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Composers, performers, administrators, and other fans of contemporary American music gathered together on May 7, 2007, for the 67th Annual Meeting and 42nd Award Ceremony of the American Music Center. The ceremony, which took place at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, opened with a performance of original music by guitarist Dominic Frasca. Following addresses by AMC Board Chair Augusta Read Thomas, Board President James Undercofler, Treasurer Corey Field, and AMC CEO Joanne Hubbard Cossa, the AMC’s Letter of Distinction was presented to composers T. J. Anderson and John Corigliano, and Ralph N. Jackson, assistant vice president of classical music relations at BMI and president of the BMI Foundation, Inc. In addition, a Trailblazer Award was presented to the new music ensemble eighth blackbird.

– FJO

An attentive audience awaits the AMC Annual Awards Ceremony. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Joanne Hubbard Cossa, AMC’s CEO, addresses the audience. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Dominic Frasca entertains the crowd. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

AMC First Vice President Barbara Petersen, awardee T. J. Anderson, Board Chair Augusta Read Thomas, and awardee Ralph Jackson (Pictured from left to right). Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Composer conclave: AMC Honoree John Corigliano and Jennifer Higdon with Paul Moravec. Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Four blackbirds are in town to pick up the AMC Trailblazer Award (from left to right: Lisa Kaplan, Tim Munro, Matthew Albert, and Michael Maccaferri). Photo © 2007 Ray Tamarra

Like people, conferences have their own personalities—public personas that take shape through programs of panels and presentations—but also private sides that reveal themselves more fully in hallway conversations, impromptu lunches, and after hours parties. If the Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference’s recent meeting in Seattle (April 19-22) provides a reasonably accurate impression of its character, the precocious six year old acts its age: playful, intellectually curious, receptive to new ideas, and still growing. A bookish, nerdy-but-cool adolescent sporting square glasses and skinny jeans, EMP is the Elvis Costello of conferences.

Jonathan Lethem delivers the conference keynote address, “Collapsing Distance: The Love-Song of the Wanna-Be, or, Fannish Auteur.” Photo by Joe Mabel

That image has more than a little to do with the fact that pop journalists and critics represented the majority of this year’s approximately 150 attendees, who also included a large percentage of music academics—well-heeled graduate students and post-docs in somewhat greater numbers than junior and senior ranking profs. Few musicians participated, aside from those who double in one of the aforementioned categories, nor did many music industry types. There were no performances, no conference exhibits. Instead of a celebrity rocker or record label exec, noted novelist and sometime music writer Jonathan Lethem gave the keynote, “Collapsing Distance: The Love-Song of the Wanna-Be, or, Fannish Auteur.” Rhapsody and Real Networks counted among the handful of conference sponsors that made free admission possible, but their understated presence impacted the overall vibe of the gathering very little.

While the small number of attendees lent the conference an intimacy, the blend made for a congenial, low B.S., nearly hype-free convergence of music enthusiasts that felt tight-knit without being exclusive or cliquish. Instead of the pervasive high-octane networking encountered at CMJ (or the conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, International Association of Jazz Education, and Chamber Music America, for that matter), budding EMP relationships seem less effected by the desire for professional expediency and an individual’s place in the pecking order. Being there is unlikely to provide quantifiable results in terms of landing more freelance work, getting tenure, or scoring a job at a nicer college, which places the focus of interaction squarely on intellectual interests. A core constituency attends year after year, but conversations between regulars and newcomers started easily as attendees chowed down on free continental breakfast in the lobby, hung out at the lone book table, or grabbed lunch in the shadow of the Space Needle at the Seattle Center next door.

(L to R) Princeton English & African-American studies faculty member Daphne Brooks, critic Robert Christgau (Rolling Stone, ex-Village Voice), and Los Angeles Times culture critic Ann Powers at 2007 Pop Conference, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington. Photo by Joe Mabel

Perhaps it takes co-mingling individuals from different spheres of intellectual enterprise to create a healthier, less hierarchical environment for exchange. But thanks also go to EMP’s psychic parents, conference organizer Eric Weisbard, a former editor at the Village Voice and Spin, and program committee member Ann Powers, chief pop critic at the L.A. Times and ebullient spirit. These two appeared to be everywhere: moderating panels, asking questions from the audience, leading lunchtime discussions, chatting informally with old and new acquaintances, and generally meeting and greeting those present. From the outset, they established a collegial tone and created a welcoming atmosphere. Instead of adopting a traditional format for the conference’s closing panel on Sunday afternoon, “The Future of Thinking About Music for a Living,” Weisbard conducted it more like a town meeting: chairs arranged in a circle large enough to accommodate around a hundred people, whose lively and productive dialogue he orchestrated. After some talk about the successes of the conference and where there might be room for improvement, discussion touched on such topics as writers’ intellectual property rights, the underexploited potential of the academy to support writers, and the migration of work to the web. Pitchfork news editor Amy Phillips’ made the provocative assertion that even webzines failed to reach many of today’s young readers, who get most of their information from message boards. The future of music journalism? Hope not.

Having four simultaneous sessions at any given time, an expansion of last year’s three, made Weisbard and Powers’ omnipresence an even greater feat. This year’s loosely defined theme, “Waking Up from History: Music, Time, and Place,” generated a wide range of panels with titles like “Urban Dance Squads,” “A Seventies Moment,” “Indieland,” “Breaks in Time: Rethinking Hip-Hop Roots,” and “Pazz & Jop Live!”

Audience for a talk in the EMP Learning Lab. Photo by Joe Mabel

The individual papers varied in style and in strength—some more journalistic in approach, others more scholarly, irrespective of their quality. On the “Year Zeros” panel, poet Joshua Clover ruminated on 1989 and its “Winds of Change,” while Caroline Polk O’Meara used the Bush-Tetras’s “Too Many Creeps” to map early 1980s New York. An exploration of “Suburban Soundscapes” included Patricia Jeehyun Ahn’s analysis of music’s role in the hit show The O. C. and its representations of racial diversity. Between Daphne Carr’s exegesis on the Hot Topic chain in suburban malls and Erica Easley’s history of concert T-shirts, the panel on iconography revealed much about clothing and identity, whether or not it provided viable fashion tips. “Pazz & Jop Live!,” a conference highlight, started off with Robert Christgau speaking out on his firing from the Village Voice and the fate of his respected poll, followed by Princeton professor Daphne Brooks’ poetic exploration of the band TV on the Radio, and closed with Tim Quirk’s predictions about future listening habits as based on Rhapsody’s subscription model. (He is Rhapsody’s vice president of music content and programming.)

The panel topics also went well beyond “pop music” or “popular music,” however one might define it. Others included “Jazz Journeys,” “Forks in the Folkways,” and “Space, Place, and Race in Country Music.” A moving lunchtime session paid tribute the career of culture critic Ellen Willis. The University of Washington, a conference sponsor, hosted an evening discussion between Jeff Chang, author of the award winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and Gaye T. Johnson, faculty in the Black Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara, titled: “Made It Funky: New Orleans, James Brown, and the Foundations and Futures of U.S. Pop Music.” The fate of New Orleans and its musical culture remained a theme throughout the three days.

Academics might find EMP lightweight in terms of its theoretical rigor—nothing there shook the foundations of scholarship—while journalists and critics might rightly counter that the academic tone of many papers and the thick critical studies vocabulary that they tend to employ hinders their ready comprehension. Nonetheless, this conference provides a welcome venue for journalists and critics to reflect on their favorite subjects outside the daily grind and to work out long term projects in front of an audience of dedicated researchers, while also serving as a place where academics can catch up on current pop and media trends and benefit from the knowledge of insiders. The specifics may change year after year, but EMP is a precious and incredibly unique young hybrid, an open space for exchange between the two primary groups who think and write about music for a living.

On Saturday, March 24, 2007, composers Jennifer Stasack, T.J. Anderson, Stephen Jaffe, Rodney Waschka, and myself were joined by two-dozen colleagues gathered to talk about the state of music in society at the National Humanities Center in lovely Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Billed as one of eight pre-symposium events across the country leading towards Tanglewood II, a 40th anniversary congress of the nation’s leading music professionals gathering in the Berkshires in Summer 2007, the North Carolina event paralleled similar gatherings at UCLA, Columbia, Minnesota, and other centers of music.

When Tony Palmer, national co-chair of the Tanglewood II symposium, called me around Christmas, he recounted a history I didn’t know. In 1967, the Tanglewood Symposium, a collection of 34 professionals, met in the Massachusetts Berkshires and examined music in American society. Tanglewood II will again meet in the Berkshires this summer with an international rostrum of educators and presenters, scholars and composers to examine how far we’ve come and where we have yet to go.

As Tony explained it, eight campuses across the country were giving pre-symposium events and one of the larger East Coast institutions had “hit a snag”: could North Carolina State host this? I explained to Tony that while NC State was big—a campus of 32,000 and a music department (which I began chairing only three years ago) that serviced nearly 2,000 of those students every year in 80-plus academic courses and 18 ensembles—we have no music major!

It was then that Tony told me the subject he needed covered: “The Value of Music in Society.” “Sign us up,” I said, and suddenly NC State got thrust into the Big Leagues. I immediately turned to my colleague, ethnomusicologist, and the closest to a musical bon vivant that exists in the world, Jonathan Kramer, to coordinate the effort. After New Years, Jonathan and I drafted the letter, wrote the news release, fashioned a tasty quote from Tony, and hit the ground running. Kramer contacted the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park—equidistant from the three powerhouse schools of the region, Duke, Chapel Hill, and NC State—and the Humanities Center leapt at the chance to bring us all together.

March 24 arrived and we anticipated a couple dozen participants—but boy did they have something to say! Bill McManus from Boston University welcomed the gathered from the national Tanglewood office and with that, the NASCAR checkered flag came down, starting the race. The talks proceeded throughout the day—a mixture of prepared papers and extemporaneous musings.

Jonathan Kramer, the event coordinator, punctuated every hour with the sounds of world music and readings. Scientist Patricia Gray from UNCG’s BioMusic offered response right away, offering that lab mice sing thirds but in the wild sing octaves and fifths—the physiological preference for the grounding of the overtone series. References to harmonizing mice raised their furry heads the rest of the day!

The first paper of the day was perhaps the best—when does that happen? Composer Rodney Waschka from NC State brought laughs early in the proceedings with his “Six Roles of Music in Society.” In short, music supports: advertising, religion, group identification, mating, clan history, protest. What can music do? He concludes: Do no harm. Try to be charming. Use craftsmanship to do good.

I followed Waschka—a tough act—by introducing five borrowed philosophical words and a method, repeating what Wittgenstein always said, “Art shows us the way we should live our lives.” My words? Hetereological (the study of music is not musical), Hermeneutic (interpretation is all), Qualia (we should study the phenomenology of experience), Praxis (the application of theory in experience), Maieutic (the Socratic method of questioning). NC State began with a good one-two punch, but yeah, I, too, think Waschka’s was better.

After the break and a Kramer video of New Orleans funeral music, the second session began with composer Jennifer Stasack extemporizing on one’s own musical culture. She grew up in Hawaii and thought herself Japanese as a child; her first music was Hawaiian chant. Only once her education was completed did she reconnect with her ethno roots and incorporate that into the college curriculum.

After three composers, musicologist Evan Bonds from Chapel Hill spoke of Orpheus going to hell. Music is what moves things to happen, he told us. In Monteverdi, it is the new form of recitative that causes things to happen. But in the original tale from Ovid, Orpheus lacks faith and turns around to look; even Orpheus doesn’t believe in music’s power. Music is very much like a religion, he concluded. We should have more faith in the power of music.

With another Kramer tangent into World Music, composer T.J. Anderson, the dean of African-American composers who retired from Tufts to Chapel Hill fifteen years ago, spoke up passionately about the divergences of music in America. “Start in your own backyard and work out to the world,” Anderson cautioned. “Don’t look outside your community. Link that diversity of cultures to your music.” It was an America First argument for music.

Ciompi Quartet cellist Fred Raimi thanked Evan Bonds for being emotional, stating that if was often hard to find the common ground between performance and musicology. “We’re all listeners,” Bonds responded.

Kramer then played a snippet of an archival YouTube video of Glenn Gould and Leonard Rose to preface Raimi’s comments. Rose once told Raimi, long ago at the latter’s audition into Juilliard, “You’re one fucked up cellist,” and thus Raimi began his talk illustrating the question posed with three musican-idols “doing the right thing through music”: two cellists—Casals and Rostropovich—and the singer Paul Robeson.

Patricia Gray followed Raimi. Senior research scientist of biomusic in the UNCG Music Research Institute, Gray brought a refreshing scientific slant to the day’s proceedings, beginning with looking at definitions of society and how we tend to focus on the human aspects, as opposed to animals. “Biomusic” Gray defined as linkages between musical sounds in all species, musical sounds as non-verbal communication, as well as the double-edged sword of the music of nature and the nature of music. “Both science and the arts have to inform the whole,” she repeated.

Gray showed video of the Bonobos of The Great Ape Trust of Iowa in Des Moines who improvise a D dorian melody over a drone provided on the video by pop musician Peter Gabriel. As a result of this example, Gray wants to define Music in ways that can incorporate apes, including getting a Bonobo an ASCAP affiliation. Others have gotten the association for less, some of us note, unconvinced by what we saw; others in attendance are impressed by the curiosity displayed. Gray concludes by pointing out current research on music and nanotechnology, brain, wellness, evolution, ecology, law, culture and philosophy.

After a splendid lunch provided by the National Humanities Center kitchen, we were back with a special session on textbooks. Textbooks, we were told by Prentice Hall editor Richard Carlin, can be paradigm-shifters but “you guys need to encourage students to read more.” A plea more than a presentation, but his lament fell more on the choir than converts.

Young musicologist Andy Flory, fresh from his doctorate, discussed the disciplines in the way of “intra” versus “inter” from a musicological perspective. “Interdisciplinarity has been a part of the American Musicological Society since its founding in the early 30s,” he told us. While the Society for Ethnomusicology “defines itself as multidisciplinary.” Post-Musicology is the future, he thinks: the unification of the disciplines.

The final Kramer connector was perhaps the most effective, echoing the Waschkian “group identification” mode in a way that proved his point that music can be used for harm: military cadence songs which use music to inure soldiers to violence. Frightening!

Session Three, and the final stretch began with Victor Hebert of Fayetteville State, the first of four to speak to the preparation of musicians. “How do we connect with our communities?” he asked us, and no one had a satisfactory answer.

W.E.B. DuBois talked of the Talented Ten in his The Souls of Black Folk. Well, Jim Ketch of Chapel Hill spoke of the talented two percent that ever do anything with their music education. Many of us, this author included, have always believed that only ten percent of our students in graduate schools should be there. Ketch produced evidence that the number is far smaller. But, he reminded, “we are educating both professionals and future patrons,” ending his presentation with some exciting developments in entrepreneurship and music taking place at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Diane Phoenix-Neal, also of Fayetteville State, continued the dialogue on preparation of musicians with her talk on the importance of interdisciplinary arts. “Art is a catalyst for critical thinking” was her primary topic, and, she tells us, we must start younger with our students.

Composer Stephen Jaffe of Duke closed the day with a personal history of growing up in the shadow of Tanglewood itself: early memories of attending performances and his first experience with new music and the Ivory Tower. Separate from “that rarefied air,” he questioned, bringing it home, “what of public schools, universities, and symphony orchestras preparing young musicians?” Creating places for new music to be heard and assimilating technological change were two successes he felt from the last forty years.

But, he warned, technology should be a part of an education and technology that fits the formalities and shaped by it (“the computer made me do it” syndrome). But “a little of this and a little of that won’t get us there.” The fellows who inhabit the offices of the National Humanities Center, Stephen posited, could easily name three contemporary authors, and three contemporary architects, if we put the question to them, but would be hard pressed to recognize the names of our contemporary composers. We are still not in the nation’s consciousness. His point hit home as the perfect punctuation to a great day.

The gathered rose and shook hands, the videographer cut the lights and assembled the tapes that will go to the national Tanglewood II symposium in June, and we, at NC State, felt we had done a good thing—made a good start—in bringing neighbors together to talk one Saturday in the North Carolina woods about the future of music and its value to society.

***

J. Mark Scearce

J. Mark Scearce, Director of the Music Department at NC State, is the composer of sixty instrumental works and over a hundred text settings. He has won five national/international music competitions, and is the recipient of five advanced degrees in music and philosophy. His music has been commercial recorded for the Delos, Warner Bros, Capstone, Centaur, and Equilibrium labels

“Without songs you don’t really have a culture. It’s a tie, a connection to every living thing—man’s power of growth and movement, the ability to think, to will, and to bring to pass. This life-force was always thought of as sacred, powerful. To it a name was given—in the Omaha tongue it was called Wakon’da.”

– Dennis Hasting’s notes in Omaha Indian Music:
Historical Recordings from the Fletcher/La Flesche Collection,
eds. Dorothy Sara Lee and Maria La Vigna.
(Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.)

Eugene Perry as Justin in the Prologue of Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

Despite my familiarity with an emerging American opera that tangles with contemporary history, Anthony Davis’s Wakonda’s Dream, which received its premiere last month at Opera Omaha, still surprises me. It ventures into virgin territory, even by Davis’s push-the-envelope standards. (Davis’s previous works include X, based on the life of Malcolm X, and Tania, inspired by the abduction of Patty Hearst.)

Wakonda’s Dream delves into the fractured life of a contemporary Native American family, the Labells, who are emotionally torn by social prejudices and simultaneously shadowed by the memories of a tortuous Native American history. The opening of the second act of Wakonda’s Dream is especially disquieting. As the curtain rises, our psycho-sonic gaze, which until this point fixed on the familial tensions of the Labell family, depicted in a sometimes traditional operatic style, abruptly shifts to an icon of urban resistance, Hip-hop, which begins the downward spiral of Act 2. The Hip-hop number was composed by Davis but inspired by Native American reservation recordings and is layered atop Davis’s rich orchestral groove and an electronic soundscape improvised by Earl Howard:

A coyote’s a dog without a name.
Without a pack to share his shame.

The vocals are performed by several Native American dancers—not singers—and the sound is of a bruised and unsophisticated timbre—a moment of raw realism that foreshadows the death of the Labell’s young son, Jason.

Wakonda’s Dream, which features a libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa, explores the polymorphous tensions that arise within contemporary Ponca society more than a century after the 1879 trial of Standing Bear, which serves as a conceptual backdrop to the main story. The difficulties of maintaining a viable Native American social identity while also asserting the rights of American citizenship play out among the LaBell family: the father, Justin, the mother, Delores, and Jason, whose constant visions of Standing Bear plague the family and ultimately bring about Jason’s accidental and early death.

Standing Bear’s trial is a little-discussed event in American history, though it seems well-known to Native Americans residing in and around Omaha. In 1876, the U.S. government, after mistakenly selling Ponca land to the Lakota Indians, moved the Poncas to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma)—in what is referred to as the “Ponca Trail of Tears.” In that year, as conditions worsened, a group of thirty tribesmen including Standing Bear attempted to return home to the Niobrara River, but were intercepted and arrested by U.S. soldiers. Standing Bear petitioned the court. And while the government claimed that an Indian was not a person so could not bring suit, Judge Dundy, in a surprise ruling, argued that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law.” He issued a writ of habeas corpus and Standing Bear was allowed to return home. The trial was a watershed in the fight for civil rights that would continue for Native Americans throughout the twentieth century—but also a harbinger of the ongoing battle to maintain a Native American identity and a Native American land as the push for assimilation steadily increased.

Arnold Rawls as Standing Bear in Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

General Director of Opera Omaha, Joan Desens, recalls that the silence around this history was a motivating factor in her five-year collaboration on Wakonda’s Dream. In fact, Desens took over the project from her predecessor Jane Hill in 2002 and remembers that she had not heard of these events prior to the commission: “I was touched by the fact that I didn’t know this about American history…a step recognizing American Indians as human beings and the fact that we live in a country that ever could have thought that Indians are not human beings is a shocking fact.” The opera was originally, she says, to be a documentary of the trial’s history, but the end result is more a reflection on that history through the twenty-first-century perspective of the Labell family.

Hip-hop, in the context of Wakonda’s Dream, seems the perfect outlet for reservation youth still beleaguered by racism. (Indeed, Native American hip-hop is currently surging on reservations.) To be sure, Davis, throughout his opera career, has engaged these intricate intersections between social silencing and music. X, for example, takes another Omaha native, Malcolm X, and the sovereignty of African Americans, as a point of departure. Malcolm’s power to make song emerges alongside his transformation into an Islamic leader. It is Malcolm X’s enforced social silence that motivates the opera thematically and musically, from beginning to end.

However, while Wakonda’s Dream is also a sonic space for engaging racism, it is only in rare moments (like the hip-hop number) a space for obliterating the silence that racism produces. Davis acknowledges this key distinction between protagonists: “Justin goes to some ugly places that in X I couldn’t really let Malcolm go to. This is much more about the despair and the loss.” Certainly Native Americans, in their prolonged fight for civil rights, have often remained barely visible. So while Malcolm’s voice emerges as epic in X, it is only in the wake of the accidental shooting of Jason Labell in Wakonda’s Dream that Justin’s Indian brothers fill in the gaping silence: In the prologue, a Native American honor dance surrounds the grieving father and calls the opera to an end. Justin’s final words, in this case, are worth dwelling on: “Is it too late for us? Is it too late for me?” underscores the contemporary predicament of Native American peoples as a sometimes silent minority in post-civil rights America.

If Wakonda’s Dream highlights a contemporary and enduring social politics, it may also dream, at least musically, of the future. The score is not postmodern, pastiche, or pageantry, but rather a complex fabric of orchestral funk grooves, electronically produced soundscapes, jazz improvisations, rich choruses and sensitive vocal writing in a sometimes classic operatic style. Disparate elements share sonic space, are sometimes layered one on top of the other, or occasionally delve off in different directions: music is used here as a space for integration, perhaps, but not as a social metaphor for assimilation or preservation.

What is largely absent in the opera is Ponca music. The Hip-hop number and honor dance stand at either end of Act 2 in gorgeous symmetry: the past and present, the young and old. But the lack of additional Native American musics is intentional. Davis spoke passionately about capturing the emotional life of the Ponca story, without using music to reference Native Americans directly: “I was worried about not trying to appropriate it in obvious ways—in ways that one would expect,” says Davis. “I wanted to make sure that music in the opera had a kind of integrity in and of itself.” The Native American community in Omaha, Davis says, feels that the opera “is telling their story”: “We took very seriously their spiritual world—not as something exotic… A lot of times Native Americans are seen only important as the past.”

Many of us have witnessed, in over-abundance, the problematic nature of staging ethnic identities—operas about Chinese, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Turks, Japanese, Brazilians, and even several about American Indians, in which ideas about “authenticity” and “exoticism” collide

“Coyote Dance” with Will Ferguson and Trees, from Act 2 of Wakonda’s Dream Photo by Jim Scholz, courtesy Opera Omaha

in unfortunate ways. Wakonda’s Dream is, fortunately, not a paean to Indian otherness. It may coincide with what Charles Trimble, who served as a Native American advisor to the production, refers to as a “rebirth or resurgence in a faith in Indianness.” But it does so alongside that resurgence without claims to authenticity. Wakonda’s collaborators uniformly understand the opera as a drama that speaks across cultures, and that, if at all political, only because it has served as a catalyst for drawing communities together.

The reception of this opera would seem to prove them right. The premiere of the opera at Omaha’s historic Orpheum Theater followed a three-month festival of Native American art, poetry, lectures, and dance. The audience was incredibly diverse at the performance I attended (March 11)—and Native Americans were prominently and proudly in attendance at all three performances. In fact, Davis said that on the opening night of the run (March 7, 2007), Native Americans greeted the curtain call with standing ovations and traditional warrior cries.

In February 2007, in a lecture delivered at the University of Richmond (where I work), Anthony Davis emphasized that his work is culturally and politically relevant—that it has something to say about the ways in which our collective social consciousness in America continues to be governed by obdurate, if random, boundaries surrounding identity. He was referring at that time to earlier works: Amistad, Tania, and X. But his latest opera is significant, and unique, within this oeuvre. With Wakonda’s Dream, Davis has created a kind of community opera that has particular resonance within the Omaha community but that is bound to have a broader, perhaps international impact in the future.

***

Ruth Longobardi

Ruth Sara Longobardi is assistant professor of music at the University of Richmond. She is currently working on a book about American icons and contemporary American opera entitled, Representing and Re-Producing the Real in Turn-of-the-Millennium America: Opera, Documentary, and Spaces Between.