We interviewed the artist Marina Rosenfeld, who tells us about her work, opera, and her upcoming role as a professor at the Winter School Seminar for creators in contemporary opera.
Marina Rosenfeld, composer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has developed a body of work spanning sound, music, performance, sculpture, and works on paper. She has created commissioned works for institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, and has participated in major international biennials and festivals. Her interdisciplinary approach and interest in the fragility and vulnerability of the body have been central elements in her work. In this interview, Rosenfeld shares her perspectives on her work, the opera and her role as a professor at the Atlanticx Winter School.
By Virginia Chacon Dorr
MusicaClasicaBA recommends:
– Your work crosses the boundaries between disciplines. Can you tell us how the body, and particularly the human voice, plays into this exploration?
-My project has taken many forms, but it’s true that the sensorium of the body and its fragility and vulnerability to surrounding networks of meaning and power has always been an ineluctable element of how I am thinking about and experiencing music. Not as a narrative element, but as a constitutive approach to making situations. Many of my works aspire to a state of instability that leaves one open to perceiving how things are happening, or the abrasions between things, the undetermined or as yet to be determined nature of most gestures. The voice is just one way that that instability becomes visible or audible, whether it emerges as an improvised response to an acoustic situation or is called for in some kind of ‘compositional’ way.
“I don’t feel any kind of requirement or pressure personally to make opera new or contemporary. But I am interested to see what happens when the frame ‘opera’ is applied to a work of mine which comes out of the context of experimental music, performance, contemporary art” – Marina Rosenfeld
– In your opinion, what is the role of opera in today’s cultural landscape?
-I think opera is a marginal form in the sense that film and video and recording and many other multidisciplinary, spectacular forms of media are more present and popular globally, more accessible and more immediate. In that sense opera represents a kind of echo of a kind of disciplinary past and should have something to do with that past, perhaps, where the idea of histrionic songs, of staging and costumes, and programmatic music itself, were a departure from everyday life. I wouldn’t venture a definition of what opera ‘is’ in today’s world, but I think there is enormous value in preserving the form as it existed in the past because of the beauty of the operas themselves. I don’t feel any kind of requirement or pressure personally to make opera new or contemporary. But I am interested to see what happens when the frame ‘opera’ is applied to a work of mine which comes out of the context of experimental music, performance, contemporary art. Something as simple as a costume or uniform— in the case of Free Exercise, the military-uniformed enlisted musicians and the un-uniformed civilians who carry out the exercises— echoes a whole system of organization and power in a way that might be understood as operatic in the context of the New Opera festival. Perhaps the idealized formal implications of the military band outfitted to resemble and be visible to each other, makes a band of improvisers also more potentially dangerous, pressures them to cohere as a group, or contest each others’ power, or even to struggle to make explicitly tragic music, that marks and stages death, as so much opera does.
– What expectations do you have as a professor in the Winter School of 2024?
-It’s an enormous privilege to meet and converse with young artists. Much of my work over the years has involved engaging with young people— or let’s say, younger than myself— and calling forth evidence, in a way, from their experience that I hope will create some kind of abrasion with mine. Also as an artist and teacher, I am tasked with bringing my own thinking and artistic experience into new articulations that I can communicate to a new cohort, which is always also useful and sometimes enlightening.
– What key elements do you believe are essential to support artists in their creative process?
–Most artists do not have the material support necessary to fully or consistently realize their work. This is true of course at different scales in different economies but it is still almost universally true. So of course, societies that believe in new art must find ways to give money and housing to the artists who in turn report back from the privacy and chaos of the studio. An underrated element of the support for artists is actually time, because making art is generally private and slow and uninteresting when viewed from the outside, and too much of the existing granting apparatuses— as a US American, this means generally private support because the USA does not really have public funding for the arts— requires branding, justifications and business-oriented kinds of entrepreneurship which are ultimately deadly for the art.
With that critique registered, I will also say that where there is a will, there is a way. The ones who want to make their work no matter what and make their life in art, are the unstoppable ones. They don’t care if you support them or not.
About Winter School
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27 June 2024 to 31 July 2024 |
The Winter School, an advanced training and artistic experimentation platform, is opening its registrations for the 2024 edition. Aimed at creators and artists from all disciplines interested in opera as a contemporary genre, those interested can register online through the website www.atlanticx.orgThe edition will feature distinguished professors and artists, including:
Info about the Winter School¿When?The Winter School will take place from September 30 to October 5, 2024. ¿Where?Fundación Williams, Buenos Aires, Argentina ProgramOver the course of a week, there will be courses, masterclasses, and project mentoring, with activities covering previous work critique, educational training, and the development of new collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. Info about Scholarships and Costs
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