There is a need for modern opera in the Puget Sound area, and Whidbey Island is the perfect venue to fill this need.
While there are many professional orchestras in the Seattle area that provide a wide variety of musical programming, there are few opera companies. The Seattle Opera has the highest profile, and there is a smaller opera company based on Vashon Island. But other groups mounting opera are few and rare.
One would think that having a major opera company like Seattle Opera would fulfill most of the public’s need for this special kind of theatrical and musical presentation, but the Seattle Opera draws almost exclusively on older romantic-era operas, like Puccini and Verdi. Notably, they also produce Wagner’s The Ring every few years. These operas are wonderful, and very popular with their audience, but there is an almost complete absence of modern opera. Indeed, modern music in general is rarely performed in the Puget Sound area.
By modern I mean the sea-change of style and substance after Charles Ives broke all the rules of classical music at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Classical music for a hundred years became more atonal, and incorporated polyrhythms and dissonance to create a modern soundtrack inspired by the bustle of cites, industries, mechanization, and the forces of modern life.
As time went on, this music became less accessible to many concert goers, who often seek something beautiful, and not disturbing. Sometime modern music is actually shocking. When Stravinsky premiered The Rite Of Spring in 1913 in Paris, the audience rioted and tore the seats out of the opera house. Now, a hundred years later, we accept Stravinsky into the standard repertory, and find it hard to believe people would react that way. But today’s audiences, in fact, favor 19th century classical music, and as a result programmers avoid the more daring of 20th Century modernists. This is especially true in the world of opera.
But opera has a great history through the 20th Century, from Britten to Bartok, which moved beyond romantic conventions, and were much more daring. And finally, in the late 20th Century, there was an explosion of creativity from Glass, Adams, and a new generation of composers who continue to write today. These later composers finally reverse the atonality of the earlier decades, embracing consonance and melody, and brought other modern values to the music, some of which is very accessible, yet rarely performed.
We seek to end the dearth of modern opera by creating an opera unit on Whidbey Island that will bring modern music to modern audiences. People must be exposed to new forms or they will never know they like them. And liking them, they will demand more.
Whidbey Island is the perfect incubator for this project. Located just outside Seattle, the most devoted of opera fans will take the effort to make the easy commute from the metro area for something unusual and exciting. Locally, Whidbey itself is home to a world-class audience, which has been cultivated by decades of intelligent programming from the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and the Saratoga Orchestra, both well known for quality performances.
But being slightly off the beaten track is a benefit for the actual production, based on the fact that costs for musicians and performers on Whidbey is significantly lower than recruiting and casting from the professional Seattle environment. Yet the quality of players is as top notch as any in the region. This means we can produce high-quality work for a fraction of the cost of the major city producers. And this makes experimentation and risks are far easier to manage. When a major production is mounted in Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, the costs can be prohibitive unless the program concept is pre-sold to area subscribers and patrons. Thus the safe choices that are made by these urban companies. But Whidbey can push the leading edge of art and music in a way that is simply financially impossible for larger companies.
Additionally, after creating more daring opera, the most successful shows can be put on the road in the region, and will find many opportunities to recoup investments and development through additional performances to art-hungry audiences throughout the Pacific Northwest. Including Seattle.
In this way, Whidbey Island is a safe haven, an incubator for new and exciting tastes, a laboratory that will test the appeal of modern music and theater, art that speaks to our age, in our own time. And art that will spread and grow from this isolated island into the world at large. Whidbey Center for the Arts has the opportunity to be the center of this new renaissance.
By Tim Everitt, Director
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