“They kept asking us, ‘Why do you get to decide what the operas are? How come we never get to decide?’” recalls an Opera Theatre St. Louis director. Now, they do.
Opera Theatre of St. Louis will produce three short operas by artists of color who seek to expand the boundaries of American opera by incorporating new sounds and stories. A community panel of artists, most of whom work outside the opera field, selected the pieces.
Galvanized by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of 2020, Cerise Jacobs and her activist opera company, White Snake Projects, developed the virtual opera Death by Life – exploring the intersection of systemic racism and mass incarceration with texts written by incarcerated writers and their families and a score by five Black composers – to stand as a monument of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Checking in with our first class of composer mentees
posted on 12:03 PM, February 16, 2021
In fall of 2020, NATS selected 10 Black composers to participate in its new Mentoring Program for composers
In October of 2020, the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) announced and began its inaugural season of the NATS Mentoring Program for Composers.
The new program was designed to encourage the creation and performance of new works by pairing a celebrated art song composer with an emerging and early career art song composer. For this first year, NATS reserved the program for composers from underrepresented groups, with a special emphasis on Black composers. Together, composers Tom Cipullo and Lori Laitman are overseeing the program, and NATS is happy to provide an update and share how the program is progressing so far.