Equitantes super phoenix: cataloguing twenty-first century music making after the early music revival
Date
2023
DOI
Authors
Russo, Devon Michael
Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Classical music produced throughout the world in the past thirty years has exhibited a profound metamorphosis. Suddenly operas starring countertenors are selling out and maintaining important portions of audiences’ interest and institutional prominence. In the 19/20 season the Metropolitan Opera began with a massive production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, written for a countertenor in the leading role, a production which continued on to win the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.12 Last year bachtrack.com, a music review website that creates aggregate counts of both concerts and composers, reported a record number of choral concerts in general, with the amount of concerts presenting early music more than doubling in the USA, Australia, and Japan, and the largest ever percentage of concerts that included contemporary works worldwide.3 The umbrella of early music has expanded and changed significantly since the beginning of the movement with titanic figures like Harnoncourt, to the nerdy counterculture treatise hounds in the 1960s, to young musicians at the turn of the millennium looking for a way forward for an artform in need of its own revival, to the now international baroque opera scene, all the way up to the professional choral scene in the United States. All of these people have a hand in creating the new playing field that has blossomed since the revival began. Each musician a simple feather on a massive revived phoenix soaring its way further and further into the musical zeitgeist.
Description
Graduate Research Project
License
This work is being made available in OpenBU by permission of its author, and is available for research purposes only. All rights are reserved to the author.