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excoriate the larger culture, which they claim doesn’t appreciate opera; experimentalists chastise opera for being out-of-date and too confining; populists criticize opera’s supposed elitism and irrelevance for “normal” folks.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from cutting edge work; on the rare occasions it does appear, it usually signifies a past time, a lost art, something out-of-date and not part of today's world.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.
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.
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