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0303: Responding to the World, Hometown to the World

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

Release Date: 02/17/2021

Harmony in Process: The Young Voices of the Santa Fe Opera with Amy Harmony in Process: The Young Voices of the Santa Fe Opera with Amy "Process" Owens

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

What does an award-winning, multi-disciplinary artist, dynamic educator, and former Sweet Potato do for an encore? She brings that boundless energy and collaborative spirit to her new Santa Fe Opera role, fueled by a deep passion for opera and music education.  Co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia roll out a virtual red carpet welcome for Amy Owens, Director of the . Get to know this exuberant, optimistic talent and learn more about the program under her stewardship. Andrea, Anna, and Amy also explore the profound community impact of two beloved SFO programs: , a storytelling...

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Making Learning Sticky: Creative Compassion for Kids & Educators Through Opera with Charles Gamble show art Making Learning Sticky: Creative Compassion for Kids & Educators Through Opera with Charles Gamble

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

We're taking an Opera For All Voices-adjacent excursion to the realm of wiggly kiddos, innovative teachers, and fresh vocabulary words, highlighting the power of playful arts integration.  Join Key Change co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia with special guest Charles Gamble, Santa Fe Opera's Director Of School Programs, as they introduce two of Santa Fe Opera's most dynamic community engagement programs: , a multi-session residency within the Santa Fe Public Schools that incorporates creative arts to make learning delightfully sticky; and , professional development...

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The Key Change Time Machine: Reflecting the Times, Speaking to the Human Condition show art The Key Change Time Machine: Reflecting the Times, Speaking to the Human Condition

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

It’s all systems go for season five of Key Change! But before we commence with the anniversary celebrations, co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia dust off the time machine for a whirlwind tour of seasons past. Think of this episode as part process evaluation––an appraisal of Opera For All Voices (OFAV), the Santa Fe Opera initiative committed to co-commissioning and co-producing new, diverse operatic works––and part indispensable playlist for repeat audiences and newcomers alike, covering the essential artistic and emotional moments that have made Key Change an...

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Season 5: Stretching The Boundaries Of What Opera Can Be show art Season 5: Stretching The Boundaries Of What Opera Can Be

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

It's season 5! This season, we're inviting you, our favorite listeners, on a journey through time and space -- traveling back in time to the origins of Key Change and Opera For All Voices and forward into the future of boundless possibilities. This spring, Andrea Fellows Feinberg and Anna Garcia take you through through the community engagement portal to hear from the voices transforming the future of opera.  And in the fall, they'll offer a backstage pass to latest Opera For All Voices commissions as we continue to shift the conversation about what opera is and what it can be. New...

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Connections Across Time and Space: Opera in the Cosmos show art Connections Across Time and Space: Opera in the Cosmos

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

Seven years ago, Santa Fe Opera started a conversation that would reverberate throughout American Opera, shaping this celebrated art form into something more reflective of the world in which it's created. Today, Opera For All Voices (OFAV) commissions have surpassed even our wildest storytelling expectations.  Key Change co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia tuck into the time machine for a season-ending trip around the OFAV universe, revisiting the initiative's greatest hits and offering fans a glimpse at what's to come––with Ruth Nott, consultant, Opera for All Voices;...

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Competing Interests: How Do You Workshop a New Opera? show art Competing Interests: How Do You Workshop a New Opera?

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

Roadtrip! After many long months of necessary virtual collaboration, the creative team behind The Pigeon Keeper, a Santa Fe Opera Opera For All Voices (OFAV) commission, finally got to spread their wings for an emotional workshop in San Francisco.  Key Change co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia discover what it was like to have everyone (well, almost everyone) in the same room for the very first time––featuring composer David Hanlon, librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, stage director Mary Birnbaum, music director Kelly Kuo, dramaturg Cori Ellison, Ruth Nott, consultant for...

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Hometown to the World Debuts on Broadway show art Hometown to the World Debuts on Broadway

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

If a chorus of 12 teens can provide compelling commentary on immigration enforcement from the stage of a venerable performing arts center in Santa Fe, how might ten times that number of voices impact the debate? From a Broadway venue that has welcomed some of the twentieth century’s most influential social justice visionaries?  Key Change co-hosts Andrea Fellows-Fineberg and Anna Garcia pilot the time machine east to find out, setting a course for the 2022 premiere of  at New York’s storied . Adding their insights to this aural postcard are Hometown’s composer Laura Kaminsky...

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Telling Hard Truths show art Telling Hard Truths

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

What do you know about the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer? Chances are, not much. That's about to change.  Co-hosts Andrea Fellows Fineberg and Anna Garcia dust off the Key Change time machine for a trip back through time and place to the real-life inspiration for This Little Light of Mine (TLLoM), the modern operatic masterpiece commissioned by Santa Fe Opera's Opera For All Voices initiative. Good thing this ride is roomy because joining them are two women who can claim a direct connection to Mrs. Hamer: Jacqueline "Cookie" Hamer Flakes, Mrs. Hamer's last surviving daughter, and...

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A Day in the Life Before a World Premiere show art A Day in the Life Before a World Premiere

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

It’s October 28, 2022. As a brisk, still night settles over Santa Fe, things are heating up inside The Lensic Performing Arts Center. Longtime opera patrons mingle alongside never opera goers. Soon, the curtain will rise on This Little Light of Mine (TLLoM), a modern operatic masterpiece composed by Chandler Carter with libretto by Diana Solomon-Glover.  The one-act production is an unflinching yet uplifting dramatization of the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black woman born on the very lowest rung of the American caste system. A Black woman who nonetheless rose to speak at the 1964...

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Spark of Imagination: Generations of the Pueblo Opera Program with Sonja & Seth Martinez show art Spark of Imagination: Generations of the Pueblo Opera Program with Sonja & Seth Martinez

Key Change: Creating Opera for All Voices

If you’re unfamiliar with Santa Fe Opera’s (POP), take a quick journey back in time for of this conversation. Go ahead; we’ll wait. In it, you’ll meet Renee Roybal and Claudene A. Martinez, both members of Pueblo of San Ildefonso. The pair recall the early days of POP and the formation of the (POCC). Now that you’re sufficiently caught up, join Andrea Fellows Fineberg as her time machine co-pilot Kyle Gray, SFO’s Manager of Community Relations & Government Affairs, wraps up the conversation (for now.)  Renee and Claudene return to share recollections of their early...

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Immigration. Racism. Religion. Some themes are ever present in our society. In this episode, Key Change host Andrea Fellows Fineberg puts the time machine through its paces, capturing the artistic evolution that brought one of the first Opera for All Voices commissions to the stage...sort of.

With wrenching plot twists worthy of La Traviata and more false endings than a Beethoven symphony, this is the story of Hometown to the World created by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Kimberly Reed. By extension, it is a story of our time. 

The opera’s artistic journey, which began in 2016, encompasses years of rewrites, workshops, name changes, and character demises - and that doesn’t even factor in the open-ended setbacks of COVID-19. But to truly understand Hometown to the World, listeners must travel back in time even further to 2008. That year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided a kosher meat processing plant in the small but thriving multicultural farming community of Postville, Iowa, deporting approximately 25% of the town’s residents. 

This is not your grandmother’s canonical opera plot. And yet…Hometown to the World reverberates with the same tension and drama, terror and beauty. At its heart, Hometown… is a story about people learning to live together despite their differences. “People really do, for the most part, want to understand across difference and make a better world for all,” Laura says. “I have to believe that.”

Immigration stories are American stories, as rich and varied as the human experience itself. Stage Director Kristine McIntyre shares her own connection, as the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. “I believe really firmly that my job, as an opera director, is to direct the music in the sense of finding what the story is inherent in what we are hearing as an audience member.” 

Dramaturg Cori Ellison points out that both sides of the operatic equation - new work and standard repertory pieces - can thrive alongside each other, expanding perceptions of what art is and how we interact with each other. 

Andrea steers the episode full-circle, returning listeners to 2021 and our current immigration, racism, and religion issues. Where does an opera about a decade-old ICE raid written at the onset of the most contentious political era in US history go after a global pandemic? Stay tuned.

RELATED EPISODES

Season 1, Episode 6 “Hometown to the World: Discovering Postville” - Interview with Laura Kaminsky and Kimberly Reed

Season 2, Episode 9 “America is Impossible Without Us” - Revisiting the work during the San Francisco Opera workshop

SPECIAL OFFER

Thank you to Bright Shiny Things for permission to share "Carne barata" from Hometown to the World, performed by Blythe Gaissert, in this episode.

Key Change listeners receive 21% off the forthcoming release of Blythe's debut album “Home” with promo code: SFOPERA21 (all caps!)

Preorder here: https://www.brightshiny.ninja/home

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Key Change is a production of The Santa Fe Opera in collaboration with Opera for All Voices.

Hosted by Andrea Fellows Fineberg

Featuring Cori Ellison, Ruth Nott, Composer: Laura Kaminsky, Librettist: Kimberly Reed, Stage Stage Director: Kristine McIntyre 

Produced and edited by Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios

Audio Engineer: Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe

Theme music by Rene Orth with Corrie Stallings, mezzo-soprano, and Joe Becktell, cello.

Cover art by David Tousley

This podcast is made possible due to the generous funding from the Melville Hankins Family Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and an OPERA America Innovation Grant, supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.  

To learn more about Opera for All Voices, visit us at SantaFeOpera.org.