model -- where the goal is to get to Broadway, and shows that make it get distributed regionally -- is a bad one. Nothing in this article would seem to be workable for opera, for which costs, in terms of money and the development of talent, seem to demand some kind of centralization. Part of the problem, as Woodduck suggests, is that the conventions of opera have grown foreign and it is hard to bring back an audience that has other, less demanding, alternatives.)


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## Dick Johnson (Apr 14, 2020)

"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these" - Ovid (approximately 8 A.D.).

This thread has been a bit depressing. I think opera is very healthy - just not in the same way it used to be - but recordings are still selling and houses are still filling for good performances. Streaming has also allowed opera's audience to expand beyond its traditional boundaries.

I think much of the negativity results from the idea that contemporary opera composers have forgotten to write for their audience (hence no audience). The same is true of what is termed classical music in general. Serious contemporary composers are writing music that appeals to music scholars but does not sound good to the common ear. The result is more and more of a schism between modern pop music - which sounds musical to the casual listener - and contemporary classical music - which often does not even try to sound musical to the casual listener. I personally enjoy some opera written in the last 50 years - but it is unlikely that many of these works will draw a new audience to opera by themselves.

On the other hand, opera continues to be very well-supported and remains, in its own way, an exciting area of musical exploration. The paucity of new opera composition has allowed companies to explore older, neglected works - leading to recent revivals of bel canto and (even more recently) baroque opera.
With respect to the comment earlier in the thread about a lack of quality singers and performers - has there ever been a time since the early 19th century when baroque opera can be performed to a higher standard? Ieystn Davis, Andreas Scholl, David Daniels, Max Emmanuel Cencic, and Xavier Sabata are just the first currently performing counter-tenors come to mind - has there been a time with 5 counter-tenors all performing that can outrank these? There are also lots of great conductors (Petrou, Bicket, Christopher) and companies supporting this work. We now have The Sixteen, Il Complesso Barocco, Armonio Atenea, Louvre, Koln - even big companies like the Met are getting into the act and finding success. 
The same is true for Bel Canto - we are presented with a much more extensive catalog of these gems compared to our parents or grandparents.

I feel very fortunate to be an opera fan now rather than half a century ago where your choices at the big houses were more limited and when finding a quality recording of Handel's great operas or exploring Rossini or Donizetti's less popular works was literally impossible.


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

^^^ I agree with much of what you wrote in your post. Although opera requires an acceptance of some peculiar conventions, it should be around at least as long as Morris dancing, and any other number of niche forms. Let us hope that it still has some legs.


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## neofite (Feb 19, 2017)

JAS said:


> ^^^ I agree with much of what you wrote in your post. Although opera requires an acceptance of some peculiar conventions, it should be around at least as long as Morris dancing, and any other number of niche forms. Let us hope that it still has some legs.


What are the "peculiar conventions"?


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

I seem to remember reading a sci-fi paperback a few decades ago, by *Asimov*, I think.

People did not interact in person anymore. That wasn't the thrust of the novel, just background for the story.

A short Google away; the novel was *The Naked Sun*.


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