I love opera.
I also understand that I am one of only 973 people in the entire United States who do love opera.
Okay, so I am under-exaggerating just a wee here. (But perhaps not by much.)
There are many reasons why most Americans are generally under-impressed by opera (if they think of it at all), and I sense the stirrings of a future blog post on this very topic.
Jennifer Rivera has written a thoughtful, interesting article on the loss it would mean to all kinds and styles of music if opera—the Olympic form of vocal music—should eventually disappear from the American landscape.
Along the way, she debunks a few of our assumptions and points out how those assumptions can be marginalizing and demeaning not only to ourselves and other human beings, but to the musical art form itself.
I highly recommend this article. And more thoughts on this topic will be coming later this summer~