Music Blog: Blog Post 7: Dallas Opera

I decided to change my topic for the music ethnography towards somewhere that had more live music so I can fulfill that requirement of the assignment. The music culture that I'm now studying is the Opera culture in the Dallas area. Opera is simply a drama play where the libretto, script of an opera, is mostly sung. There's usually instrumental aspects to operas ranging from a small ensemble to a full orchestra. Opera is usually performed in Opera houses which are theaters that have a stage, seating and an orchestra pit. Fans of opera usually go to live performances but lately the trend of streaming opera to theaters has grown.

The event I have been to was a live broadcast at my local AMC Theaters. I watched a NCM Fathom presentation of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra performed at the The Metropolitan Opera.

Since I am a technologist, I plan to focus on how the technology has drastically changed the music culture. I have a couple quick bullet-points for this aspect:

Less social event.
Smaller audience per movie theater.
Nationwide participation.
More convenient.
Able to have different types of content (Interviews, commercials, etc.) before the show.
Non-live experience. There's nothing like actually "being there."

Below is the Google trend graph for the keywords Dallas opera. I was looking to see if there's a downward or upward trend but it seems to be cyclical. I then queried the keyword opera to see if there was a trend with opera in general and it seems that it's mostly unchanging but the news results are steadily rising over the years.