Where Can We Find Opera? A Listening Methodology to Center Listeners

Abstract

Numerous recent calls to decolonize opera include the theme of this special issue as well as the collective behind this new opera journal. While the last decade-plus has seen a willingness and a desire to expand opera, the core repertoire has remained static. Can genuine transformation take place within such a heavily institutionalized genre? And, if we were to imagine such institutional change, where might we strategically focus our energies in order to begin to hear the results today? As always, rather than looking to the institutions themselves, I look to practitioners—singer and performance artist Juliana Snapper and artists Massimo Bartolini—for potential strategies. Snapper and Bartolini shows us how we can refocus our concern away from the glacial pace of change within operatic institutions and toward what we pay attention to, an activity each and every person can actively participate in: listening beyond the artificial limits of any given definition of opera.