Season 4, Episode 1

Welcome to Season 4 of Sound Expertise! Opera is a four-hundred-year-old genre, and it often looks and sounds that way: despite opera’s revolutionary merging of artistic disciplines, its administrators and musicians are often stuck in the past. But in his visionary productions, the director Yuval Sharon has imagined many potential futures for the art form; this conversation, about his new book, reveals where he thinks opera needs to go next, and why. Plus, a discussion of his highly-anticipated Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera!

Yuval Sharon is Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of Detroit Opera and founding artistic director of The Industry in Los Angeles.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sharon’s work, check out:

• His new book, A New Philosophy of Opera
• Will’s 2015 article on Hopscotch
• A new musicological study of The Industry by Megan Steigerwald-Ille

Sound Expertise is hosted by Will Robin (@seatedovation), and produced by D. Edward Davis (@warmsilence). Please subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and/or Spotify. Questions or comments? Email soundexpertise00 @ gmail

If you’re planning to attend the American Musicological Society conference in Chicago, please come to our LIVE EPISODE of Sound Expertise on Friday, Nov 15 at 11:45am! Will will be interviewing composer Jonathan Bailey Holland. And come hang with fellow Sound Expertise fans that night, starting around 8pm, at 2Twenty2 Tavern!

A written transcript of this episode is available here; thanks to Andrew Dell’Antonio for volunteering to prepare transcripts for the show!