VIII. We are you (II) – non-classical participants, audiences and their reaction to Serenoid

A survey amongst the participants in the group server on Discord where the idea for Serenoid originated, revealed that barely any of them had come in contact with opera or classical music. These people are all Star Trek fans between the ages of 19-49, they’re all engaged in the fan fiction community as either readers or writers and they all agreed to participating in the survey because the idea of an opera written based on their favourite characters intrigued them. 

If they had been to see an opera, it had been a school trip or a one-off situation as a chorus member in a school setting, and it hadn’t impressed them enough to become a frequent visitor. Even those members who are involved in music themselves, seemed disengaged from the genre to varying degrees. The answers given in the survey to the question “When have you last seen an opera and why were you drawn to it/did you decide to go and see it?” are as follows:

“I haven't been to see an opera live”
“Never.”

“I’ve never seen one!”
“I watched some of Madame butterfly when I was performing in it. It was part of my grade so I had to be there.”
“I have never seen an actual opera.”
“This really doesn’t count as an opera, but Phantom of the Opera is really the only opera related thing that I’ve listened to.”
“I have never seen an opera. Have seen a few ballets though, and lots of musicals! I will listen to shorter bits of singers I like doing opera songs, like Britney Slayes singing Brindisi. I have never gone to see an opera.”
“Never seen an opera”
“It was a long time ago, but it was Faust. It was part of a school trip.”
“I don't think I've ever seen an opera live.” 

But when asked what they liked about the opera, if they’d seen one, the responses were enthusiastic. “It was incredibly moving, the main actor/singer was incredibly talented.“ and “Even though it was in another language and I sat too far away to really get a good view I could still feel the raw powerful emotions of the singers. The music was very striking.” So they are engaged in it to a degree, it does reach them, but it doesn’t make them feel like it belongs to them. One of them noted “It was so gut wrenching and triggering I had to leave the building”, indicating that the story of an opera can be disturbing if one isn’t prepared to compartmentalise it as a “product of its time”. 

The efforts to bring younger audiences to opera are varied and sometimes impressively creative but mainly concerned with gaining younger audiences for traditional opera. As a theatre-maker, Nadiya Atkinson agrees, "I think that theater is constantly in crisis about, we're not getting the right audiences, we're struggling to reach a younger audience, et cetera, et cetera, but then it isn't actually looking at the work that it's making (…). (same interview)”

Whilst it is understood by the author of this exposition, that the traditional opera often serves as the money-maker for larger opera houses, it is also worth wondering, if there could be a shift in this culture as well. Far be it from me to suggest that Mozart and Puccini have run their course and shouldn't be played again. I do, however, firmly believe, that when it comes to opera as an art form, the story and the music are on par in terms of adding value to the experience. In this context, I remember a brief conversation with my ethnomusicology teacher Dr. Fiorenzo Palermo at Middlesex University during my Bachelor, in which he told me he "hated (Alban Berg's) Lulu" because the story was so horrible and demonised women in such a damaging way. I agreed with him but then said "but what do you think about the music?" Instead of commenting on the music, he argued that I was being "such a composer" for saying that because he'd had the same response from a colleague of his who is a composer. It is important here to mention, he is not a practicing musician. And most of the audiences we're after probably won't be. So the story matters, also because the first thing people will read will be the synopsis. To most new audiences, it is the synopsis that makes them decide if they want to see the opera, not the music they haven't heard yet. Opera in itself, may not be elitist, but a lot of the stories are so off-putting that the only reason one would go and see it, is that one is familiar with the music. This takes pre-education and therefore can be seen as a form of unintended gatekeeping, because who wants to do a load of homework in order to enjoy their free time activity? That's the person who is already a fan. Not the new audience member who is coming along to see if they might enjoy it enough to go again. It’s not just about getting the audience into the opera house, concert hall or theatre – it’s also about keeping them, making sure they want to come back. 

When I took my queerplatonic partner Lily to this year’s Opera Makers Showcase at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, she didn’t know what to expect. She’d never seen an opera before. Zygmund de Somogyi’s opera “Ursa Minor”, however, featured a couple of lesbian parents. They were written beautifully and real, by a middle-aged queer woman, as a loving relationship that struggles with parenting the main character Arthur in all his rage and upset about having lost his cat Misha. Lily was immediately in love. As I wittered on about the fantastic orchestration, she couldn’t stop talking about how touching she found the couple. Would she see a contemporary opera again? Of course! With all the perceived difficulties around bringing younger and more diverse audiences into the opera houses – it is really surprisingly easy if one is willing to take a risk. 

When I sat upstairs on the gallery to trigger samples I was able to watch the audience trickle into the small thrust space that is the auditorium of the Cockpit Theatre. And I was so pleased to see that our audience was one of great variety. There were the Star Trek fans with their pins of the Vulcan greeting or the Starfleet Delta. There was a small section of the Steampunk Community in costume. There was Lily and the band of transgender women she had roped into coming and seeing it. There were people with grey hair who'd probably come to the festival since its origin. there were my colleagues from the seafood restaurant I worked in over the summer, waving vigorously when they spotted me upstairs. A girl in a wheelchair. A loud and giggly bunch of young women in beautiful dresses, elaborate make-up and hijabs who later turned out to be members of Taryn’s baseball team. There was an old rock musician whom I knew because I'd worked as a carer for his disabled daughter all through my bachelor's degree. And a whole many more. We managed to draw an audience that made sense to the story and to the people who created it. The people who surround us, whether or not we know them. They didn't come to "go to the opera". They came because something in the synopsis and story piqued their interest and made them feel like this is something made for them. The anonymously-gathered audience feedback speaks for itself (to be read in full here): "Beautiful! A well-told queer love story with characters I learned to empathise with throughout the opera. Wonderful costuming and excellent orchestra!", "Loved the radical story, the music, the amazing voices", “Awesome! 1st opera <3”, “I found myself very drawn into the story by the aesthetics and the interactions early on; really powerful lines (we all hurt the people we love) and beautiful moments of tenderness. Music extremely moving, esp. towards the end.” The single negative feedback we received was a scathing article for an amateur-written blog by someone who mainly writes about company-produced Westend shows. 

Teresa Whitter, one of the people who attended the premiere with two of her friends, is a very interesting person. She is a black-British professional salsa dancer but uses her free time to organise USS Londinium, the biggest London-based Star Trek meet-up. Her Instagram is full of cosplay and conventions. We met each other briefly online after she responded when I sent the leaflet for the opera to her Instagram profile. It meant so much more when she wrote to me the next day: “me and two other friends were in the audience. I really enjoyed the experience! I’ve actually never seen an opera live, so it was indeed special.” Lauren, an acquaintance I met through my support worker job, came with her mentally challenged son, who is in his later teens and interested in a creative career. She writes “Atticus (her son) was so excited and inspired to see young people doing something so interesting and stretching boundaries.” 

I am not quoting these positive comments to boast, but I see them as proof that the “experiment” had a positive outcome, that it inspired the right people as much as it annoyed the right people. I also received a list from Tete-a-Tete of people who want to “be notified” about future shows we’re producing. Having a number of subscribers before launching a newsletter was not something I expected to happen, but it shows that you can speak to people enough for them to be interested in seeing another contemporary opera, even when the music is challenging and the performance is a little rough due to limited rehearsal time and it being a premiere. 

However, I also strongly believe that the work has to come out of an authentic space, rather than trying to “appease” a Zeitgeist with representation. Nadiya agrees when she says (same interview): “there’s this whole thing about writing being woke, and older writers trying to write to appease a younger queer generation, and it feels very unintuitive and unorganic to the stories that they’re making, and in turn, two-dimensionalizes what we’re talking about. So I would love to be the younger person in a writer’s room.” Being the younger person in the writers room is hard to accomplish when you want to be working for the BBC or Disney, but when it comes to Western contemporary opera, we can all do a bit more of it.