Department of Music Lecture: Naomi André, Professor of Music at UNC Chapel Hill
Title
"Engaging Opera: Stories from Black experiences and Spanish Language Latin Diasporic Opera"
Abstract
This presentation explores how leading artists are centering new voices and stories on the operatic stage. Inside and outside of the opera house, living creatives (composers, librettists, singers, and administrators) are shaping how culture can articulate and represent lived experiences. They bring to life experiences from the past that provide a deeper context for how we think about the present. Belonging to a shadow culture of artistic activity that has been hidden from mainstream view, in this paper I examine operas that had Black composers, librettists, and singers involved with the compositional process. (Denyce Graves, Nkeiru Okoye, Sandra Seaton, and Damien Geter). A portion of this talk will also explore another operatic shadow culture of Spanish-language works from the Latin Diaspora by Manuel de Falla, Daniel Catán, Osvaldo Golijov, and Gabriela Lena Frank. Seen together, operas involving interracial compositional teams from a wide range of racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences animate histories from the past and shape a new vanguard in opera for an artistic vision that has a new relevance for the present.
Biography
Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan in Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College.
Her publications include the books Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and co-edited collections Blackness in Opera; African Performance Arts and Political Acts; and The Music of Mzilikazi Khumalo: Language, Culture, and Song in South Africa. Actively engaged with performance today, she has worked with opera companies, symphonies, and is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN). She was the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Seattle Opera (2019-2024) and has served on the Boards of the American Musicological Society, the Kurt Weill Foundation, and Detroit Opera.