A Conversation with Marc Scorca
Series: Art Works Podcast
From: National Endowment for the Arts
Length: 00:31:03
All eyes are on the 2011 NEA Opera Honorees who are receiving their awards tonight (October 27, 2011) at 7:30 in Washington DC's Sidney Harman Hall. It ‘s going to be webcast live, so you can join us by going to arts.gov and clicking on Opera Honors. Our partner in the Awards Ceremony is Opera America, a nonprofit service organization for the opera industry. Now celebrating its 40th year, Opera America advocates on behalf of the arts in general and opera in particular. It gathers best practices, data and research to help opera companies and producers be as efficient, effective, and creative as possible. Marc Scorca has been at the helm of Opera America for 20 years, so it's safe to say he knows a thing or two about the art form and about our honorees. I spoke to Marc Scorca in New York City and began our conversation by observing that when people think of opera, they tend to think of it as expensive: expensive to produce and expensive to attend. According to Marc, that's both true and not.
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Piece Description
All eyes are on the 2011 NEA Opera Honorees who are receiving their awards tonight (October 27, 2011) at 7:30 in Washington DC's Sidney Harman Hall. It ‘s going to be webcast live, so you can join us by going to arts.gov and clicking on Opera Honors. Our partner in the Awards Ceremony is Opera America, a nonprofit service organization for the opera industry. Now celebrating its 40th year, Opera America advocates on behalf of the arts in general and opera in particular. It gathers best practices, data and research to help opera companies and producers be as efficient, effective, and creative as possible. Marc Scorca has been at the helm of Opera America for 20 years, so it's safe to say he knows a thing or two about the art form and about our honorees. I spoke to Marc Scorca in New York City and began our conversation by observing that when people think of opera, they tend to think of it as expensive: expensive to produce and expensive to attend. According to Marc, that's both true and not.
Transcript
Transcript of conversation with Marc Scorca
Rise Stevens singing Carmen
Marc Scorca: The NEA Opera Honors is just a fantastic program. Explicitly it is to celebrate lifetime achievement in opera and the recipients have deserved it a hundred times over. For each of the honorees we do a video tribute which are available on the NEA web site and the video tributes always involve interviewing ten or so people for each honoree from which we then create the tribute. This has become a fantastic oral history of American opera. If you look at the nearly 160 interviews that we've done, each of them between half an hour and an hour and a half, they tell the story of the development of this art form in the United States. Just this year alone Robert Ward is honored and Bob is now 94 years old and when we went to interview him we were talking about his music education at Eastman in the 1930s, how he...
Read the full transcript
Musical Works
| Title | Artist | Album | Label | Year | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Beginning - Act II | Robert Ward, Bernard Stambler, and conductor, Emerson Buckley, and the New York City Opera Orchestra | The Crucible . | Albany Records | 00:00 |
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