We Are You - An Investigation into intersections between Western Contemporary Opera and Online Fan Culture

Robin Fiedler

Finding an audience we can relate to, or bringing our social circle into our audience is still a struggle for most younger composers. With the Western classical opera audiences ageing and the attempts to bring younger audiences into opera houses and concert halls, we need to ask ourselves as composers who we write for, and how we reach these people. My opera Serenoid which had its premiere in September 2024 at Tête-à-Tête Festival in London came out of a niche space of queer and disabled geek culture in creative online fandom communities that I have been part of since I was a teenager. These groups are hardly engaged with classical music as a genre, their creative focus is on visual art and writing, mostly around an established pop-culture franchise, in this case Star Trek. Often decried as cringy, the spaces in which they move have been melting pots for many people outside of the narrow representation of mainstream media in search for community and belonging since the arrival of the internet. The decision to take Serenoid as a story from an obscure niche space on the internet to the opera stage attempts to speak to its members and therefore open the doors my own community to become part of the “opera audience”. My research describes the process and outcomes of this experiment and hopes to prove that as classical composers we can speak to younger and diverse audiences by openly and authentically being part of the group we write for.

I. Introduction

I am about to present you with what I’ve been told is an autoethnographic study. But really, what I was doing when I developed and wrote my opera Serenoid during the last year and a half, was realising, that the two worlds I moved in and felt at home in – creative fan spaces online and the contemporary Western art music scene – were worlds I no longer wanted to feel separate from each other. I thought they fitted together well and would actually make a great marriage. In other words, I shipped them. I still do. My research is about finding out whether other people from either world would get on my ship. As a composer who moves mainly in an aesthetic of Western contemporary classical music, I’ve always struggled getting the people in my social circle who weren’t directly of this world involved – even just as an audience. And vice versa, whilst I meet a lot of friendly people in the audiences that come to occasions where my music would be played, they rarely end up being members of my social circle due to too many differences in age, socio-economic status, interests and potentially worldview. So rather than bringing one audience into the other world, I decided to bring the two worlds together and see, whether this also has the effect of organically “merging” the audiences, asking if we can engage new audiences in contemporary opera but changing the narrative and telling a story that comes out of their community – and doing it authentically, because it is also my community.

I understand autoethnography to be the study of the cultures I am part of in their natural settings or fields through the use of qualitative methods. Nourished by my insider status in both the new music world and creative online fan spaces this research explores how these worlds might be brought together in a constructive fashion. Using a methodology of narrative inquiry I hope to generate insights into this topic that may help finding new ways for younger and diverse audiences to feel seen in and engage with Western contemporary classical music, as well as provide a perspective on our existence as composers as part and product of the communities we move in rather than artists who stand alone to observe and reflect.

Rather than thinking about how we can attract bigger or broader audience in Western classical music, which is an urgent and much discussed issue in the industry, I want to share the spaces and communities which inspired me with each other, in hope that attracting a broader audience is something that emerges as a collateral.

This research focuses on my first opera (and also first evening-filling work) Serenoid, which emerged from a Star Trek fan fiction space and enters into a dialogue with contemporary Western opera culture. After briefly situating myself, I will discuss historic ‘fan works’ and fan fiction culture in general, common tropes in mainstream media and Western classical music as opposed to the creative fan spaces and how my opera and its characters engages with these archetypal narratives. I will touch on how the score reflects my endeavour of bringing two worlds together whilst being true to both. The last part of this paper will be led by my engagement with different artists of different genres that emerged from creative online fan spaces as well as discussing the reaction of an audience that isn’t normally engaged with Western contemporary art music or Western art music, before I come to a conclusion. Many of my references will have their origin in pop culture media, rather than academic literature. Personally, I don’t believe this diminishes their validity as reflections of a collective mind or societal phenomenon.

Growing up and being a teenager in the 90s in rural Bavaria is not a very socially rich experience when you’re what we call an egg in the trans community – a transgender person who doesn’t realise their transness yet - and an orchestra kid on top of it. Neither of those attributes necessarily catapult you to the top of a social order in high school. In fact, they do the exact opposite and are at best isolating and confusing. I acknowledge that I was lucky to grow up in a place where my otherness isn’t something I would face legal prosecution or conversion therapy for, and I acknowledge that other people on this world aren’t as lucky.

I was also lucky that just when I became a teenager, life started happening more and more online. Whilst I was almost invisible at school and troubled at home, the media that I loved and the busy online communities around it felt like the only place next to the orchestra rehearsals where I felt a sense of belonging. Whilst a lot of people think back on their engagement in online fan spaces as the cringe thing they did when they were a teenager, I have consistently been a part of this space and some of the friendships I found in them have endured for years. These spaces helped me understand who I am and why my body didn’t feel like mine. They helped me understand other people, how they were different and how I can best empathise with them. They made me adept at putting myself in someone else’s shoes and experiencing life from points of views that weren’t talked about in the 90’s. The perspective of someone with a disability, the perspective of someone queer, the perspective of someone from another culture than white European. All these stories and perspectives were authentic because they were written by people who experienced them and wrote about their own experiences through the lenses of their favourite characters – in varying degrees of eloquence. Even if I was confused about why I felt so strange, there were other people who felt the same kind of strangeness within these spaces. And even if I didn’t yet understand myself, at least I wasn’t alone with my experiences.

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Robin Fiedler - We Are You - An Investigation into intersections between Western Contemporary Opera and Online Fan Culture - 2025