Contemporary American-Chinese operas as the nexus of business, innovation, and aesthetics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines business and ethnographic methodologies with cultural and translation studies, this dissertation investigates the traditional American opera house model and festival business model through an ethnographic examination of two contemporary Chinese-American operas' creation. Dream of the Red Chamber (premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2016) and Paradise Interrupted (premiered at Spoleto Festival USA in 2015) are part of a corpus of new Chinese-American contemporary operas, and offer important exceptions to the dominant business model's reliance upon Western canonical works to attract donors and audiences. As the assistant director for Paradise Interrupted and an ethnographer for Dream of the Red Chamber, I witnessed the process of these operas' production, from commissioning to premiere. The operas' box office success and subsequent national and international productions demonstrate the power of identifying new demographics to support the renewal of an art form that struggles to communicate its relevance to contemporary audiences. Equally importantly, these operas contribute to the redefinition of cultural hybridity from an "East-meets-West" model to an everyday practice of individual and institutional interactions driven by complicated and often conflicting motivations. Irrespective of the traditions and sources involved in the works, however, their critical reception—positive or negative—reveals the persistence of exoticist discourses in contemporary journalism. Through my fieldwork and the analysis of financial and marketing data provided by San Francisco Opera and Spoleto Festival USA, I uncover the intertwining cultural, economic, and aesthetic drivers behind the production of these two operas. I draw upon my analysis of these case studies to assess the American opera ecosystem's ability to incubate innovation and risk-taking through culturally hybrid works that target new audiences and donor bases, with a focus on the challenges and opportunities presented by the current institutional infrastructures of large unionized opera houses and multi-genre festivals. I conclude by articulating the need for an innovative hybrid model for the production of opera that develops pipelines for new artistic talent, audiences, and funding sources, which should be used to experiment with modes of presentation that challenge the traditional opera house experience.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Riopelle, Katherine Anne |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hadlock, Heather |
| Thesis advisor | Hadlock, Heather |
| Thesis advisor | Grey, Thomas C |
| Thesis advisor | Levin, David J, 1960- |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Anna C |
| Degree committee member | Grey, Thomas C |
| Degree committee member | Levin, David J, 1960- |
| Degree committee member | Schultz, Anna C |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Music. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Katherine Anne Riopelle. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Music. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Katherine Anne Riopelle
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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