How is Opera a Universal Language (United Nations Webinar)
On February 11, 2022, I was invited to present at a webinar entitled “Human Rights, Art & Protest” hosted by The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and Freemuse. It was a huge honor to speak with other artists who use their art to respond to societal pressures for an audience of activists and organizers working to support the freedom of creating art and human expression. I encourage you to watch the entire webinar, but below is my response to the prompt from the mediators.
Derrick León Washington, PhD: I would like to introduce Chelsea Hollow, San Francisco based soprano, operatic activist, and co-founder of Concert Rebels. We decided to have Chelsea after Victoria to think collectively and creatively in relation to art forms and also communities. So, the question I ask you Chelsea is, “How does your art form a universal language that shares the specifics of your community and relates to others? More specifically in the equity in the arts and in building bridges.
Chelsea Hollow: Thank you, Derrick and thank you to Freemuse and the UN Office of Human Rights for organizing this important conversation. I'm joining from Alameda, CA on the ancestral lands of the Chochenyo and Ohlone Tribes.
To answer your question, opera is universal because it is a collaboration of perspectives. Singers, instrumentalists, conductors, directors, stage, costume & lighting designers, composers, librettists, and many other artists bringing their life experience and perspectives into one art, distilling their human experiences into one production, yielding art with perspective and empathy. That said, I do think our industry spent the last century confused about whether we should repeat old music or tell new stories and in that confusion, we lost huge opportunities to build bridges and we lost relevance.
In 2016, I was coming to terms with my place in the world as an operatic artist and realizing that I so rarely had the opportunity to create art that had any real impact. I felt that society was distracted, reactionary, and politicized and that we should be able to look to artists to help us process the trauma, instead of just scrolling through headlines.
I saw activists standing up for what they believed in and an idea started to grow. Musical storytelling is as old as humanity and uses tools of pacing, melody, rhythm, and repetition to deepen the impact of spoken word.
Traditionally art music or Lieder is when a composer creates a song using an existing poem as the song lyrics. So I started creating activist art songs using activist poetry and speeches to commission new songs! For me, the composers, and audiences, this music was cathartic and so profound that I and soprano Maria Caycedo created Concert Rebels, an organization to give other singers this same opportunity and make music that holds space for collective growth.
In May 2020, desperate to create art with others after months of quarantine, I put out a Call for Proposals, which is where composers send in ideas for possible commissions. I received applications from all over the world! Here, in the middle of a pandemic, I was building bridges with composers, poets, activists, and organizers from China, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and all over the United States.
We were experiencing and telling the stories of people who inspired us, amplifying outcries for help, learning how to cope with tragedy; what could be more universal than these?!
Today, I'll share one of those works with you by composer, Jason Cady using a speech from his US representative, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In AOC's speech, she condemns the abusive language she received from a fellow congressman. She states, "dehumanizing language is not new...I will not allow people to create hatred in our hearts." We don't have time for the full video, so here are some selections and I'll put a link to the full video in the chat. Quick warning, early in the song, the text quotes the language of the harasser and includes an expletive. Here is "I Could Not Allow That to Stand" performed by me, Chelsea Hollow and pianist Taylor Chan with Jason Cady on modular synthesizer.
"I Could Not Allow That to Stand" (Chelsea Hollow, Taylor Chan, Jason Cady) Full Video