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went to the FridaDiego opera rerun today and liked it well enough but the pop-locking skeletons took me out jajaj. it was fun and a cute break in the Opera(tm) ambience but still kind of a bizarre directing choice. i spent a lot of time just wondering why they didn’t have a modernish take on one of the dozens of mexican folkloric dances instead. also kind of bummed by how sparse the rivera mural animation was with just the human silhouettes/shapes. plus there is such vibrant and meaningful imagery and costumery (idk if that’s the word) in mexican culture that it feels like a lot of the set stuff was a missed opportunity… sometimes it felt more greek myth adjacent and just slapping some Mexico on top

yeah lol i do kind of agree about the skeleton dancers, like i do understand what the director/choreographer was aiming for but i'm not sure how successful it actually was… she talks about it a bit in this video:

i talked a little bit about this right after i got out of the screening and felt really enamored with the orchestration and the use of the instruments that did feel really novel to me, but a lot of these composers who try to use these very rigid classical western/european forms (opera, orchestral music in general) to tell non-european stories get caught in a tough place because no matter how hard you try to break out of the form it does often just feel like you're putting an "exotic" gloss on top of a composition that is still at its core a piece of western classical music. i think a lot of the actual Sounds that the composer was able to get the orchestra to produce in this case were very effective to me, but yeah i think the set dressing around that probably was not as successful. like no matter how much they wanted to pay respect to or draw direct inspiration from mexican culture, i think they still end up bumping up against this idea that it Has to be presented in a certain way as a piece that is being performed at the metropolitan opera house with all the baggage of what that entails (which makes the breakdancing thing even more baffling bc like… you want to take a swing and break out of the met opera mold for this and THAT'S the swing you decide to take? uh.. ok)

this reminds me of something i was talking about with charlotte @dykeselfcest who went to see a new monkey king opera at the san francisco opera a few months back and was pretty disappointed in it because she said it felt very much like it was just a traditional western opera but they sprinkled in one or two "eastern" instruments in the orchestra to give it an exotic flavor, which was incredibly frustrating for me to hear bc (like you said about established mexican cultural art forms with the fridadiego opera) there are incredibly established historic traditions of chinese opera (peking opera is the most well known obviously but i am partial to sichuan opera bc that is my Home and what i grew up on) that have their own form and rules and instruments and they look and sound completely different from western classical opera.

ALSO sorry i'm getting completely off track here but this also reminds me a bit of the sideways video essay on the james cameron avatar film soundtrack lol. haven't watched this vid in a few years but tl;dw the main point was basically james cameron hired ethnomusicologist wanda bryant to work with composer james horner develop an entirely new type of music for world and the na'vi culture that would sound totally alien (or at least would sound uhhhh "exotic" and vaguely non-white but not be recognizable as being from any one specific culture on earth) but then once they tried to play the music for cameron, especially with the lyrics he had originally written in english but then translated into the na'vi conlang with its non-english phonemes, it didn't sound good to his western ears and sounded Too Alien. AND THEN that coupled with the fact that the rest of the score would be made up of a traditional western classical orchestra because after all this film was a standard blockbuster and needed a standard big blockbuster soundtrack… well in the end they basically threw out all that work and just ended up going with a standard western classical orchestral soundtrack, any non-western instruments with non-western sounds were sampled so they could just treat them as traditional western instruments digitally, and in the end there were like half a dozen instances of any of the actual non-western sounds bryant brought to horner actually recognizably making it into the score and even then only as vague timbral flourishes

v interesting writeup by bryant that sideways cites in the video:

On January 25, 2010, James Cameron’s Avatar became the highest grossing film in history. I was privileged to be part of Avatar’s creative te

she references mervyn cooke's a history of film music:

Cooke could have been writing about Avatar’s score when he discussed “the pervasive use of ethnic instruments and voices, sometimes lending authenticity to a film’s cultural or geographical milieu, but at other times perpetuating a generalized timbral exoticism that suggested Hollywood stereotyping was still a guiding spirit” (2008:504–5). That is Avatar’s score in a nutshell.

and talks about the process of composing and orchestrating a film score as very concerned with how much a (hollywood) audience will be able to accept, and more centered around commercial/economic concerns rather than any kind of artistic integrity:

Horner has described the process as actually writing two separate scores, one to represent the Na’vi soundscape, the other a traditional cinematic score “to drive the film” (Horner 2009c; Landau 2009). Throughout the process of creating the score, the choices that we made always kept the average filmgoer in mind. “Had I been more avant-garde in my musical choices, I believe I would have pushed the audience further away from an emotional centre. . . . I chose beauty, heart, and emotion over trying to radically expand the audience’s musical capacities” (Horner 2009e). “Audiences seem to be much more capable of absorbing new visuals and things that are much more outrageous or avant garde [sic] visually – aurally, audiences are much more conservative,” Horner says. “If I went as far as Jim [Cameron] did visually, and started to use all kinds of weird scales for the music and made it too avant garde [sic] or too out-of-the-box, I would be ungrounding the film. . . . Obviously I’m still writing film music, so it still has to appeal to a film audience in a conventional way” (Horner 2009c). […]

Each decision concerning Avatar’s score was influenced by both artistic and economic considerations. While we would prefer that our artistic choices supersede all others, that is often not the case. The late critic and impresario Lawrence Morton pointed out that quality has little to do with film music’s success: “[film music] has nothing to do with art . . . it has everything to do with commerce. Above all it must be successful—that is, it must do something for the picture, please whoever is paying for it, and, if possible, win an Oscar” (McCarty 2001). While I feel that this claim that film music has nothing to do with art is overstated, it is undeniable that commerce is a very influential force in today’s film world.

ANYWAYS. sorry that got SO off track that i somehow ended up talking about the fucking avatar film soundtrack (instead of discussing the visuals of the fridadiego opera at all which is what you were mainly talking about oops) but i do think a lot of the discussion about the commercial requirements of a hollywood blockbuster film score and adherence to expectations surrounding a Classical James Horner Orchestral Score also apply to what composers/directors of operas think that Metropolitan Opera Audiences will expect from their work… limitations of the form, limitations of trying to make art in a world of commerce… it's rough

#this is interesting..