The Mozart Effect: Music and Cognition

As a musician who began playing classical piano at the age of five and singing operatically at the age of thirteen, I never thought until recently about the impact that my music education has had on me. However, a few months ago, I heard about a phenomenon called “The Mozart Effect.” The term Mozart Effect was coined in 1991 by Alfred A. Tomatis, but the major bulk of research was done by Don Campbell, the author of the book The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit. According to Campbell, after listening to Mozart’s music, specifically Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, a student’s intelligence, spatial awareness, concentration, and speech abilities are temporarily improved. Also, having music education can help a child’s cognition as well. This week, I decided to search the blogosphere to find out what other musicians think about this phenomenon. Within Blogger, I found a blog called A Time For Music. The post I found interesting, written by Jesse Fischer, a musician and producer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., is called Mozart Effect – Not the Only Game in Town. In his post, Fischer briefly mentions The Mozart Effect and the research surrounding it. I therefore expanded on his topics with the information that I learned while conducting my research. The other post that I decided to respond to was written by Christian Salvesen, a master of philosophy, literature sciences, and music sciences. The post, simply entitled The Mozart Effect, was published on Madhukar. In it, Mr. Salvesen delves deeper into the actual cognitive effects that Mozart’s music has on the brain. I therefore merely offered my further knowledge to expand on what he already researched. My comments can be found below or on the original blog posts themselves.

Mozart Effect – Not the Only Game in Town
My Comment:
First of all, I would like to thank you for writing this post. It was very thought provoking and of a subject matter that has had much debate in the past few years. As a music student myself who is very interested in the relationship between music and cognition, I have done much research into this phenomenon known as The Mozart Effect and would like to touch on and expand some of the points that you made.

First of all, you stated that Mozart “had an interesting head start… listening to his parents play the piano and the violin months before he was born.” I appreciate that you recognize this as being significant. Many people might not agree that this exposure to music while in the womb could have influenced Mozart. However, there has been much research conducted that shows that exposing unborn babies to classical music, and Mozart’s music in particular, can be greatly beneficial. It can stimulate a baby’s heart rate and can even cause more movement inside the womb. It can also enhance the baby’s development by minimizing or completely eliminating developmental delays. Doctors even recommend playing music for premature babies because it has been shown that premature babies who are exposed to music early on have higher survival rates than ones who are not.

I would also like to expand on the “countless studies [that] have shown… the use of music to improve memory, awareness, and the integration of learning style.” It is proven that between six and eight years old, a child’s skull and brain grows in size, and, as it grows, new links are formed between the child’s visual, speech, and motor regions. The child begins to be able to link what she sees directly to what she hears. Also, her logical reasoning and abstract thinking improves. The more music that the child is exposed to during this time, the better the brain’s neural integration. The rhythm in music helps the child’s logical reasoning, and the melody helps her intellectual discernment. On top of that, actively making music, or actively learning, combines mental and sensory memories, which enhances memory more than passive learning does. Musicians’ brains are different than everyone else’s because musicians combine mental and sensory learning daily.

Finally, I would like to briefly mention how “studying music [creates] a sense of order and harmony necessary for intelligent thought.” With its physical vibrations, rhythms, and patterns, music alters the brain in a way that regular learning cannot. This type of learning advances a person’s reading and language skills, and, if exposed to music at a young age, it can help raise a child’s test scores.

The Mozart Effect
My Comment:
I would like to start off by thanking you for writing this blog. I found it extremely interesting and informative. I especially found the section that solely focuses on The Mozart Effect to be intriguing. I have done much research in the past on this phenomenon, especially with its relation to children and the growing brain, and have always been interested in the relationship between music and cognition. As a musician who started on the piano and continued on to singing, I have always questioned whether my musical training had any affect on other aspects of my learning. I therefore found it interesting when you said that the Mozart Effect could foster “higher brainpower, increased learning ability, increased ability of decision-making, more intuitive powers, alertness and creativity.” In doing my research on this phenomenon, I came across an aspect of interest that could further support and validate your statement. I found that there are three ways of learning: enactive, iconic, and symbolic. Enactive learning involves action and manipulation, iconic involves imagery and perceptual organization, and symbolic involves words and other symbols. The enactive and iconic modes of cognition are how young children know music. Therefore, learning and listening to music at a young age can enhance a child’s cognitive growth. This enhancement leads to many things, including increased visualization, learning abilities, and reading abilities.

By adding to a child’s cognitive growth, music helps motor and rhythmic development and helps develops language and vocal skills. Over specialized education can be harmful to a student because it dispenses information but does not foster understanding. In order to see long-term effects of learning, multiple areas of the brain must be working. Music is made up of rhythm, which has pulse, beat, tempo, and meter. Listening to rhythms helps to stimulate all parts of the brain. Eurhythmics, which is education in rhythm, involves multiple areas of the brain in challenging and creative ways. Actively listening to music can help long-term learning, and listening to classical music, especially, will sharpen a student’s thinking and long-term learning. Music causes the entire brain to work rather than just one side of the brain. Therefore, practicing music before doing homework or school work of any kind can help the work go faster, be easier, and can actually help the student to remember her work for a longer period of time.

Finally, music can help improve a student’s reading abilities. There is a noticeable relationship between reading and understanding pitch. Pitch actually helps in word identification. Music education improves pitch discrimination, which helps reading. Also, music helps reading because it helps the student to visually recognize words and helps to associate the visual words with her spoken sounds.

After concluding my research, I found that The Mozart Effect is actually a true phenomenon that can help in the growth of a young child. Therefore, I am delighted to see that others are seriously considering this phenomenon to be of importance. Thank you again for your research and insight into the subject.

The Death of Classical Music: Can it Be Saved?

Everyone has heard the rumors floating around in the past few decades reporting the death of classical music or at least of its failing health. If one looks at the facts, it is easy to see why all of these speculations have been made. Music education has almost completely disappeared from public schools, record sales have significantly declined, and ticket cost of live performances has increased while attendance has decreased. On top of all of that, between the years of 1980 and 2000, classical music was almost completely absent from the main stream media, and in those twenty years, seventeen orchestras, such as the New Orleans Symphony, were forced to shut their doors. The world of pop was emerging and growing quickly. There was just no room for elitist classical music.

This decline in popularity has become the subject of countless blogs, news reports, books, and symposiums and has classical music supporters at a loss as to what went wrong and whether or not it is too late to save the industry. In fact, all of this talk about the death of classical music has become an industry in itself. People are beginning to ask themselves, has America given up on classical music? The answer to this question, based on the previous facts, seems obvious. However, this rumor of classical music’s imminent death is based on data that has been incorrectly interpreted. The actual numbers show a completely different story. While it is true that the popularity was waning in the past few decades, as of now, there is much more classical music being offered than ever before, both in concerts and recordings. And it is no coincidence that the rejuvenation came with one of the most important technological advances of the past decade: the Internet.

If one looks at the current record sales for classical music, the numbers are depressing. Compared to what the industry produced from 1950 to 1975, the numbers today are practically negligible. However, going beyond the major record labels, it is clear that classical music sales are actually booming. Since the creation of Apple’s iTunes in 2003, the sales of classical music have risen significantly. In fact, they reportedly accounted for twelve percent of the one billion tracks sold by iTunes in the first three years. In a recent interview with Alex Ross, a music critic from The New Yorker, Chris Bell, the director of worldwide product and music marketing at iTunes said, “iTunes is a safe place to try classical music. It is easy to sample and the buying is low-risk.” Perhaps this is why the sales have been so high. First time listeners and buyers are able to peruse iTunes’ vast selection from the comfort of their own home and buy songs one track at a time rather than investing their money into an entire CD, which they may end up not even enjoying.

While iTunes is a huge source for classical music and a main reason for the surge in sales, other sources are available for downloading as well. One of the largest online resources can be found at Naxos.com. Naxos Records, one of the biggest classical music recording labels was created in the eighties by Klaus Heymann. Heymann (seen to the right), who started his company at about the same time as the creation of the CD, saw an opportunity to profit off of recordings of mainstream classical repertory. In the early years, he relied on low priced ensembles that offered poor recordings. The business was not very lucrative, and he was not bringing in much money from it. He told Ross, “until about two years ago, for me this whole music business was a hobby, an expensive hobby.” He even put his entire catalogue online in 1996, allowing listeners to hear any track for free. It took many years for the Internet to advance to a point where he could make a profit off of his online database. Recently, however, Heymann created a subscription based library that offers higher quality sound recordings than do the free tracks. The library, which charges $19.95 per year, allows subscribers to have access to every recording that Naxos Records has online. The service, which now has over eleven thousand users, has added to Naxos’ eighty-two million dollar revenue.

Not only has the Internet helped to boost sales of the actual music, but it has also increased ticket sales for concerts. In the past few years, many major newspapers such as the New York Times and magazines such as Guardian Unlimited have argued against this claim, saying that “the concert hall is in crisis” and pointing out that season subscriptions for concert halls have plummeted. However, last-minute tickets sales have risen ten percent in the past decade. In fact, according to Matthew Westphal from Playbill Arts, “The [Metropolitan Opera] sold 83.9% of available tickets in 2006-07, up from 76.8% in 2005-06.” Before that, “figures had slipped every year since the 90.8% reached in 2000-01.” The most probable reason for this change in trend is that families have grown busier, and their habits have shifted. Many do not want to invest in season tickets where they have to commit to performances months in advance. Also, the Internet has led to a rise of first time concertgoers. People now have unlimited access to performance reviews, online radios, and streaming audio of classical music performances. They can hear samplings of the music before committing the money to buy the tickets. On top of that, there are scores of classical music blogs, such as chicagoclassicalmusic.org and the blog written by Jessica Duchen, a music journalist for The Independent. Each of these blogs, along with the countless others like these, get hundreds and sometimes thousands of hits a day, and they allow performers, composers, critics, conductors, or simply just classical music fans to get their voices heard, have immediate impact, and in some cases, to have some free advertising for themselves. Never could this have been done before the dawn of the Internet.

Although classical music has a history of riding the wave of popularity through new media in the past, starting with records, then cassette tapes, then CDs, there is no denying that the Internet has created for it a new awareness. No type of medium for obtaining classical music has ever been in existence that is as far reaching as the Internet. However, we cannot attribute all of the success to the Internet. In the words of Alex Ross, “classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away.” Nevertheless, fans of classical music will take this as a victory. This old, beautiful art form not only is not dying, but it looks like it will be here to stay.

Busking Around the World: One Man's Quest to Give the Gift of Music to All

On June 9, the South African born David Juritz, concert violinist and concertmaster of London’s famed Mozart Players, left his home in London with a backpack, his violin, and an empty wallet and started off on his 60,000-mile journey around the world. He had plans of busking in every city he stopped in order to raise enough money to support his travels. (Pictures of Juritz busking are seen to the left). Four and a half months later, Juritz has concluded his voyage in New York City, with $50,000 extra in his pocket and experiences that will last a lifetime.

When Juritz decided earlier this year that he wanted to travel around the world with only his violin in hand, he was not thinking of personal gain. Rather, he decided to mark his upcoming 50th birthday by touring the world and performing Bach’s solo violin works in hopes of raising funds for charities that would help bring music education to underdeveloped nations. His trip, now known as Round the World and Bach, took him through every continent except Antarctica. While traveling through each continent for the past four and a half months, Juritz worked everyday from 6 a.m. to nearly after midnight playing his violin in the streets and hoping for donations. He faced apathetic people who ignored him, blistering cold temperatures and pelting rain, and even policemen who tried to arrest him. However, Juritz believes that it was all a small price to pay to help bring music education to children who really need it.

“If you actually take a group of kids and put them up on the stage and get them performing, they suddenly realize that there’s another route in life than having to clamor for attention and hav[ing] to fight,” Juritz said in an interview with reporter Patricia Zengerle from Reuters.

A good example of this is seen in Juritz’s experiences in Montevideo, Uruguay. While playing violin on a street corner, a guy who Juritz says was high on drugs, and a group of about twelve kids surrounded him. Juritz feared that he was going to get mugged. Instead, the group, who seemed transfixed by his music, stayed and watched him for quite some time. Before leaving, one of the kids, who obviously had very little money, offered Juritz a coin as a donation.

"They were exactly the sort of kids we want to help,” Juritz said to Claire Soares from The Independent . “Music does have the power to transform lives. You get self-discipline from playing an instrument. You cannot beg, borrow or steal the ability to play, you have to practice and earn it.”

Although his trip around the world was meant to raise money to bring music education to children in need, Juritz has even bigger plans to accomplish his mission. Upon realizing that that there are no charities in existence solely for the purpose of bringing music education to underdeveloped countries, he created his own charity to do just that. His organization, called Musequality, is meant to support the development of music projects in these countries. Juritz hopes that bringing music to children in these countries will help foster “self-confidence and growth in their social, intellectual and spiritual capacities.” Juritz plans to use Musequality to provide the financial assistance necessary to fund such projects and to help form partnerships between the projects created by his organization and other well-established music institutions around the world. The money raised during Around the World and Bach is just the starting point for Juritz. By the time he is done, he hopes to have raised at least $500,000 for his charity that will all go to building music education projects around the world.

Despite only having raised $50,000 on his last trip, Juritz has already made some progress toward his end goal. Musequality is currently helping to bring funding to The Tender Talents Magnet School in Kampala, Uganda. Although this is just one small project, this is only the beginning for Juritz and Musequality. Juritz is confident that his charity will succeed and that it will bring the gift of music to underprivileged children all over the world. He is excited to see children, who would otherwise have nothing, growing through music. The Tender Talents Magnet School, seen in the image to the right, is proof enough for him that his initiative is working, and he has spoken out about the excitement that he has about these kids’ progress. “What I find most exciting is that, when you speak to them, they are all aiming high for the future. These are kids who want to become lawyers, economists, psychiatrists, and nurses, and I’ve no doubt that the discipline and self-respect they are developing now will help them to achieve their goals. It's wonderful to see.”

Advertising in Opera: Does Sex Sell?

After years of declining attendance, the Utah Symphony and Opera, logo seen to the left, has decided it needs a new public image. In order to move away from the stereotypical view of stuffy operas, the company administrators of the Utah Symphony and Opera have hired a new advertising firm to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. The firm they decided to employ is the one and only R&R Partners, most famous for the catchphrase, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Although R&R Partners have very little experience in cultural promotions, marketing director of the Utah Symphony and Opera, Sean Toomey, hopes that “the more playful approach [will help] break down the stereotypical image of stodginess.”

Examples of R&R Partners’ new marketing campaign can be seen all over Salt Lake City, Utah, from department stores to local bookstores to Chinese takeout restaurants. A person may be surprised to find a fortune that reads “Man who takes woman to opera finds pleasure after,” and a woman buying lingerie may find a tag with the slogan “Removes easily- after an evening in the balcony.” While these slogans may seem risqué enough, this is not as far as R&R Partners took their ideas. One particularly racy radio ad features a man and a woman talking monotonously about Verdi’s orchestration when they suddenly break into passionate moans directed at each other.

Supposedly, this type of ad campaign that Sean Toomey describes as being “playful” is meant to attract younger, more sexually driven people to the opera. However, in Salt Lake City, with almost 50% of its population being Mormon, the ads are causing some controversy. In fact, there has already been an instance in which a Mormon owned radio station refused to run an ad for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The ad was a parody of a typical morning-after conversation that might occur between the stars of the show Sex and the City after one of them woke up to discover that her one night stand was literally an ass. This ad was meant to be a take off from the scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Nick Bottom has his head transformed into that of an ass by the character Puck, as seen in the image to the right.

In order to stop some of the hullabaloo, Toomey recently asked R&R to change their marketing campaign to contain less sexual content. The slogan of the new campaign will change from “Experience the romance” to “Embrace the romance.” However, it will still be long way away from the average advertisements for classical music performances. For example, one of the newest ads for a Mozart performance reads “18th-century composer meets 21st-century pianist. Same music, better hair."

Now that the Utah Symphony and Opera has changed their tactics, they have to evaluate whether or not it is working. In the early start of the ad campaign, the company saw a rise in ticket sales. For example, the sales for the opera Jenufa went up 14 percent. However, the company now needs to figure out whether the ad campaign will have long-term benefits. Will the hot-and-heavy marketing campaign be able to make regulars out of the younger generation that they are targeting it to, or will the campaign simply create curiosity that is fleeting? So far, it is not looking promising. The attendance has already started thinning out despite the initial climb in ticket sales. Toomey, who is still hopeful, attributes much of the loss in attendance to competition from other local productions, bad weather, and construction. Others believe that the advertisements simply contain too much sexual subject matter to sell in a community with such a high population of Mormons. The Utah Symphony and Opera will now have to wait and see whether their strategy is working and whether the widely known marketing idiom is true; does sex really sell?

Musicologist: A Threat to National Security?

As of today, October 1, 2007, the United States government’s national threat level is “elevated,” while the threat level for all international and domestic flights is “high.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s website directly states that “While there continues to be no credible information at this time warning of an imminent threat to the homeland, the department's strategic threat perspective is that we are in a period of increased risk.” Perhaps this “imminent threat” during this “period of increased risk” is what caused up-and-coming musicologist, Nalini Ghuman, to be detained for eight hours in the San Francisco airport on August 8, 2006 and subsequently to be refused reentry into the United States. On September 17, 2007, Nina Berstein from The New York Times caught up with the case. Over thirteen months later, Ghuman has still not been allowed reentry and has yet to receive any information on the reasons for the revocation of her visa.

The situation with musicologist Nalini Ghuman, whose image is seen below, is one of sheer puzzlement. Ghuman, a British citizen of Welsh-Indian heritage, received her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, and is a Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland. She is esteemed as one of the world's preeminent scholars on the musical works of Sir Edward Elgar. As a perfectly innocent and prominent musician with respectable education credentials, the United States has, in flagrant violation of law, revoked her residency visa and refused to allow her back with no explanation given and no rights afforded; not even a phone call. The difficulty with this situation is that Ghuman’s case has not been able to be closely studied as a result of the government’s refusal to release any specifics on her case. Despite having a clean background and no direct links to any sort of national security threat, she has been treated as though a huge danger to the United States. As a result, her situation has caused uproar amongst the musicological community, her colleagues, and others who believe that she is being unfairly kept out of the country. The American Musicological Society has even been sending out regular newsletters regarding Ghuman’s current status.

While Ghuman has heard no specific information as to why her visa was revoked, the officers who originally detained her reported to Ghuman and her representative that, although no information has been released dealing with her case, there is a strong likelihood that there are deeper security reasons for holding her from entering. On July 27, 2007, the American Musicological Society, concerned with the lack of movement on the case, wrote directly to Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice to query about the status of Ghuman’s return. The response they received was short and unsatisfactory. It stated that “Dr. Ghuman's case is undergoing administrative processing. It is not possible to predict when Dr. Ghuman's case will be completed.” As of yet, that is the most information anyone has heard about the matter. Perhaps there is some other problem that the public is unaware of that is causing the government to not release any other material on the case, or perhaps they are worried about security. Whatever the reason, nothing appears to explain this inexcusable situation.

While Ghuman’s story is the story of just one woman, there have been many other instances where the United States has denied entrance or revoked the visas of foreign scholars. Not surprisingly, most of these foreign intellectuals were critical of the Bush administration and spoke out publicly about it before being denied entrance. One such example is of Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi professor of medicine who had been invited to visit the University of Washington to share his research on cancer among children in southern Iraq. Upon being deprived entrance into the U.S., Mr. Lafta decided to deliver his lecture at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, and the video was broadcasted at the University of Washington. These actions that have been taken by the United States’ govenment against these foreign scholars are not only unjust and unfair, but if this continues, America’s pre-eminence as a place of scholarship is at stake.

Music Memorization: A Practiced Skill

Although musicians have been memorizing music for as long as music has been in existence, nineteenth century composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, seen in the image to the right, was the first performer to present an entire recital by memory. It is now considered standard practice for a musician to memorize his or her music and perform it without the aid of music. No matter how talented a musician, memorizing music is a challenge. Many people have theories on what is best way to go about memorizing a song, and every theory varies slightly. For this reason, I decided to search the blogosphere this week and seek out what different people say on the matter of music memorization. Within Blogger, I found a post by Elaine Fine, composer, violist, violinist, CD review writer for the American Record Guide, and writer for the Instrumentalist. In her post, Musical Memory: true confessions, Ms. Fine speaks out about her own weaknesses when it comes to memorizing music. Therefore, I responded with my own personal weaknesses and some insights into why we each had these weaknesses. Along with that, I found another blog that caught my interest at musicteachershelper.com. The blog post, Memorizing vs. Learning was written by Ed Pearlman, fiddler and fiddle teacher. It talks about memorizing by way of ear training and the benefits of learning an instrument by ear rather than by reading music. I do not agree with his stance on this issue so I therefore decided to refute his argument. My comments can be found below or on the original blog posts themselves.


Music Memory: true confessions
My comment:
I have always found the concept of memorizing music to be an interesting one. As a classically trained pianist and vocalist, I have had to do my fair share of memorizing in my musical career. Similarly to you, I have always had problems memorizing the “hard parts” of Beethoven Sonatas. For example, I had almost the entire length of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique memorized. However, the fast section of the first movement always caused me problems, and even though I rehearsed it countless times, it ended up being the section that I stumbled over when performing the memorized piece in my recital. In contrast, memorizing and performing my vocal pieces has never been a problem unless I entered into the performance with insufficient preparation. The reason for this, I believe, is because of my aural and visual memory.

When learning a vocal piece, my brain makes a strong connection between the notes and the words because the music and the text usually match in emotion and overall feeling. Whether it is the actual physical shape of the music or just the musicality of the piece, there is usually some correlation between the words and the music. This causes my brain to form a strong visual and aural relationship with what I am singing. On the contrary, when learning a lengthy sonata, the brain is processing so much that it is difficult for it to create a visual or aural connection to the notes in the tricky parts. I believe these connections are more difficult to form for the obvious reasons; the actual notes on the page look scrambled and the brain usually hears difficult sections as a whole rather than note by note. Therefore, when trying to perform a difficult section from memory, the brain has a hard time remembering the individual notes.

First page of Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique

Memorizing vs. Learning
My comment:
I find your distinction between memorizing a piece and actually learning a piece to be an interesting one. You say “musicians who rely on written music, and then memorize it, have taken only a first step toward learning it.” While this statement is obviously valid, I do not believe that a musician cannot memorize and master a piece of music without the ability to learn by ear. As you said, a true mastery of aural skills is important, however, there are many different elements that go into memorization besides aural memory.

Visual and conceptual memories are both very important for a musician to be able to memorize a piece of music and to command the performance of that piece. Without seeing the notes on a page, a musician can gain only a limited amount of knowledge about the piece. He can hear it and interpret it to his liking, but the actual structure of the piece and how the composer imagined it will be lost to him. Also, being able to visualize the notes on a page allows the brain to remember the shape and sequence of the notes. This contributes to the memorization process. A musician must also have good conceptual memory to be able to memorize a piece. He must really be aware of what he is memorizing in order to retain the music. This includes musical text, phrasing, notes, harmony, etc. While the musician can hear some of these aspects when learning by ear, some are not as obvious and must be seen in print in order to grasp them.

Because the brain uses many different tools in the memorization process, I believe that it hinders a musician to learn a piece by ear only. The ability to play or sing by ear is a great talent, but the ability to read, interpret, and understand written texts and music is essential to any good musical training.

The Big Bang: New Opera is Taking America by Storm

In America, traditional, stuffy operas are out, and new, more racy operas are in. Now that is not to say that Puccini's Madame Butterfly and Verdi's La Traviata will never be performed again. They are classics and the basis on which contemporary opera originated. However, a decline in ticket sales and opera popularity has forced composers to develop new ideas to capture the American public's attention.

It has been speculated that the popularity of opera in America is dwindling. The 2005 Metropolitan Opera Annual Report supports this theory. A summary of the income and expenses from the past ten years is seen in the image to the left. According to the report, the 2004-2005 season "continued to languish below the pre-9/11 levels" ending with a deficit of $833,000. Because the Metropolitan Opera has the most press coverage of any opera house in the country, with an annual attendance of over 800,000 and a $200 million dollar budget, people look to the Met as an example of opera in America. However, there are hundreds of smaller opera houses throughout the country that are prospering and growing. In fact, according to OPERA America, The National Service Organization for Opera, the number of opera companies has increased by 60% since the 1970's, reaching a record high of 125, making the U.S. one of the global leaders in opera. The reason for this is that Americans are now embracing a wider variety of opera. The newer, smaller opera houses are starting to produce more adventurous, modern operas. And while most of these opera houses hold only a fraction of the Metropolitan's 4,000 people, they are bringing in more revenue and attendance is higher.

The reason for the change in style in new operas is simple: the older, more formal styles of opera were starting to be considered art forms meant only for the elite. And the population attending these operas was getting older. The artistic directors were forced to think about what was going to happen in ten years when the opera going population had passed away and a new generation had emerged. Since over 80% of the funding for opera houses in America comes from public donors and not the government, the opera houses had to insure that their popularity did not dwindle, because with dwindling popularity comes a decrease in funding. So the leaders of the opera houses came up with a simple solution: create operas that had not been done before that would appeal to the younger generation of Americans.

Producing new operas seems like it would be a relatively easy task. However, for opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, it is just the opposite. The Metropolitan Opera has to get all works approved by their board members, who censor what their company produces. Also, the Metropolitan's performance schedule is planned eight years in advance, which makes it hard to fit in new productions. Because of this, there are now a growing number of smaller opera houses nationwide. It is simply easier to produce contemporary operas in these smaller opera houses. They do not have to report to board members and their schedules are usually planned only three years in advance, which gives them more room to fit in new productions.

Another venue for new operas is at the collegiate level. Educational institutions are more able than big opera companies to take risks and therefore are beginning to produce operas that are attracting more attention. For example, Ken Cazan, the Opera Stage Director and associate professor of vocal arts at the University of Southern California, is in the middle of producing a new opera entitled Miss Lonelyhearts, written by composer Lowell Liebermann and librettist J.D. McClatchy. This controversial new opera based on the 1933 novella by Nathanael West features nudity, violence, sex, and a scene where the main character assumes a crucifix pose. Miss Lonelyhearts first premiered at The Julliard School last year and then twice at the University of Southern California in the spring of 2007. After the California premier, image seen at the right, Mr. Cazan says that "for weeks [he] had people calling [him]." Some were outraged and some sang his praise. However, whatever the comment, the opera definitely attracted attention and had people engaged. This was exactly the response Mr. Cazan was looking for. He realizes that in order to keep audiences interested, performers must come out with "bold new works." The opera will also premier at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music next February.

With growing support from audiences and monetary support from donors, opera houses nationwide are flourishing. A new genre is being produced that is revolutionizing the way people view opera. It is no longer a form of entertainment only for the wealthy. Instead, it has become a typical Friday night activity for the general populace. People are beginning to say goodbye to the long lines at the movie theatres and starting to welcome the fabulous art that is opera.