The discovery of children as a potential audience for Operas

The discovery of children as a potential audience for Operas Theresa Schmitz Abstract During long time, the art of opera has been considered not only as exclusive for a certain social class but designed first of all for an audience of grown ups. Children or even minors has been often considered as potential trouble makers as they won’t at that age neither have integrated behavioural codes or intellectual capacities to follow a four hours masterpiece. By the end of the 1960 a paradigm shift touches the Opera houses: the differentiation of the audience in divers audiences. One of theses new audiences are children. This process will end up in a new policy of programming for children and even provoke a new lyric art form: professional operas for children. This means contemporary creations not executed by children for a pedagogical aim but by professional musicians and singers in search of high artistic quality. My presentation will investigate political and social reasons of this change. In my opinion, not only the phenomena called cultural democratisation during the 1960-70 and the crisis of the Operas during the 1970-80 are responsible for it, but also the considerable change of the conceptions of Child and Childhood. Just like the New Sociology of Childhood considers the child as co-constructors and co-actors of childhood and society, now the Operas are considering children as a today’s audience instead of a tomorrow’s audience. The concrete example of an professional opera for children, Swanhunter by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton created in 2009 by Opera North, will show how children as an audience will influence the artistic process without being considered a less important our less intelligent (=critical) audience. Key Words: Child, opera, cultural policies. ***** 1. The Crisis of Opera Already in 1959, European Opera directors commented on the disaffection of their halls and the over-representation of the older age groups constituting their regular audience. Ticket sales are still mostly based on 2 Title of eBook Chapter ______________________________________________________________ subscription passed from one generation of the elitist parts of the population on to the next. Opera is first of all a social meeting point. The artistic interest is mostly based on the voice of the diva and the repertoire focused on 18 th and 19th centuries works. As the audience is getting continuously older and new subscribers won’t appear to support the expensive programming – the opera houses need to find new strategies to keep the machine going. First of all, the rationalisation of the organisation and internationalisation of the artistic masses are deemed an efficient tool to reduce the overall budget. Second, some States start to finance the opera houses with up to 90% of the total budget to save this form of art, regarded as an European cultural heritage. In order to justify the high expense and use of public money, the call for democratisation of this legitimate form of art becomes a political issue. Actually, this request was linked to the emergence of modern cultural policies in the 1960’s. The concept of Culture for everyone should promote cultural identity as well as cultural diversity. The objective was to homogenise the different social classes through regular contact with the High Arts. Consequently, it was necessary to diversify the audience so as to enable the access of distant groups. In the beginning, the distance was defined in terms of geographic accessibility and economic barriers. Museums, opera houses and theatres adapted their prices and the opening or performance hours. Against all expectation, the quality of the audience didn’t change, as psychological barriers had been underestimated. Simultaneously, changes in quantity actually reflected a higher attendance of the privileged social classes. As the understanding of promoting art persists in being the diffusion of one legitimate High Culture, thereby excluding popular culture and amateur activities, also the ways of transmission keep being patronising. Furthermore, institutions are defending the idea that the pure contact will elevate the lower classes and their artistic taste. Clearly, a different approach to the audience like changing the mode of representation, innovating that art form, has not been considered – not least because new staging and new repertoire would alienate the rich and traditional audience. In the UK, the situation is lightly different as the institutions of arts are only indirectly dependent on public funding due to the intermediate position of the Art’s Councils. Secondly, cultural policies are essentially social policies sustaining much earlier the positive effects of creative practices on all social classes. So in the 70’s a high number of community operas emerged, integrating all age classes and professions into a common creative process. 2. The first act of cultural democracy: defining new publics Although other countries in Europe won’t adhere to this community practice in the same way, they will integrate the transformation from the Name and Surname of Author(s) 3 ______________________________________________________________ concept of Culture for everyone into Culture with everyone. Democratisation of High Culture became cultural democracy in the 80’s. That would mean the attempt to establish equality between all types of art and to consider the diverse artistic practices as co-constructing a general cultural identity. In this second phase of diversifying the audience, the opera houses started to consider the big homogeneous mass of public as a wide range of different audiences with varying needs. In view of the audience’s average age of 60 years, they began to take children into consideration as a potential audience of the future. Educational departments were established in order to educate this new audience. Changes in the perception of the child will largely contribute to the progress of the relations opera houses will engage with these new audiences. It seems to me that there is a parallel between the concept of the New Sociology of Childhood and the creation of educational departments in the opera houses during the 80’s and 90’s, especially as the approach of the child-spectator will change rapidly. 3. The second act: educational activities and programme for children At the time of their creation, the educational departments were usually linked to the marketing services. It shows the original objective of this new mission: sell more tickets to a new audience, the school pupils and children. As on the one hand, the lyrical adult repertoire is considered hardly accessible to children, in terms of length and topics, and on the other hand, children are considered not to know the behaviour codes of an opera audience, new solutions must be found to bring together these two worlds children and opera. For this reason, the educational departments put on diverse educational activities to prepare the pupils for the big encounter with the opera and its conservatory audience. Very soon, as the evening hours are difficult to attend for schools, performances started to be offered during the school hours, in the morning or early afternoon. For budget reasons, partly because the educational work was hardly legitimated inside the opera houses, and partly because ticket prices for pupils differed largely from adult prices, reductions and adaptations of the adult repertoire have been introduced. These new forms allow also to adapt the duration and the plot to children’s capacity of concentration and to their concerns. Several scientific domains have long defined the child negatively1, describing it from what it will become in the future and not as what it is, likewise, the opera houses interpret children as a potential audience of the future and a non-audience of today. The upcoming hypothesis of children as a co-actors of their own socialisation, of their own life and of their cultural consumption, will contribute to the new attitude of the opera houses coming 4 Title of eBook Chapter ______________________________________________________________ up during the 90’s. It’s about discriminating the child positively in relation to its capacities, needs and potentials as a member of society. 3. The third act: professional children’s opera as a new genre While at first a parallel programme of adaptations intends to prevent children from disturbing the traditional ritual of opera and its conservatory audience, this programme for young audiences could also be analysed as the protection of the child from frustration and negative experience of neverending performances of unintelligible stories. Rapidly, the opera houses became aware of the potential and exceptionality of this kind of audience. In order to hold up reputation of quality (that was not always given in the lowcost adaptations of the general repertoire), the institutions started to commission new works for young audiences. Sizeable budgets spent on new chamber operas created by important actors of the contemporary musical life show the shift in the consideration of the young audience as a legitimate audience of today, and not only of tomorrow. The educational background still exists, but focuses now on the enrichment of the children’s creativity and personality. It’s important to underline, that we are not talking about participative productions but about professional productions for children exclusively as auditors. These are not cheap versions of the general repertoire but whole new works requiring seriousness in realization, as well as budget and artistic quality. 4. The children’s ideological power Before analysing a concrete example of a contemporary professional children’s opera, let’s for a moment come back on the significance of the perception of the child as a co-constructor of its own culture and culture in general. When William Corsaro (1997) talks about interpretative reproduction2, he intends three levels of the children’s contribution to culture: 1. Children’s creative appropriation of information and knowledge from the adult world. 2. Children’s production and participation in a series of peer cultures. 3. Children’s contribution to the reproduction and extension of the adult culture.3 In this special case of professional children’s opera, I would like to underline the exchange and the reciprocal influence between generations. Children never choose by themselves to go to see a children’s opera. Either their teachers or family members bring them to see one. Unlike what you could imagine, these parents aren’t necessarily fans of opera but are in Name and Surname of Author(s) 5 ______________________________________________________________ search of a nice story they can bring their children to on Saturday afternoon. In most cases, it’s not the genre and the institution that provokes the ticket purchase, but the favourite fairy tale of the parents or a classic of the children’s literature the parents read during their own childhood. The reciprocal observation between adults and children in front of a medium new to both of them, puts them on the same level. The child will influence the parents with its reactions. It will make work its ideological power - an expression coined by Benoit Heilbron4 - on the cultural consumption of the family. 5. Creating operas for children: Swanhunter by Jonathan Dove The child as an auditor influences the professional children’s operas right in the moment of creation, as the composers are conscious not only of the child’s ideological power, but also of its frankness of what it likes or not. Contrarily to adult productions, where they rarely take in consideration the reception of their work, when creating for children, almost all composers adapt their language and creative gesture to this special audience. Most refuse to admit this, as it could significantly devalue their work, but some like the British Composer Jonathan Dove talk openly about it. The example of his latest opera for young audiences, Swanhunter, shows how a specific perception of the child influenced the creation. For my PhD research I carried out an ethnographic study of Swanhunter, including not only a musicological analysis of the score, but also a direct exchange with the composer. Swanhunter was commissioned by Opera North in 2009 specifically for a young audience. For this reason it can be called a children’s opera. When I first contacted Jonathan Dove via Email, I asked him if I could meet him to talk about children’s opera and especially about Swanhunter. He answered me: “If you want to talk about children’s opera, we should talk about Pinocchio and not about Swanhunter.” Obviously, he had his own personal definition what a children’s opera is and what it is not, even if the institution would sell it as a children’s opera. The adventures of Pinocchio, based on the novel by Carlo Collodi, is a huge family show, with entraining melodies, high rhythm in the storytelling and a lot of jokes and circus elements. Swanhunter, on the other hand is based on an old Finnish legend, not especially conceived for children but part of the general Nordic heritage. From the beginning, Jonathan Dove doesn’t consider the story of Swanhunter as a story for children. It’s a great adventure, focussed on the 6 Title of eBook Chapter ______________________________________________________________ power of singing, that would be perfectly fit for the opera genre, but it needs a slower story-telling, in his mind hardly suitable for children. The most important aim of children’s operas would be for Jonathan Dove that the young spectators have a good time, that they go out telling their parents: “We want more of it!”.5 There are many ways of getting this type of reaction, but in his feeling the most important would be to avoid extreme singing and slow music. A bored child is a lost spectator. Jonathan Dove has worked out his own idea of a child spectator. This opinion is on the one hand constructed on the base of remembering how he behaved as a child and on the other hand on the base of personal experience on working with children. In his mind, works must adapt on the lower concentration capacity of children: only a high rhythm and a sequence of exceptional and spectacular effects would be able to keep the children’s attention. As in their daily life children are surrounded by many different stimuli, continuous music and ongoing activities, to be interesting to them operas would need to do the same. 6. The composer’s entertaining strategies Nevertheless, Swanhunter will be performed as an opera for young audience, because Jonathan Dove resorts to various strategies to guarantee the entertainment of the young audience: a. Familiar sound elements: Percussions is one of the instruments they definitively do relate to. That’s in all dance music. For this reason it was very important for the work to have a strong rhythmic identity. I’m writing for children I’ve never met and I’m telling kind of a difficult story, it’s not a funny story6. So for Jonathan Dove, percussions and rhythm are pointed out as linking element to children’s every day life. b. Exceptional sound experiences: I felt it’s quite a risk then to write slow music to the swan, but she’s singing these incredibly high notes that children would almost certainly never have heard everyone’s singing, or certainly they wouldn’t have heard it singing live, in the same room without a microphone. So they may think it’s weird but probably they will be interested. It will hold their attention.7 Name and Surname of Author(s) 7 ______________________________________________________________ c. Spectacular staging: Jonathan Dove understands opera as a medium that tells a story by the use of diverse arts (music, theatre, danse, lyrics). His music alone won’t be able to keep the children’s attention. So staging is very important and the composer has been almost disappointed of the way Swanhunter was staged at the Opera North: “I think the many elements could have been more frightening. In the Leed’s Museum there is a skeleton of an elk, it’s really frightening, it’s huge.8” d. Relevant Story: According to Jonathan Dove, it’s important to tell stories the children can relate to: Alasdair and I read hundred of stories. But often these stories involved kind of incestuous relationships – you just can’t do this with kids. It wouldn’t mean anything to them, but terrify the parents. It’s not yet part of their experience, we hope. To try to find a story, which is a really good adventure but does not involve sex is quite hard.9 Jonathan Dove’s words highlight the desire to use everything possible to ensure a good reception. The responsibility in front of the children is very high for one reason: usually these 5-11 years old children come to see an opera for the first time. And even if they don’t understand exactly what it is, they will remember it as an exceptional event. The minute they associate opera with something boring you will hardly get them a second time into the Opera House. Creators like Jonathan Dove seem to want to communicate their passion to the genre. They integrate the meeting with this one work in a larger meaning: the first meeting with the opera genre. Children don’t know that there are many ways of doing opera, so this first opera must be perfect. This kind of universal desire, the transmission of the passion, is especially present in these works for children. The feeling of responsibility could be considered as unique in front of a children’s audience, as composers don’t feel the same in front of the general audience. But finally, it’s a risky and utopian desire, as no art form will ever unite all the existing tastes. Notes 1 W. Corsaro, The sociology of childhood, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, (1997), 2005, p. 84. Corsaro, p.18/19. 3 Corsaro, p.41. 4 Heilbrunn, Benoit, ‘Les pouvoirs de l'enfant consommateur’ in Enfants adultes. Vers une égalité de statuts, Singly, F. (eds), Collection Le tour du sujet, Éditions Universalis, Paris, 2004, p.50. 5 Interview Jonathan Dove, 24th February 2010. 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. 2 Bibliography Caune, J., Pour une éthique de la médiation – le sens des pratiques culturelles. Presses universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble, 1999. 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(ed), Kinderoper, Ästhetische Herausforderung und pädagogische Verpflichtung. ConBrio, Regensburg, 2004. Schulze, G., Die Erlebnisgesellschaft, Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt, 1993. Singly, F. (ed), Enfants Adultes. Vers une égalité de statut?. Collection Le tour du sujet, Éditions Universalis, Paris, 2004. Sirota, R. (ed.), Elements pour une sociologie de l’enfance. Presses Universitaires, Rennes, 2006. Theresa Schmitz is actually Ph.D. student in Musicology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her scientific interest in the contemporary creation for children is accompanied by professional experiences in opera production management as well as by the organization of music pedagogic workshops for element school children.