“I don’t know what the tipping point is, except to say that I think that this generation of composers that are coming up [is] particularly entrepreneurial,” says Beth Morrison over a quick coffee near her Upper East Side office. It’s been a whirlwind year for the 37-year-old opera producer and founder of Beth Morrison Projects. In the last 12 months, her production company has fueled productions of Tod Machover’s William Gibson-esque opera Death and the Powers in the U.S. and Europe, Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads, a twenty-first-century Lieder series at Galapagos Art Space, and New York City Opera’s contemporary American opera lab, VOX. If that’s not impressive enough, the company is just in its fifth year.
To describe Morrison herself as entrepreneurial is an understatement. Yet the trained classical singer who spent her childhood summers at the Tanglewood Institute and who has degrees in vocal performance and pedagogy from Boston University and Arizona State University, respectively, changed her tune when it came to her career trajectory. “I wanted to be . . . an opera singer,” she explains. “And then I got through grad school . . . [and] the goal was really to get a PhD or a DMA or work at a university.”
A move back to Boston, however, landed Morrison at Tanglewood once again, ultimately as the institute’s program director. “Having a vision for 70 faculty members and 350 students and 10 programs was really exciting to me,” she says. “We did a lot of changes, we built some new programs—it was a really rich time.” It was rich not only for the organization, but for Morrison herself in discovering her true calling. “I was always a neurotic performer, very much a perfectionist,” she smiles. “It started to feel like what I was better at was being concerned about other people and a vision.”
Never one to shy away from thinking big (she is fond of asking composers, “What’s a crazy idea you don’t think anybody’s going to do?”), Morrison began to envision her own space that would encompass contemporary music theatre, contemporary opera, and contemporary chamber music—plus an art gallery and café for good measure. She quickly realized that if she built her field of dreams, they would come—but she didn’t know how to build it.
“I thought . . . I don’t want to bankrupt myself or somebody else,” she said of her decision to pursue a second master’s degree in theater management and producing at the Yale School of Drama. During this period, Morrison also apprenticed herself to Linda Brumbach’s production company Pomegranate Arts (which produces boundary-defying works by the likes of Philip Glass, Dan Zanes, and Laurie Anderson) and found extra mentorship from the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s executive producer, Joe Melillo. “It was really there that I had an understanding of what is possible, that there are these things called producers,” Morrison explains.
Like straight theatre, the idea of a producer is a relatively recent one (especially when taken into the context of Sophocles and Aeschylus). Producers may be well known on Broadway and in Hollywood as the outside investors who get productions on their feet—yet, in opera, the term is still more foreign than zierlich. “It doesn’t exist in opera,” Morrison agrees. “They have companies. And the companies produce the opera. And they’re the producers. It is the opposite of Broadway; it’s much more like the regional theatre model, too, where the company produces it.” Yet, as classical music on the whole gradually turns toward self-funded, independent productions that give performers and composers the wheel, the opera producer is becoming less of a rare bird.
Though, what a producer actually does is still subject to great and frequent change from one project to the next. As Morrison breaks it down, her current activities range from being pitched work to take on as a traditional theatrical producer to consulting on projects that already have funds and venues locked in but need help with operational logistics. A good portion of the job also entails working with artists to build projects from the ground up and commissioning new works. “I’m trying to really build a new model,” she explains of her packed job description. “But it’s definitely tricky because there’s a reason that there are different people doing [all of these] jobs . . . but I’m a creative producer. I consider myself an artist first.”
While Morrison says that composers creating their own brands have had a score of influences aiding the tip, she also notes that there are far fewer entrepreneurial singers—for now, at least. “They are there and they are doing it,” she emphasizes. “And I think it is an empowering thing as a performer to be able to create your own opportunity and drive your product—if you will, your talent—in a direction you want it to go. A lot of singers I work with are interested in doing this stuff that’s off the beaten track so they’re not just singing Bohème or whatever at some regional opera house . . . any culture develops its own climate. And I think the composers of this generation are learning from each other as they watch each other develop. And it propels it forward.”
Such a groundswell is in the works, especially thanks to singers specializing in new music, which can either mean a background in the classical tradition (such as the case of mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer, who balances Baroque works with world premieres by Missy Mazzoli, John Zorn, and Nico Muhly) or the school of rock (see former Shudder to Think front man Craig Wedren, who rejoins indie chamber band American Contemporary Music Ensemble to reprise a song cycle by Jefferson Friedman at next month’s Ecstatic Music Festival).
“I see them, this generation, as just really understanding that they have a lot of tools at their disposal,” Morrison explains. “The world has really changed with the Internet . . . all of these social programs and media programs that we use every day just have offered an opportunity to have exposure that people in previous generations simply couldn’t do.” She is quick to add, too, that the manipulation of digital and social media—whether it’s posting YouTube videos teasing your opera, such as Matt Marks did with The Little Death, Vol. 1, or using Facebook’s event page to get a guest list for your recital—is a natural and organic move on the parts of Gen X and Y composers and performers, rather than a calculated part of the business plan.
“I don’t think they’re strategizing it; I think they’re just doing it. I don’t think that anybody has sat down and said, ‘OK, if I do this, that, and this . . . .’ I think it’s just natural to them. It’s what they’ve grown up with. It’s their music, too. Their music is inclusive language which is rock and metal and pop and jazz and all of these influences. It’s a very different cauldron that they’re drawing from to create their music. There are a lot of forces at work, and it’s created this very rich environment for new music here [in New York].”
Morrison, however, wants the environment to spread beyond Gotham. And in some respects, that’s the greatest challenge: Manhattan is, after all, the home to two of the nation’s (if not the world’s) highest-regarded opera companies. Yet the ripple effect fueled by City Opera’s VOX is undeniable. This was the program to first foster operas like Adamo’s Little Women and Danielpour’s Margaret Garner and which gives voice to rising composers such as Daniel Felsenfeld and David T. Little. Moreover, fringe composers such as John Zorn are now taking over the mainstage of the David H. Koch Theater, while next door the Met’s first co-commission with Lincoln Center is a new work by Muhly and playwright Craig Lucas. While in economics the “trickle-down effect” is an inherently faulty system, it does have some merits in the nation’s art scene. In regional opera, Morrison notes, “the new pieces are selling out. Now that argument of ‘Oh, my audience will only come to Bohème’ will fast move away as statistics continue to surmount.”
And that’s part of Morrison’s call to action: 35 years ago, she explains, American regional theater companies realized that “in order to build the art form, they needed to provide younger, less established artists opportunity to develop their work.” In order to remain financially viable, however, the black box theatre was born—a complement to the mainstage that didn’t harm box office receipts. It’s all detailed in a manifesto Morrison wrote that she hopes to publish soon which details her organization (which is essentially the groundwork of a national black box movement) as what is needed to drive opera and art song forward into the new century and into new territory.
“The art form is changed [and] is changing, and we need to establish and support on an institutional level the growth of these works which may not exist otherwise,” she says. “People are doing them here; they self produce. It’s in churches. It’s in clubs. But how about getting it out of here and bringing it to a black box in Kansas? Because I think people would respond to it, I really do. The work stands on its own and will survive out of this city.”
For singers who want to help make that jump, the playing field is open but, as Morrison points out, with a catch: “A lot of performers I’ve seen start things and a year later realize it’s very hard to start a company and it’s hard to raise money, and it kind of drops away,” she notes of singer-led companies, many of which are often perceived (and sometimes run) as vanity projects. An Ivy League graduate degree isn’t necessary, Morrison adds, but it is important to have backup if you lack business acumen before you—in her words—“jump off the cliff.”
Having a true vision is also essential. “Think of what your mission is. If your mission is only to give you work, that’s probably not a good enough reason to do it,” she says. “If your vision is to create something new in the field and your performance is a part of that, just be crystal clear in what your mission and your vision is and go forward.
“When I decided to make this my mission, to further the art form in any way I can,” Morrison adds, “I was so depressed with the people I was encountering and meeting and the interactions I was having—just feeling like it was such a conservative field and [wondering] how can real change be made. Now I really feel like things are changing.”
Which, according to Morrison, makes the timing almost perfectly right for herself and other opera entrepreneurs out there.
