THE STATE OF THE ART

Artistic & General Director, Rob Ainsley, and 2023 Artist-in-Residence, Anthony Roth Costanzo, discuss the future of opera, the role of the artist in society today, technology in the arts, and much more!

Rob Ainsley (RA): In his 2008 bestseller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argued that mastery comes only after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. When I was growing up, everyone studied to be a niche expert. Today it seems that it is breadth, rather than depth, that we prioritize. It is less about the divo or diva status and more about followers and collaboration— about dipping your feet in an awful lot of different pots. It feels like the whole zeitgeist has changed immeasurably.

Anthony Roth Costanzo (ARC): Yes, and I think the key to navigating the change is a word you brought up— collaboration. I appear to have a lot of breadth, but the truth is I have very little breadth. The appearance of breadth and the execution of breadth come from collaboration. I connect with and rely on other people who have dug deeply into their form and understand it well. It is a skill that I've worked on developing and honing as much as my singing—the ability to connect and collaborate with people who have expertise in another field. This approach means that rather than bucking tradition and going less deep into the artform, I am embroidering the traditions that I spent a lot of time working on.

RA: So you’re saying you can’t skip the 10,000 hours?

ARC: No, I don't think there is any substitute for that. We can never let go of the careful craft that it takes to reach expertise. It is my depth that has grounded me.

RA: Then maybe I’m talking more about branding and marketing. The way we think about creating a personality, an entity, and a brand.

ARC: Yes! I think what you’re talking about is the fact that 10,000 hours— achieving mastery in and of itself— used to be enough. It no longer is. As artists today, we really have to think of ourselves as CEOs of our own companies. That means that the product that each company produces has to be the best product. But then there's all the things that go around that product. We have to understand how to connect to institutions, how to leverage social media, or grassroots marketing, or press— whatever it is—to build our image.

RA: Exactly! How is that possible? How do we do that?

ARC: You have to really try different things. I’ll give you an example. Over the pandemic I was very frustrated that there was no live music happening. I spoke to the visionary Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, and we began brainstorming. I had this idea to take music to the community in a pickup truck and she said, “I love this idea, let's collaborate and do it.” Together we built something called Bandwagon. It was a way for the New York Philharmonic to connect in a different, grassroots way to communities all throughout New York with pop-up music.

RA: And it is amazing how quickly the landscape can change with a new collaboration, a new idea. I think that is partly due to technology—and the pandemic was huge as well.

ARC: Well, I think there are some wonderful aspects to certain types of digital resources but that technology can also be a real red herring. I don’t think anyone is really interested in streaming opera from their home.

RA: That’s very controversial, but I'm with you.

ARC: I genuinely believe it! I think very few people are interested in streaming, but…I do believe that when it can be used to connect new audiences to our artform or to build a bridge to a live performance, technology is really exciting.

RA: So then, what is the distinction between streaming and these other digital resources?

ARC: I’ll give you an example. When I released my first album I made nine music videos with artists who don’t work in the classical field and have no real relationships to classical music. They interpreted the pieces with no constraints. And because they have a different audience, because there were other outlets interested in what they do, it was a way of disseminating the music in a new form to new people. Recently, I was on a panel at ISPA (the International Society for Performing Arts) and we were talking about digital futures. I said that “the digital” appears to be very sexy to us old-fashioned opera folks. But we experience so much through screens or filters. Even when you go to a rock concert the voice and the music are being filtered through wires and speakers. What’s fantastic about opera is that it is completely direct. Something comes from inside my body and it goes inside yours. And that's the way we should be framing the live opera experience. It is the most intimate, the most exciting—it’s the unprotected sex of the arts! The digital assets we build should be used to get us to the live performance, not replace it.

RA: So when we think about the art that people experience in that live performance, it is exciting to see what we create changing and developing as we move forward.

ARC: Absolutely, I think there is a definite vitality to what’s being created in our time and in response to our time. The voices of new composers are so crucial. I think back again to collaboration. Conductors, singers, and musicians are able to find different modalities of emotional expression when they work with these new composers. I’ve certainly been challenged by many of the composers I’ve worked with to think differently about how I use my instrument and how that instrument exists within my emotional landscape and in combination with their vision. The other thing that occurs to me whenever I’m doing contemporary opera is that it is all built, both compositionally and in a performative way, upon traditions that are hundreds of years old. I couldn’t sing Kaija Saariaho, or Joel Thompson, or Nico Muhly, without the vocal technique I’ve developed through Handel. They are writing for a voice that has developed from these traditions. I'm very aware that, in all that we do, we are holding up our lineage and we are taking it to new places.

RA: It has always amazed me that art encapsulates and records culture and the spirit of our times, whether it intends to or not. It is built into the process. There have been huge changes recently—huge steps forward and back—in terms of social justice and where we are going as a society. Art has always been concerned with that but I think particularly so in the last few years. In these terms, the artist has great power to voice many things.

ARC: Yes, I think about it all the time. I have a responsibility. If my main job as an artist is to tell stories that connect to people, then I have to make sure that I am telling not just my stories or the stories that are close to me, but to figure out how I can effectively tell other people’s stories or provide opportunities for them to tell their stories with the connections or resources that I find myself able to tap into. I’ll give you one example. In the second iteration of Bandwagon, we partnered with the National Black Theater. Instead of going to them saying, “We’ve got these pieces that we’d like to do, how can you make them fit into a week of programming that you curate?” We asked, “Do you want to curate a week of programming? And if so, what do you want to do and how can we make that possible?” Jonathon McCrory, their artistic director, said, “There is this incredible slideshow of images a photographer took during all of the protests and I'd love them to be set to music. I think “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone is the counterpoint that I want to the heaviness of these images.” So with the Philharmonic, we got a brass quintet and a fantastic arranger and this glorious music was played as the images were shown to the audience. That is how the collaboration happened. We told a story that came from him with resources we were providing from the Philharmonic. I’m always thinking about how to do that in the operatic context—in all kinds of contexts.

RA: And you do it so well. It's so admirable and something we can all strive to do as we navigate this changing landscape.