Opera company devotes whole season to ‘pioneering queer composer’
OperaFrom NPR LA:
The Long Beach Opera has unveiled its ambitious 2025 program focused entirely on the works of pioneering queer composer Pauline Oliveros.
James Darrah, artistic director of the Long Beach Opera, said audiences will have a chance to experience Oliveros’ unique take on the opera. “We really started to think that that was an interesting idea to show one woman’s kind of bold, varied work, and no two of these pieces are the same,” Darrah said.
Darrah described Oliveros as a musically curious Mexican American queer artist from Houston, Texas, who eventually moved to San Francisco and helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962.
“That period of time, when you look at it, is marked by exciting theatrical pieces that involved dance and sound and visual art. Later in life, some of her pieces are simple, spare, human voice or instrument, layers of sound,” Darrah said.
Oliveros is also known for creating a practice called Deep Listening that distinguishes listening from hearing. It’s taught in schools, workshops and other places of music. Her work spans over 50 years. She died in 2016.
Her lifetime and creative partner, playwright IONE, will direct Oliveros’ final composition, The Nubian Word For Flowers: A Phantom Opera….
Read on here.
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2ipPVvupaY
Thanks for this. Heads up to avoid such stuff – for me at any rate!
One wonders if opera was ever anything other than pioneering queers – either / or.
Brought to you by the people who brought you Bud Light and jaguar marketing.
How to sink an opera company in one season. Auto death of a thousand slices.
Ticks lots of woke boxes: lets see if there is much of an audience for this.
Seriously?? I wish them well but this sounds like a company with a death wish.
This isn’t terribly off-brand for Long Beach Opera, which has specialized in experimental work for years now.
Long Beach is adjacent to Los Angeles, and people there who want conventional opera have always gone to L.A. Opera anyway. Long Beach Opera moved into experimental work because there was no point trying to compete with the much larger company just up the freeway.
Thank you for the context
These comments are hilarious – “Gay people? Involved in the arts??? It’s wokeness gone mad!!!” Where have you all been during the last 500 years? Anywho, Oliveros is a giant of 20th century experimental music. Good on LBO!
I find their comments absolutely ignorant of the past, angry and sad, particularly from people who consider themselves learned. And as for their attachment to the term “woke”, they don’t even seem to know the context in which the word was originally used; it’s sort of like the Trump campaigns’ use of the Village People’s song “YMCA” during campaign events. So, well yes, I guess they are pretty hilarious.
Did the experiment succeed?
How many people would actually like to listen to this music?
The only problem I have is where do the people in Longbeach who want to attend the opera go?
If you mean something besides Long Beach Opera, Long Beach is immediately southwest of Los Angeles and is closer to Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the venue for Los Angeles Opera) than are many parts of the city of Los Angeles.
Well, Genius, you could always check a map to find out where Long Beach is in relation to Verdi.
O great, queer music. That’s bound to be brilliant then.
Indeed. I enjoy Tchaikovsky, Poulenc and Britten because they wrote good music, not because of their sexuality. It is risible to suggest that they wrote homosexual, gay or queer music.
Clearly you don’t know their music very well then…
This will be an unpopular view, but I think this is fantastic.
When I was a student at UCSD, over 40 years ago, Oliveros was simply a composer in the Music Department faculty. No other label seemed necessary at the time. I recall only a couple of her works piquing my interest, back then.
Except to note that diverse groups of people (not only white males) have contributed to the arts, there is no real reason to label her now. Unless you’d like to bully her because of her sexuality, of course, which seems to be great fun for many people.
Such tasteless marketing! When will these people realize people don’t go to concerts/operas for the composer’s race or sexuality?
When I have to go to a concert, the only thing getting my attention is sexuality.
Sally
They do though, because non-white, non-cishet people have had opportunities stripped of them for generations. Uplifting the work of underrepresented groups is part of doing the hard work of creating equity in the field.
How does it feel to be one of the last dinosaurs around after the meteor strike? So glad you and your gobbledygook (“non-white, non-cishet”) ilk are on the verge of extinction.
This won’t really hurt Long Beach Opera. They’ve been doing this kind of experimental work for decades. If anything, it will draw audiences for them. They don’t do standard rep. Whether it’s any good is of course open to question.