Conference Agenda

The Pandemic Trilogy (2020-2021) is a set of three live virtual operas produced and commissioned by the Boston-based activist opera company White Snake Projects (WSP). This new genre of live digital opera demands an extended investigation of its speculative ethos, which pushes the boundaries of opera-making in the twenty-first century, and has consequently fueled a serious consideration of cyberspace as a viable medium—and site—for the future of opera. In my paper, I investigate how this series of operas serves as an exemplary object lesson in elite capture, a concept introduced by the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò to refer to the “increasing domination of elite interests and control over” not just antiracist or identity politics, but all of our global social systems (Táíwò 2022). I push for elite capture as a valuable lens to bring into focus critical issues in opera and the performing arts, like transmedia storytelling and social activism, with a more rigorous critique placed within broader media, aesthetic, and ideological concerns.

While proponents of new media technologies view transmedia storytelling as a promising avenue of operatic engagement, I posit that the trilogy raised new questions about the challenges transmedia aesthetics have introduced into opera performance, asking us to put pressure on the idea that live virtual opera heralds a paradigm shift for the future of opera. Drawing on my observations and interpretations grounded in virtual attendance at the performances, reviews, interviews, social media postings by audiences, and the wide-ranging scholarship of Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Arman Schwartz, and Matthew Aucoin, I also question what an activist opera entails today, and whether WSP succeeds in fulfilling the aspirational goals it has set for itself. The aim is to inspire a reappraisal of cyberspace not as an automatically utopian non-space but a site-specific space with its own set of affordances. Technology, in other words, is not simply equivalent to forward-looking aesthetics and limitless reparative possibilities. As a conclusion, I illustrate how digital puppetry potentially offers a creative avenue that engenders enchantment and unexpected provocations in audiences, and how this series of operas emphasizes a very different ethos of opera-making in the twenty-first century.

Composers of East Asian heritage have grown in significance and influence on the international concert stage. We can no longer conceptualize post-1990 contemporary music scene without their influence. Yet concepts such as extended techniques, defamiliarization of instruments, or sonic exoticism often steer critics and scholars away from the pursuit of meaning associated with various types of sonic imagery—they can be excuses for not engaging. This paper argues that their musical creations are prominently shaped by the multiplicity of materiality, involving sonic ideas rooted in socio-historical contexts. As a case study I will consider Tan Dun’s opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul (2002) in a manner responsive to materiality uniquely associated with the heterogeneous Asia. By exploring histories, materiality and philosophy inspired by different modes of inter-Asia connection, I examine the ways that inspiration from such a connection forms the basis of the opera, determining the kind of story to be told and the sonic expressions that can be distilled or sculptured. Through this process, Tan Dun expresses a vision of music theater with his exploration of sonorities and sonic designs. Aside from historical and material connections, the musical language, vocality, and imagery that Tan forged also reflects inter-Asia sensibility in the visual, kinesthetic, and sonic dimensions of this opera. The paper will explore these issues in three parts. In part I, by considering the space and the story of the opera and three layers of significance (history, tea, Zen-Buddhism), I examine how the inter-Asia sensibility forms the basis of the opera. In part II, I consider the ways in which an amalgamation of Tan Dun’s sonic creations from the previous decade, which include the elements (water, paper, and earth) and vocality, and a distinctive notion of musical gestures shape the opera. In part III, I examine further the materiality of his sonic imagery in three dimensions (indexicality, body, and intonation). Finally, I argue that the exploration of the materiality associated with various types of sonic imagery—both the physical objects and socio-historical contexts in which they are rooted—has further implication for the understanding of post-1990 contemporary music.

In the footsteps of Béla Bartók, composer and scholar Akin Euba (1935-2020) incorporated his research and experience with Yoruba music into his own compositions. One of his early large-scale works, Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants, serves as an ideal vehicle for this approach. Euba was familiar with Wagner and his concept of total art, but his approach to the operatic medium is also informed by his understanding of Yoruba music, especially the dùndún, or talking drum ensemble. A performance by this ensemble brings together music, poetry, dance, and visual arts; Euba (1990) describes it as “approaching a concept of total art” (426). By combining this performance tradition and opera, Euba blends two different concepts of total art.

Euba also integrates musical idioms on a deep structural level in his intercultural music. This is clear through his approach to Chaka’s harmonic material. Euba takes two separate, but entwined approaches to the boundaries of the harmonic space. He clearly references two tone rows, though his manipulation of the rows is based on segmentation, rather than strict serialism (Euba 2005, Heile 2022, Omojola 2005, Robison 2008, Uzoigwe 1992). Uzoigwe notes that in other works, Euba creates rows that emphasize intervals common in dùndún music. I suggest that Euba takes this even further in Chaka; the entire work is suffused with pitch material pulled from the emergent harmony of dùndún ensemble, which he called “shadow chords” (Euba 1990). This harmonic material informs the tone rows, the key themes from the opera that emerge from those rows, and the major tonal centers of the opera and the movement between each center.

By embedding a sonic space informed by Yoruba practices into tone rows and using that pitch material on all levels of the opera, Euba creates a truly intercultural work of total art. Demonstrating how Euba integrates both approaches to harmonic space in Chaka provides an important model for composers looking to emulate his compositional approach and points to alternative ways of hearing and analyzing music.