Nashville Opera’s One Vote Won (2020) and the Challenge of Engaged Opera Performance

Abstract

In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.

Keywords:

• Opera
• Twenty-First Century Music
• Music and Activism
• Social Media
• Music in the United States
• Music and Race

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.nashvilleopera.org/vote. For the trailer, see: https://www.instagram.com/p/CEmfAvnBdo0/.

2 The full opera may be found at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/1vw. This excerpt is available on a 22 September 2020 Nashville Opera Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/nashvilleopera/videos/328344761840154/.

3 https://www.coc.ca/keychange/ep7.

4 In the United States, the predominant model for opera funding relies heavily on the individual; on average, 85–90 percent of a company’s revenue comes from donations eligible for tax deductions and (to a lesser extent) box office sales (Agid and Tarondeau 2010, 157–158). It is no coincidence that Nashville Opera’s Fiscal Year 2021 Report lists a few of its top priorities as finding new donors, fundraising more efficiently, and identifying new donors with arts affinities –goals which are not entirely separable from its commitment to ‘reflect [our community’s] changing demographics […] [to] search for, and sometimes create or revise, repertoire that appeals to the evolving market’ (Nashville Opera Association 2021, 2–3).

5 The roundtable is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7mjG6V1GtI.

6 https://www.nashvilleopera.org.

7 See roundtable conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7mjG6V1GtI.

8 https://blacklivesmatter.com.

9 While less recognizable to young audiences, Redmond also analyzes a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s I’m Dying of Thirst by none other than Robert Glasper—one of Ragland’s inspirations for Gloria’s vocal style—as an example of ‘inventory form’ that ‘tak[es] advantage of the #IAm language popularised in the demonstrations after the 2011 execution of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis’ (Redmond 2017, 41).

10 https://www.facebook.com/nashvilleopera/posts/10158619563527383.

11 Follower numbers as of 15 December 2021.

12 https://twitter.com/NashvilleOpera/status/1300846246379294721.

13 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2769419949992871.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitlin Schmid

Caitlin Schmid is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Reed College. Her research and teaching interests include musical avant-gardes, music and politics, reenactment, risk studies, experimental writing, and critical pedagogies.