Making Them Sing Again: Opera's Second Act

 Perhaps you've been to the opera, but you probably haven't: a 1992
study found that only 3.3% of Americans had ever sat down in person
to watch a robust person sing, and, while the data is thin, the
percentages were probably lower in many other places—and even
lower now, when attendance at all live events has struggled with
Covid and the internet. Take a moment to explore the origins of opera,
then discuss with your team: what makes it different than
Broadway-style musical theater?
 Champions of opera have noticed its declining popularity. In Italy,
they've offered young people cheap seats—you can listen to a
mezzosoprano for the cost of a double espresso. Others have
reimagined live opera from the ceiling down as a multimedia
experience. Audience members at the recent premiere of Somnium in
China bumped shoulders with roaming robot rovers; those at a mid-
pandemic Rigoletto in Serbia had to worry less about their toes getting
run over and more about frostbite. At both, an LED screen was such a
key player that it could have worn a tuxedo. Also during the
pandemic, one opera company—led by renowned opera
innovator Yuval Sharon—put together a drive-through version of
Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle in a parking garage. Consider these
examples, then discuss with your team: is it possible to reimagine
opera in ways so immersive that they aren't really opera
anymore? If so, what is opera becoming?
 Maybe that LED screen wouldn't need to rent a tuxedo after all.
Defying a tradition which many believe can alienate modern
audiences and perpetuate racist and sexist institutions, some
orchestras are rethinking what their performers should wear. Discuss
with your team: how much does the look of a performer matter?
Should orchestras allow their performers to dress in athleisure, or
like Lady Gaga—or is there a risk of distracting from the music?
Would it be okay for a conductor to wear yoga pants? Does
forcing all members of an orchestra to follow any dress code at all,
let alone one better-suited for (the men at) a 1920s soiree, unfairly
limit their freedom of expression?
 For those who think operas (like subject outlines) are too long for Gen
Z attention spans, the British radio station Classic FM has retooled
classics of the genre into 30-second animated shorts, such as
this take on Bizet's Carmen. Others, worried that opera (like global
rounds) can be too expensive for people to attend and too hard to find
outside of large cities, have tried streaming operas into movie theaters.
Discuss with your team: do you think these approaches can win
new converts? Do they sacrifice anything (of what makes opera
opera?)
 Classical works—many of which reflect a white, Western-dominated
cultural milieu—can be reimagined for a more diverse world. Explore
this production of the 17th century opera Orfeo, one that merges
parallel Greek and Indian mythology, songs in English and Hindi, and
musical instruments and styles, then discuss with your team: how well
does it succeed? Can you think of other operas (or musicals, or even
Disney movies) that should be reengineered in a similar way? Is it
misleading to show two traditions coexisting so harmoniously in
the same work in a world where cultures still more often collide
than converse—or is it aspirational? And is the fact that the original
opera was an Italian masterpiece proof that Western culture is still
being given dominion over its Indian counterpart?
 China, too, has something of an opera problem: attendance is down,
interest is waning. Enter Donald Trump. A 2019 Cantonese-style
opera about Trump searching for his twin brother in China sold out
every performance. In the United States, so-called "CNN operas"—
focused on recent events—have also become more common in the last
few years. Consider the song "Jones is Not Your Name" from the 2022
production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Discuss with
your team: should opera stay away from potentially controversial
stories set in the modern world? Or are there certain political
events that are suited to opera—and is that what draws
composers to them?
 Opera is not the only genre of music to be reinterpreted for the world
today. Learn about and listen to this new approach to Oliver
Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which he first wrote as a
 German prisoner of war. Do you prefer the new version—and do
you think Messiaen would have been okay with it?
On a Nostalgic Note
 Everyone (in the senior division and above) has songs that make them
wistful for moments they can never have-ana again, but are some
songs more universally nostalgic? Listen to and learn more about the
selections below, which are widely celebrated as nostalgic
masterpieces, then discuss with your team: what do they have in
common? Do they reveal a formula for making people sad about
their lost happiness that future songwriters could follow? And do
they work on you, or are you immune to their charms—and
harms?
o The Beatles | Yesterday
o Maroon 5 | Memories
o Ali Haider | Poorani Jeans
o Gao Xiaosong | You Who Sat Next to Me
o Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick | Sunrise, Sunset
 Magic mushrooms are in the curriculum this year—at least, musically.
(We don't have a round in Portland yet.) Them Mushrooms' Embe
Dodo is an example of a nostalgic musical genre—zilizopendwa—
with enduring popularity in Kenya and Tanzania. It has even
inspired academic research on its implications for East African
development. Discuss with your team: can nostalgic music help a
society move forward, or does it do more to keep people fixated on
the past?
 When the main character of the time travel film Back to the Future
finds himself in 1955, it's not just the town around him that has
changed: it's the very sounds in the air. Check out the way that his
arrival in the past is choreographed to the hit 1954 song Mr. Sandman,
and discuss with your team: how much does it matter that movies
set in the past use music from that same period?
One Track Forward, Two Tracks Back: Old Music, New Musicking
 The Ancient Greeks invented the shower; surely they also invented
singing in it. But, until recently, it's been very unclear what Greek
music really sounded like. Learn more about the process by which
scientists have reconstructed the forgotten music of an
unforgettable civilization, including their form of musical notation,
then discuss with your team: does listening to their songs make the
ancient Greeks feel more familiar—or more foreign?
 Yes, something is killing all the bees, but Rimsky-Korsakov's are
holding up okay; his classic Flight of the Bumblebees keeps landing
in new places. Consider the examples below, then discuss with your
team: which feels the most faithful to the composer's intent? Is
there a difference between a reconstruction and a reimagining,
and is it possible to reuse a classical work in a disrespectful way?
o Bob Dylan | It's The Flight of the Bumblebee
o Al Hirt | Green Hornet Theme
o Our Shining Days | Chinese vs. Western Instruments
 Long before people debated whether the prequels were canon,
Pachelbel created a canon that no one will ever dare to propose
erasing. Listen to his original Canon in D, the look for songs (such as
Vitamin C's Graduation: Friends Forever) that have reworked it in
modern times. Discuss with your team: why do we keep going back
to certain pieces in this way? Would the world of music be a more
creative place if, in fact, we could remove the Canon from the
canon?
 Backwards thinking isn't always a bad thing: the Beatles'
song Because began with the idea of playing the familiar chords in
Beethoven's famous Moonlight Sonata—but in reverse. Discuss with
your team: do we need to know, in the title or elsewhere, when a work
is built out of a previous one in such an unconventional way?
 Have a listen to the piano piece Experience; if it sounds familiar, it's
because you probably heard it on TikTok. Many classical pieces have
found new homes that would have surprised those who first created
 them. To what degree should such a repurposing alter what we
think of a work's meaning and significance? If the same exact
piece of music is used in two very different ways, should we think of
it of as two distinct pieces of music? Do you think composers would
be happy to see their works reused in ways that didn't even exist when
they were alive?
o Rhapsody in Blue
o Pomp and Circumstance
o Ode to Joy
 Experience was just one beneficiary of Gen Z's recent surge of interest
in classical music. Consider the young musicians described in this
article as finding success—and fandom!—in a style once seen as in
decline, then discuss with your team: have you noticed this trend
among your own friends? Are these new classical musicians similar
to those in the past, or are they adjusting in some way to appeal to
younger people today? Might they be gaining popularity simply
because embracing classical music is "the most left-wing move
imaginable for a modern-day teenager"?
 Late in production, the director of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick, discarded all the music that his chosen composer,
Alex North, had written for it—a move almost unheard of in
Hollywood. (It would be like changing the theme at the last minute.)
He replaced the entire soundtrack with classical pieces. Most
memorably, he laid Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra over a
scene that literally reconstructs the beginnings of human civilization.
Listen to the part of the original soundtrack meant for that same
sequence, then discuss with your team: did Kubrick make a good
choice? Should more movies and television shows rely on classical
music instead of fresh compositions? Would it make them more
generic—or more timeless?
 The 19th century saw the rise of a new kind of professional musician:
the conductor, whose job it is to oversee, in rehearsal and then in real
time, the performance of a piece. Orchestras vie for the services of the
most famous conductors—the Lionel Messis of the music world. But
 different conductors have different approaches. Some are more
beholden to the "notes on the page", trying to reproduce the sound of a
piece exactly as its composer intended. "Mr. Toscanini is literally a
slave to the composer," one critic wrote of the famed
conductor Arturo Toscanini. He meant it as praise. Discuss with your
team: if you were a conductor, would you see it as your duty to
follow the original composer's wishes? Or would that make you too
easy to replace with a computer program?
 In fact, robot conductors are a thing. Do you think people will be
okay with paying to see orchestras led by them? What if the robot
is an AI-powered reconstruction of Toscanini himself?
 Toscanini's famous rival Wilhelm Furtwangler took a dramatically
different approach—he treated the notes on the page as just a starting
point for his own interpretations. Listen to this comparison of their
different takes on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, then discuss with
your team: is one version better than the other? Is one more artistic? Is
one more authentic? To what degree should a conductor have the
freedom to reimagine how a work should sound?
 Before the 19th century, composers frequently conducted their own
works; it was just part of the job description. Even today, many still
do. Discuss with your team: is the most genuine version of a work
the one conducted by the person who wrote it—for instance, John
Williams conducting his own Star Wars main title theme, as opposed
to this version led by Darth Kucybała??
 Modern composers can also rebuild classical music from the ground
up by integrating it with the instruments and styles of diverse cultural
traditions. Consider works such as Simon Thacker's "Panchajanya",
then discuss with your team: are they crafting something new? Is
there more value in musical traditions remaining separate so that they
can be linked creatively, or should we be aspiring to a single global
sound?
The Past Has a Version Control Problem
 In the 1980s, two Soviet artists-in-exile, Vitaly Komar and Alexander
Melamid, painted the head of Josef Stalin, freed from its body and
perched on a woman's hand. Judith on the Red Square(check out an
image) was just the latest take on another historical moment that may
also never have happened. Consider Komar and Melamid's version
together with those below, then discuss with your team: what story
inspired them, and how do their styles and meanings vary? Is there
a difference between showing the act of the beheading and just its
aftermath? And, if, as critics argue, they celebrate the trope of "female
rage", should we still be studying any of them?
o Judith Beheading Holofernes | Caravaggio
o Judith Slaying Holofernes | Artemisia Gentileschi
o Judith and the Head of Holofernes | Gustav Klimt
o Judith and Holofernes | Pedro Americo
o Judith and Holofernes | Kehinde Wiley
 He could be a Super Junior—in 2022, the 10-year-old Andres
Valencia painted Invasion of Ukraine, a work modeled on Pablo
Picasso's 1937 Cubist classic Guernica. Where Picasso portrayed, in
fractured screams, the German bombing of a small Basque town,
Valencia saw a chance to critique the similar horror of Russia's recent
aggression. Examine both works and those below, then discuss with
your team: how does each vary from the original, and to what end?
Have any other artists created new works about Guernica based on the
actual attack, rather than on Picasso's painting? Should Valencia have
tried to find a more original approach, or was it a good choice to
make his work a homage to an established masterpiece? And,
would Valencia's painting be seen differently if he were an adult—
or Ukrainian?
o Backyard Guernica and Saskatoon Guernica | Adad Hannah
o Untitled (Guernica Redacted) | Robert Longo
o Guernica remastered (works inspired by Guernica)
 o Guernica in tile
o Keiskamma Guernica
 Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851)
captures a moment that even in the tense runup to the Civil War had
already become part of America's founding myth: the future first
president leading his men to a pivotal attack on the British. As
paintings go, it is iconic; it is also inaccurate. In 2011, the artist Mort
Kunstler revisited the scene more realistically. Compare his
Washington's Crossing to Leutze's, then discuss with your team: if
painted in 1851, would it have become as iconic? Then, consider a
version that critiques not the size of the ship or who is where on deck,
but the founding myth behind all of it: Robert Colescott's George
Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American
History Textbook (1975). It challenges viewers to consider whether
promoting the original version to schoolchildren spreads a founding
myth that marginalizes whole groups of people. Discuss with your
team: if you could print only one of these three works in a
textbook, which would you choose—or would you create an
entirely new one?
 Sometimes history can't wait. In July 1793, at the peak of the French
Revolution, Charlotte Corday, a minor aristocrat, stabbed the radical
Jean-Paul Marat as he took a bath. Although both were
revolutionaries, she wanted slower change and less murder than he
did; she was Mon Mothma to his Luthen. The unrepentant Corday
insisted to the guillotine that she had "killed one man to save a
hundred thousand." Later that year, the Neoclassical artist Jacques-
Louis David—whose usual focus was long-ago history scenes—
memorialized the martyred Marat in a simple painting that inspired
two hundred years of replicas and reinterpretations. Consider his
work, as well as the other versions below, then discuss with your
team: should artists wait a certain amount of time before depicting
important political events? Leutze was painting Washington crossing
the Delaware half a century later from across a much wider body of
water; do artists closer to the facts on the ground have an
obligation to portray events more accurately? What do you think
 Picasso would have said about this obligation? (Yes, you can ask him
on Character.AI if you'd like.)
o Charlotte Corday | Paul-Jacques-Aime Baudry
o The Death of John Paul Marat | Engraved by James Aliprandi
o The Assassination of Marat | J. J. Weerts
o Death of Marat | Gavin Turk
 Professional artists aren't the only ones who remake famous artworks.
In the early months of the pandemic, long before the sourdough grew
stale, the Getty Museum challenged everyday people to attempt it
with household objects. Review their efforts, then discuss with your
team: should we add this kind of challenge as an optional event at
the Global Round?