When such disparate and controversial developments as Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, Critical Race Theory, the anti-woke movement, and the war in Ukraine have led to a global reexamination of history and memory, it seems appropriate for MLA’s Opera and Musical Performance Forum to consider the role played by public works of music in society’s memory and imagination. Many works of music begin as commissions to commemorate an event or beloved person. Verdi’s Aida was written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, while Bernstein’s Mass is devoted to the memory of President Kennedy. Often works gain a standing entirely on their own, their inspirations either forgotten or supplanted. Examining the origins and aspirations of such works and considering how they have come to be understood and used over time provides fascinating insight into the nature of celebration and memory, as the topics below amply demonstrate.

Composer, artist, and performer Corey Douglas Smith of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and theorist Jacob Henry Leveton of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University will launch the discussion with “Dialectics of Sound: Frank Lloyd Wright Midway from Philadelphia to Phoenix.” They argue that music invites new collaboration relative to celebration and memory. In 2022, the presenters created a unique work confronting Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy in sound and performance. In “MIDWAY – A Performance Lecture,” they took up the subject of Midway Gardens, Wright’s modernist Chicago concert venue, which was built in 1914 and demolished in 1929 after the 1918-1920 pandemic and financial crisis. The Gardens’ sculptural program was relocated from Hyde Park to the Arizona Biltmore Resort in Phoenix along a significant vector of public health-related intrastate migration and settler-colonialism. As a critical frame, they draw on the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s social theory of memory for the composition. Such a framework allows us to deconstruct the critical-creative binary through music, freeing forms of play that encourage the study of the heretofore un-representable and new knowledge to come.

In “A Requiem for Michael Brown,” Jonathan Karp, Graduate Student at Harvard University, examines an instance of spontaneous reexamination of received culture that took place during the interruption of a 2014 St. Louis Symphony concert by a group of singers protesting the police killing of Mike Brown. After intermission, with the conductor poised to raise his baton, a few scattered audience members started to sing, “Which side are you on?” Others in the audience, caught between the programmed performance on stage and an unexpected one around them, were made to improvise. Videos of the performance with subsequent reflections by audience members, performers, and protesters trace the circulation of affect and explore the political possibilities and limits of interrupting and coopting stage performance. He argues that the performance’s power arose from the invitation to improvise with Florence Reece’s song and the programmed work, Brahms’s Requiem, which, over the course of this public event, becomes a requiem for Mike Brown.

Finally, stepping directly into the present and future of musical performance, Trivius Caldwell, PhD candidate at Duke University, argues that the act of commissioning an artist to capture the essence of an event can take various forms in “Counter-public Discourse: Music that Marks Violence as an Evolutionary Event.” If we consider commissioning as a political act and examine who has the means to commission, we can then consider the social commissioning of music as a means of catharsis regarding police brutality – an ongoing reality that perpetuates a racialized American modernity. He scrutinizes Nasir “Nas” Jones as a musician who draws on the rich African American vernacular tradition to reveal police brutality and epistemological violence as legacies of American slavery. As such, he satisfies a disenfranchised “counter-public” who socially commissions his art to amplify black expression and identity. Nas's music, through sampling and hip-hop literacy, conjures memory and serves as a transnational sound current.

In investigating the relationships among sources of commissioning, the artists’ inspiration, and the audience’s reception, the three papers traverse both traditional sites and manners of performance and unconventional interactions with musical works. From the public garden to the concert hall, to massive arenas and streaming platforms, this panel takes head on the subject of why and how a musical performance comes into being and how its reception can evolve. Across the papers, the subject of music as celebration and memory seems to provoke as many new questions and as it elicits new interpretations.