In her contribution to this splendid edited volume, Anne Boyd writes that opera is “particularly suited both to the creation and presentation of myth in a contemporary social context” (94). As the essays collected here show, myth as temporal-spatial structure of feeling can range from the national mythologies that states create to legitimize themselves, to indigenous cultural expressions that re-imagine pre-colonial cultural heritage in new contemporary contexts. And as these essays also collectively demonstrate, the multimedia genre of opera provides a wealth of ways of embodying and performing myth.
The publisher’s blurb on the book jacket explains that the collection “explores how operas on Indigenous subjects reflect the evolving relationships between Indigenous peoples, the colonizing forces of imperial power, and forms of internal colonization in developing nation-states.” While orientalist representations in opera of peoples in the Middle and Far East have been the subject of a number of previous studies, this book breaks new ground in a number of ways. The subject matter is primarily representations in musical theater of indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, areas only sporadically treated up to now in opera studies. And more importantly, the voices and concerns of indigenous people themselves are integral to the approach of the book. Firstly, several of the contributors themselves have indigenous backgrounds as Aboriginal Australians or members of First Nations in Canada or the United States. Secondly, rather than simply rehearse again the postcolonial critique of the musical and visual exoticisms of elite majority culture, this collection of essays for the most part takes a different tack, focusing largely on opera and musical theater productions in which indigenous artists themselves play a significant role in determining how their cultures will be represented. This is what the editors mean by re/present in the book’s title; the deconstructed word is meant to suggest both “how non-Indigenous artists have represented the Indigene in opera and how Indigenous artists have more recently utilized opera as an interface to present and extend cultural practices” (2). The book thus addresses the relatively recent shift evident in the Pacific and the Americas from the status quo practices of elite majority (usually white) cultural actors representing indigenous peoples, to the emergence of indigenous agency and the practices of indigenous peoples themselves, as they become empowered to re-present their own cultures on the musical-theatrical stage. While this empowerment and agency are understood to be a good thing, this does not mean that the new re-presentations made by indigenous artists and musicians are immune to critical inquiry and reflection. The book thus does not merely celebrate the new indigenous artistic agency, but subjects it to a critical scrutiny on the same basis as it critiques older non-indigenous representations of indigenous cultures.
The contributors include scholars in the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and performance studies, as well as professional opera producers and practitioners, and includes indigenous professional academics and artists. The book’s geographic coverage includes the western Pacific (especially Australia, but also including Bali and New Zealand) and the Americas (with special emphasis on Canada, but also including the United States and Brazil), and one essay dealing with South Africa.
As one might expect, many of the chapters focus on close readings of specific individual operas, based either on scores or on recorded performances. Some of the most interesting work in the book, however, is in the chapters that break out of this text-reading mode. The last two chapters, for example, are based on conversations between researchers (the book’s two editors), musical theater practitioners (including both indigenous and non-indigenous professionals), and other members of the indigenous communities involved in specific productions in Australia and Canada.
While some of the essays treat historical subjects, the focus on contemporary work in much of the book reveals a pattern whereby, especially over the last two decades or so, indigenous artists in multiple locales have recognized and capitalized on the way that opera’s inherent nature as a multimedia and hybrid genre makes it especially adaptable to indigenous modes of storytelling that fuse language, music, acting, dance, and the visual arts. Related to this development is the exploration of opera as a vehicle for engendering time and space, and thus for narrating the histories and geographies of both colonialism and contemporary indigenous identity, as suggested in the passage from Boyd’s essay quoted above. Also related to this theme is the way that contemporary musical theater continually stretches the boundaries of opera as a genre, as artists explore different ways of telling stories through the various media integrated in the specific productions discussed.
Much of the book is organized geographically, grouping together essays on, respectively, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere in the Americas. But a general arc cross-cutting the different sections can also be discerned, running from chapters that use as a point of departure Timothy Taylor’s critique (in his book Beyond Exoticism) of opera as a genre that historically served as an idiom for representing colonizing subjectivities, to chapters that focus on contemporary approaches to the genre that subvert that tendency and that use musical theater as a vehicle for affording decolonized subjectivities, both for indigenous and non-indigenous people.
There is not enough space in this short review to discuss in detail all of the eighteen essays (plus the editors’ introduction) brought together in this book, so I will only mention a few that I think would be of special interest to the readers of this journal. Ethnomusicologist Beverly Diamond focuses in her chapter on two works, both created by indigenous composers, librettists, and choreographers, that each in different ways “comment on colonial encounter” (31). One is the Sámi opera Skuvle Nejla (2006); the other is the Aboriginal dance opera BONES (2001), created largely by artists from Canadian First Nations. Suspicious of “claims of decolonization when actual social impact is hard to ascertain” (31), Diamond explores in the essay the question of to what extent these productions actually succeed in contributing to the creation of decolonized subjectivities in their audiences.
Tara Browner provides a historical perspective in her essay, examining the complex relationships between early ethnological field research on Native American musics and the uses of that research by art music composers in the United States. Browner discusses the partnership between ethnologists Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche (Omaha) and composer John Comfort Fillmore in the late 1800s, and La Flesche’s later collaboration with composer Charles Wakefield Cadman. Cadman’s initial work with La Flesche and his later collaboration with Creek singer Tsianina Redfeather eventually led to Cadman’s opera Shanewis (1918). Browner disentangles the complex personal and professional relationships between the (indigenous) researcher and the (indigenous) informants from whom songs were collected, the (white) composer and the (indigenous) performer, accounting for the roles they played in the eventual genesis of the opera. These collaborations and others eventually resulted in the “Indian sound” that came to predominate in “countless film scores and Broadway depictions of Indians,” and that can still be heard today in the American film genre of the Western (184).
The subject matter of Victoria Vaughn’s essay on composer Evan Ziporyn’s A House in Bali will be familiar to many ethnomusicologists. Ziporyn’s opera (still in the pre-premiere stage at the time of the essay’s writing) is based on composer Colin McPhee’s autobiographical account of his time on Bali, well known to researchers on and western performers of Indonesian music. Vaughn uses her close reading of the opera as a springboard for reflections on the “Western history of the reception of Eastern musical forms (and dance and drama), while investigating our own reception of others’ receptions” (296).
Another theme that runs through many of the essays is dialog, both specifically between indigenous and non-indigenous composers and artists and, at a more subtle level, between settler colonial communities and the indigenous peoples whose lands they have colonized. The idea of dialog is especially enacted in chapter 17, an interview with the (non-First Nations) director of Vancouver Opera’s 2007 Coast Salish adaptation of Mozart’s Magic Flute, with responses by First Nations people who were involved in or saw the production. The chapter is organized as a collaborative, polyphonic, and experimental piece of writing, with passages from the interview and commentary from the respondents arranged in adjacent columns on the page to construct the dialog not just through the content of what each person has to say, but also in the very way that content is physically arranged and displayed on the page.
As a whole, this collection makes a significant contribution in several areas; for me the most interesting of these is to be found in the way that many of the essays provide examples of serious engagement with postcolonial modes of critique, a relatively undeveloped approach in music studies. Most of the chapters are written in an accessible style that eschews jargon, making them especially appropriate for classroom use at all levels.
Work Cited
Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham: Duke University Press.
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[Review length: 1493 words • Review posted on May 7, 2012]