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Pitching Opera: Innovating New Music Theater at Banff and Stratford, 1970–1990
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2020
Abstract
The Banff Summer Festival of the Arts and the Stratford Summer Music Festival have been unrecognized sites of operatic innovation in Canada. Indeed, the flourishing of what might be termed “new music theater” in Canada is imbricated with the history of these two festivals. Archival research reveals that the inventive, often revolutionary, approaches to music theater honed at Stratford and Banff from 1970–1990 ultimately defined the course of Canadian new music theatre in the decades that followed. Founded in 1953 as a Shakespeare festival, the Stratford Festival eventually became renowned for its (nearly exclusive) focus on musical theater. At Banff, discussions about generic innovation occurred regularly, producing what I suggest was one of the foremost centers in the world for innovation in music theater. Charting the development of opera in Canada through conversations that took part at the Banff and Stratford festivals during the period 1970–1990 reveals the unique possibilities that the peripheral positioning of these festivals—aesthetically, critically, and geographically—offered to the development, dissemination, and innovation of so-called new music theater in Canada.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 14 , Special Issue 1: Music Festivals , February 2020 , pp. 33 - 50
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020
Footnotes
I would like to thank Michael Bawtree for his generosity, Liza Giffen and Christine Schindler at the Stratford Festival Archives, and Lianne Caron, Andrew Hennan, and John Yolkowski at the Banff Centre's Paul D. Fleck Archives. Thank you also to Andrew Mall and my fellow panelists in the Festivals and Musical Life Seminar at SAM 2017 in Montreal, PQ, Canada. Finally, my warmest thanks to the editor and to the two anonymous reviewers for the journal, who provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts.