Opera as a way of thinking

From and excellent article on IDEO, an industrial design firm, from the May 21 issue of NEWSWEEK:

As Kelley explains it, IDEO’s current mindset is less about product design than it is about, well, fostering new mindsets. Kelley says his company’s mission is to train its clients in “design thinking,” or the ability to think as designers do, deploying similar methods to conjure new lines of business or improve existing ones. “The world seems to be good at coming up with innovations out of a new technology or a new idea in marketing,” says Kelley. “But by trying to understand people, and looking for their nonobvious needs, we find good opportunities to innovate.”

Interesting to think of opera and music theatre in these terms; i.e. looking for the non-obvious needs in peoples' artistic/spiritual lives and then creating for them Opera as a mindset/theatre as a way of thinking.

Full text of the article can be found here.

What this genre is not?

• The standard repertoire in a traditional mode of presentation
• Most musical comedies and operettas.
• Menotti [save for possibly The Unicorn, The Gorgon & The Manticore], Argento [save for possibly Postcard from Morocco] and other standards of the academic canon.
• Pieces that that don't place an equal value on the text [even if abstracted, performative or non verbal] as on the music.
• Pieces that value entertainment over taking an audience on a journey.

A List of Possible Candidates

Below I am including a [stream of consciousness] list of [mostly contemporary] works, composers and dramatists that I feel could fit into this genre. This list is in no particular order and will be updated as new examples come to light or to mind:

• I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky & El Nino - Adams
• The Cave and Three Tales - Reich
• Einstein on the Beach [and many many others] - Glass
• Sequenzas - Berio
• Adventures and Nouvelles Aventures - Ligeti
• Improvement, Perfect Lives [and others] - Robert Ashley
• Nothing - Morton Feldman
• The music theatre works of R. Murray Schafer
• The plays of Mac Welman and Michel Tremblay
  
• Theatrical works by Crumb
• Sondheim
• Britten, Stravinsky and Orff's church parables and progressive stage works
• Myths and Hymns and Floyd Collins - Guettle
• Atlas [and others] - Meredith Monk
• Lost Highway - Neuwirth
• The Cradle will Rock - Blitzstein
• Some Chinese "Red" Operas
• The Carbon Copy Building, Aquanetta, Little Match Girl Passion, Decasia, Van Gogh and others - The crew at Bang on a Can [Lang, Gordon, Wolfe]
  
• Rehearsing Her Choir - Concept album by The Fiery Furnaces
• Tomorrow, In A Year - Concept album by The Knife
• I am a Bird Now - Concept album by Anthony and the Johnsons
  
• Mass - Bernstein
• Seven Deadly Sins [and others] - Weill
• 110 in the Shade and Celebration - Schmidt and Jones
• Urinetown
• The works of Pina Bausch
• The Manson Family: An Opera [and others] - Jon Moran [do yourself a favor and look him up on YouTube ... he is AMAZING!]
• Roratorio and the Europeras - Cage
• The works of Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, Amy X Nueberg, Louis Andriessen
• VALIS, Brain Opera, Transformations and others - Tod Machover
• Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs - Michael Nyman
• Operas and Musicals from the Yiddish Theater tradition
• Ursonate - Kurt Schwitters
• Many oratorios, cantatas, choral fantasies and passions - Penderecki, Guibaldina, Golijov ...
• Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire - Arnold Schoenberg

The Unnamed Genre

The genre that we will be exploring does not, as of yet, have a name. It is not a new performance category, but rather one that has existed as a component of other performing arts genres. This genre is most solidly seen in works created over the last century, but arguably can be identified in works prior to the 20th century.

To unpack this concept a little, what I am talking about is a textually rooted, performance based, highly visual, progressively conceived theatre-with-music.

This genre, to date, can most concretely be described by the word "opera", but also has valid permutations in what is perceived as performance art, musical theatre, theatre with music, lyrical plays, dance pieces, theatrical concert music, song cycles, concept albums, folk works and hybrid theater experiments.

What I will be doing in this blog is working towards finding the correct word or phase [hopefully 3 words or less] that accurately describes this under-explored, yet to be named genre of theatre-that-just-happens-to-be-opera.

A Manifesto? A Dissertation? An Exploration.

This blog is an attempt to define, explore and encourage a genre of theater-with-music. The form of this blog will be non-linear, conversational, opinionated, and possibly self-contradicting. Bear with me. I am working out my ideas on the fly as you read and contribute. I encourage input, discussion and debate.

Throughout this blog, I will use the "re" form of theatre to signify the practice and theory of stage productions, while reserving the "er" version of theater to describe the physical buildings in which these works take place. This usage will not hold true in the case of a proper names.