Society of Fellows scholar David Gutkin (2015–2017) recently co-edited a volume of The Opera Quarterly journal derived from the SOF/Heyman Center conference, Experiments in Opera Today: Conference and Symposium. This conference and symposium considered how artists from numerous disciplines are currently working with opera.

About the volume

"This issue stems from a conference we organized with Arman Schwartz at Columbia University in 2018 called “Experiments in Opera Today.” We were interested in thinking about what artists of all kinds were doing with opera, now that some of the most ambitious and wildest takes on the form from the second half of the twentieth century had become something like avant-garde “classics.” As we put it in our publicity note: 'Opera has been conceived for serialized television broadcast, performed by robots, staged in site-specific spectacles, transformed into non-narrative installations, wedded to free improvisation, and intended (if not quite realized) as interstellar rituals … . What new approaches to narrative, voice, subject matter, media, and technology have recent creators of opera employed? Or is the emphasis on novelty particularly ill-suited to a form that, even in its most radical guise, continues to connote a host of conventions and traditions (ways of singing, a simultaneously extravagant and rarefied aesthetic, a canonical repertory, a bourgeois base, and so on)? What elements of the operatic past, then, have remained compelling or inevitable?'..."

Access the full issue here.