By this logic, English-language opera (yes, it exists) ought to be doing well in America. Check your local opera house schedule and see how many performances you can find that are not in Italian, German, or French.
There is some merit to this argument, that some music can't be appreciated as easily unless you attach it something people can easily relate to. Even classical music isn't immune to this, hence the existence of program music like Beethoven's 6th symphony and many other works from the Romantic era. Today, it's mostly film scores that fall into this category of instrumental music that is best understood within a certain context.
I think the difference today is that the context itself has changed. We've transitioned to an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and have lost touch with the beauty of nature from which many instrumental pieces draw inspiration. We've become more materialistic, hence the prevalence of "bling" in rap songs. The host on my local classical station once remarked that there are only two serious topics in music: God and sex. Though I'm not religious, I can tell that these days it's much less of the former and more of the latter.
That said, I wouldn't be so pessimistic right now. Think long-term: in 100 years, how many people will still be listening to Brahms, and how many will still be listening to Britney Spears?
"I think the difference today is that the context itself has changed. We've transitioned to an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and have lost touch with the beauty of nature from which many instrumental pieces draw inspiration."
Huh? Most classical pieces of music were written in urban centers not on some farm. Same with jazz. Jazz is fiercely urban. But what we have today is carcass. But between 1930-1970 some crazy st went down.
"The host on my local classical station once remarked that there are only two serious topics in music: God and sex. Though I'm not religious, I can tell that these days it's much less of the former and more of the latter."
In it's heyday jazz were certainly about Sex.
"That said, I wouldn't be so pessimistic right now. Think long-term: in 100 years, how many people will still be listening to Brahms, and how many will still be listening to Britney Spears?"
This is just too reductionistic. Folk (aka pop) music and classical (aka serious) music have been forever intertwined. Whether the average music listener appreciates doesn't change that.
"By this logic, English-language opera (yes, it exists) ought to be doing well in America."
We call them "musicals". They're doing OK.
If you want to argue that a "musical" is an "opera plus some stuff added to make it more palatable to visually-oriented Americans" I'm not going to argue.
No way - operatic singing techniques are fundamentally different from other kinds of singing, and much harder work physically. Next time in you're in the shower or wherever you can sing, do a chorus of some song you like. Then take a deep breath and instead of using your throat as you do when you talk, use your abdominal muscles to push the air out of your lungs while you sing, such that you can feel the notes resonating your chest cavity. It isn't just louder, it fundamentally changes the characteristics of your voice.
Part of what makes popular music so compelling is that using microphones to amplify the voice allows singers to present a much more intimate quality - they're right there with you, and that intimacy is strongly coupled to the emotional content of the song, even if it's coming through a stadium-sized sound system. It's like the amplification creates a bridge between the singer and the audience. but in opera, (even with amplification) the singer is bridge between the melody and the audience...a big reason why opera singers don't always look right for the part, but when they open their mouths, it ceases to matter...if they're good enough.
I like the opera a lot and go several times a year...but don't get me started on all the things that are wrong with the opera industry. As with nerdy and self-indulgent jazz, the arts establishment is fucked and limits its own audience by wasting huge amounts of money on packaging the product so it becomes a high-priced status symbol - perhaps even deliberately. Every year in San Francisco they do one or two free operas at the baseball park (via simulcast from the opera house), and people love it - last time it attracted over 35,000 people. But if you want to go the Opera house you'll probably have to pay $75-1000 per ticket to subsidize a small army of union stagehands and visual designers, and they send out glossy-full color begging letters every 6 weeks as if people went to the opera to look at the costumes and stage furniture. Well, I guess some of them do, but I imagine that composers and singers would rather be appreciated for their musical ability than their ability to look like they stepped out of a history book.
Opera != bel canto. True, the classic opera (say, late baroque through Puccini) was written specifically for the bel canto voice due to the increased size of the audience over the previous, more intimate pieces, the unfortunate lack of amplification, and the relatively few vowels to be found in Italian (and French, for that matter) but there's no real reason to equate a genre of theatre with any particular vocal style. Hearing a Purcell piece sung with the English-mangling roundness of vowels required for the italianate style is as disturbing to me as Nixon in China. Even loudness is not an excuse -- the reverberations of Ethel Merman's last "on with the show" have not yet died down.
There's no need for opera to become fossilised, nor for it to aspire to an audience of fossils. Jesus Christ Superstar should have changed the world -- not that it was the best that could have been done, but it should have opened doors everywhere to the possibility of actually keeping opera relevant.
My point is that musicals fill the niche operas used to fill. Technical details are of interest to me personally but not relevant to my point. I really, really hate labeling a type of music by the physical techniques used to generate the sound, I think it's a terrible way to think about the scene. (Though I aggressively concede that I seem to be in the minority on that view.) To me, your point is basically equivalent to saying that classical-style music with saxophones in the orchestra just isn't classical music anymore; I am sure you would disagree with that characterization and I'm not saying it's objectively true, but it's not part of how I think about musical classification.
I was under the impression that a musical is a spoken word play where the actors break out into song and dance on a regular basis, whereas in an opera the singers rarely dance or speak.
If that is the case, the difference between musicals and opera is more than just the language. and actually supports the author's point that American culture needs visual stimulation (the dance) and words they can easily understand (the spoken lines).
"Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat" is entirely sung (Well, apart from "and I don't speak Egyptian very well"), but is usually referred to as a musical. Maybe just marketing though. Personally I usually expect opera to mean a particular style of singing more than anything else.
I don't think humanity as a whole has become more or less materialistic: we've just raised the bar due to technological advances. Witness the greed of conquistadors and kings of times past for gold, for example.
There is some merit to this argument, that some music can't be appreciated as easily unless you attach it something people can easily relate to. Even classical music isn't immune to this, hence the existence of program music like Beethoven's 6th symphony and many other works from the Romantic era. Today, it's mostly film scores that fall into this category of instrumental music that is best understood within a certain context.
I think the difference today is that the context itself has changed. We've transitioned to an urban, fast-paced lifestyle and have lost touch with the beauty of nature from which many instrumental pieces draw inspiration. We've become more materialistic, hence the prevalence of "bling" in rap songs. The host on my local classical station once remarked that there are only two serious topics in music: God and sex. Though I'm not religious, I can tell that these days it's much less of the former and more of the latter.
That said, I wouldn't be so pessimistic right now. Think long-term: in 100 years, how many people will still be listening to Brahms, and how many will still be listening to Britney Spears?