The Opera Glasses Podcast

Timothy Myers on Shaping the Opera Experience for Modern Audiences

• Elizabeth Bowman • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Experience a journey into the world of opera with special guest, Timothy Myers, one of America's most innovative conductors. Recently appointed as Music Director at the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, Myers—who also holds the Music Directorship at Austin Opera—lends his unique insights into the changing landscape of opera and its audience in the post-pandemic world.

Join us as we delve into the evolving preferences of opera audiences. In closing, Myers reflects on the importance of fostering an inclusive environment in the arts and making it an affordable and engaging experience for everyone. Get ready to be inspired by this enlightening conversation with Timothy Myers.

All episodes of The Opera Glasses podcast are hosted by Opera Canada Editor-In-Chief, Elizabeth Bowman. Follow Opera Canada on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Visit OperaCanada.ca for all of your Canadian Opera news and reviews.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to season two of the Opera Glasses podcast. Today I have Timothy Myers here, one of America's most versatile conductors. He was just named music director of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and he is also music director at Austin Opera. He was featured in our spring issue in a conversation with me about innovation and opera. He's always got insightful things to say. He has an executive MBA from the Harvard Business School. So let's get to it. Welcome to the Opera Glasses podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Timothy Myers:

Yeah, so glad we finally put this together. I'm excited.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Firstly, I want to congratulate you on the recent news of your music directorship at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. That's really exciting.

Timothy Myers:

Thank you. Yeah, this is very fresh, so we are recording this on Thursday and the first part of the announcement was made on Monday. It was all very new and very exciting.

Elizabeth Bowman:

We were chatting before about it being multidisciplinary and how special that makes this festival.

Timothy Myers:

Yeah, so the Spoleto Festival originated in Italy and so that was the original.

Timothy Myers:

It was founded by Giancarlo Menotti, the composer, and who also happened to be the life partner of Samuel Barber, so the original one was in Italy. And then they were wanting to start one in the US, and so they did many site surveys to visit different communities where they might want to put a North American version of this festival, and they decided on Charleston, and so that started in 1977, again originated by Giancarlo Menotti, and it is, by design, a multidisciplinary festival. So the orchestra, which is the part of which I'm the music director, is a big facet of it and really I think you could say not just a core asset but the most widely deployed throughout the festival, because there are symphonic concerts, there are operas. Parts of the orchestra support other things, like perhaps a ballet company that's coming in to do a run of performances, or even cabaret, or more popular music artists who want to have orchestral backing, and so the orchestra is a very big part of this Spoleto Festival and it's really rewarding to be at the festival. I made my debut there this last spring.

Timothy Myers:

so it runs from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, which is an important holiday in the US through the second week end of June, so it's 17 days and over 100 performances in those 17 days. So encompassing orchestral music, opera. They have an unbelievably formidable chamber music program, a really phenomenal jazz program, choral music, theater, all kinds of dance. It's hard to even encapsulate in conversation all of the disciplines that this festival touches, and not just touches but really does beautifully and manifests in a really wonderful way. So I'm really excited about this appointment and just jumping in with both feet with the incredible team at Spoleto.

Elizabeth Bowman:

I assume it must drive tourism a great deal and really impact the community there.

Timothy Myers:

It does because you have this huge influx. Like with most other festivals, there's this giant economic impact, right, because you have the influx of people who are coming to actually create there. In my case, one unique thing about the Spoleto Festival Orchestra is it's recreated every year via audition, and so these are all young career musicians. So, let's say, maybe just out of undergrad or in grad school or right out of grad school taking auditions, or maybe they're in a finishing program, like the New World Symphony, something like that. And so part of my responsibility is doing a seven city audition tour and then, together with my colleagues, putting together an orchestra of around a hundred who will then come to the festival for X number of weeks to be involved in all of these activities. And so just with the orchestra, obviously that's a lot of people coming into Charleston, which is the peninsula of Charleston is relatively small. And then you have all of these artists who are coming to be in the operas and all of these other acts that are coming. You know, international ballet companies showing up, and so there's this huge influx of people into the Charleston economy before you even get the audience there. And then it's an international festival, so you have local audiences coming, you have regional audiences and then you have people coming from all over the world to visit the festival. So it's a really incredibly exciting environment and the city of Charleston embraces it wholeheartedly.

Timothy Myers:

For me, that's one of the magical things about a festival is there's just this fusion of all of this energy from all of these different areas and it creates this really special environment that people are really there to experience something. It's not like going to just one performance and then going home. I mean, they're there to make the hard decision. Oh my God, there are so many things. We can't possibly attend everything we would want to attend. We've got to make some choices and that's a great problem to have.

Elizabeth Bowman:

It really is, especially in the economic climate. The performing arts right now. I've been looking at the scope of things in North America and what's going on. I mean, obviously the news across. Well, the opera industry in particular has not been very positive. You know, we should talk about opera eliminating full scale opera productions, tulsa opera scaling back significantly, and then opera news we're now coming to the end of their publication run. Obviously, opera UK is taking on some coverage there and that's a really great thing, but nothing will replace it. What about at Austin? I know you've just started as music director there and before you were principal conductor and you were artistic advisor, right, that's right.

Timothy Myers:

There as well. That's right, yes.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Do you have any insights there about how things are going with the post pandemic normal?

Timothy Myers:

Well, what's interesting is we've, like everyone else, noticed that there are some trends. Not everyone sort of rushed back in to fill the vacuum, right, that was created by no audience during COVID, but it's deeper than that. They are really turning out for some things, and so finding where the audience is right now is a particular challenge. And I'll give you a great example. In Austin, our subscriptions have recovered pretty well. We're still getting a lot of people into the audience for the first time. It's just, as I mentioned, figuring out exactly where the connection point is.

Timothy Myers:

So last season we did a production of Sweeney Todd. It was a company premiere, the first time the company had done any Sondheim at all, and all the performances sold out. And so we have these huge houses and it was this terrifically rewarding artistic experience because we had this great cast that was blended between opera singers and artists who lean a little bit more from the Broadway tradition, and it was very, very exciting to have. Of course, all performers want to play to full houses, right, because of the reciprocal energy that you gain and give in doing that. But that was something that we had scheduled not quite knowing right.

Timothy Myers:

Having a hunch, our general director and CEO, annie Burridge said I think this is going to work and I trust the data that I know and my instincts enough to say that I'm going to lead in this direction. And so we went and she was 100% correct in how the audience responded. So I think there's there are things like that. We're also experimenting with different lengths of programming. You know, for example, we're opening this the season with Ipaliachi alone and it's not that this hasn't been done before. I've done it that way before but asking the question what does the audience want? And as far as the format that they're consuming Now we'll do a full length Carmen also in the season. So it's not as though we're shying away from any particular modality or format, but in exploring and really making sure that we're engaging the consumer base in Austin, texas.

Elizabeth Bowman:

A lot of people seem to be investing their time away from their families or with their families or however they experience performing arts. They want to have an all encompassing experience. They want to know every moment sort of counts. Now it's like I want to walk in and start the experience. Whether or not that's the show or not, that's a whole other matter. But I think that it's sort of about concentrated performance, if that makes any sense.

Timothy Myers:

Well, I think it makes a lot of sense and part of it. The first link there to me is that post COVID I mean if we can say that right Now that it's endemic people are a lot more selective about what they do and, from what we can tell at a higher rate, choosing to do nothing, which is an interesting shift in a lot of parts of society. So it is a tricky thing to figure out how to harness this. I know even for myself I'm being a lot more selective about what I do, and that's not just me speaking as a conductor who travels a lot and deciding okay, this engagement that before COVID I would have probably taken without many questions. Now I question greatly before I make a decision of yes or no and in many of those cases I'm saying no.

Timothy Myers:

So that's my kind of professional side of it, but even on my personal side of it, when I am home or when I do have a choice of what to do with some time, of just being more selective about what I do with that time or what I choose to do with that time with my family, and so these are all things that arts organizations are competing with right.

Timothy Myers:

Part of it is that the quote unquote entertainment space is crowded, and we can talk later, if you want, about my thoughts about opera and entertainment. But it's not just that the entertainment space is crowded, it's that sometimes people are just. You know, I didn't mind not having all of these obligations for a while during the pandemic and in fact I kind of started to enjoy spending more time doing X, y or Z, or more time quietly just relaxing and doing nothing, etc. And so the value proposition of getting people out of their house first of all, then to a commute, then into a theater, that's really complex now, and I believe it's more complex than it was before COVID, which is why in some areas we're seeing audiences rebound really well and in a lot of areas we're not.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Yeah, and then, obviously, we're seeing some cut to funding to a lot of institutions, which is resulting in some of these seasons not running in full capacity. What are your thoughts on opera and concert? Do you think that it takes away from the art form or are you pro opera and concert? What are your feelings about it?

Timothy Myers:

I'm very, very pro and I have been for a long time and let me just give you a little bit of background on this. So before Austin and Spletta and all of that, I was for almost 10 years involved at North Carolina Opera, which is in Raleigh, north Carolina, in what we call the Triangle Area Raleigh, durham and Chapel Hill and I actually still live in Raleigh. So I was involved there and had a similar trajectory of starting off as principal conductor and artistic advisor and then moving into music director and then artistic and music director was my last title there. But when I programmed the first season I did there where I actually had kind of the programming authority to do the whole thing.

Timothy Myers:

A semi-staged piece was part of the mix from the very beginning. There were a couple reasons for that, driven in that case by space and economics. The one space being is that none of the venues in that city had an orchestra pit that could seat more than, let's say, 45 musicians. That limits what you can do. Of course that's a pretty full Mozart orchestra or a reduced orchestra for something else. So we wanted some sort of outlet where, if there were bigger repertoire pieces that we wanted to do that we could really use the full orchestra and that ended up expanding into doing full Doss, ryan Gold and etc. Etc. But the other was an artistic reason tied with an economic one, in that we were a small company and since that there was an opportunity there to quote unquote punch above our weight.

Timothy Myers:

One of the hard things about getting top artists is they're in demand right and they're also making these decisions that everyone else is making about. Is that opportunity worth my time and being away from home and etc. Etc. And so it was an exploration into how can a smaller company secure artists that would normally be far beyond the resources right that we would be able to put towards casting and excite our audiences with that. And so the first season that I programmed we had a Faust and Christian Van Horn sang Mephistopheles, dimitri Pitas sang the title role, mary Dunleavy sang Marguerite, irene Roberts sang Siabelle. I mean, it was this cast that I looked back at and I'm like wow, we were a million dollar company and had those artists in and they sang the hell out of it. And those are a couple reasons that I started focusing that way early on Things that came from that, as we continued that trend throughout my time there, and I guess I should qualify the semi-stage thing. When we say semi-staged, that pretty much means fully staged, just without a giant set, right.

Timothy Myers:

And so we would often have costumes and props. We did do some titles, just strictly in concert. It was very interesting to see how the audience became very attached to that format and there were a few reasons. Number one, because we were focusing on doing titles that didn't necessarily need gigantic sets to tell the story right. Torovatore is a great example. All of the action happens offstage and people come onstage to sing about what happened or what they want to happen. So you don't necessarily need these monolithic, ginormous walls behind the singers to tell that story. If you give them other elements of storytelling and light it evocatively, etc. Etc. You can be very, very effective in that presentation.

Timothy Myers:

And the audience really became attached to it because they got used to having really high-level singers. What we didn't anticipate in the beginning of this initiative is that the audience got really attached to seeing the orchestra onstage and hearing them more directly, because then they saw the kinetic energy that was actually happening inside the orchestra and then in relationship to the singers and the conductor, etc. Etc, and the fact that the sound was really direct, along with the sound of the singers. So instead of coming up from a hole and then sort of having to blend and then come into the hall, that there was an immediacy to it that the audience found really exciting, and so I became very, very fond of doing operas that way and, like I said, you choose the repertoire wisely. It's something that we've done a little bit of in Austin and are exploring doing more of, because, again, we've had the same positive reaction to it. I think it can be very, very effective to do repertoire that way.

Elizabeth Bowman:

I was just in Banff this summer and Joel Ivany directed Don Giovanni there for the opera in the 21st century program. I just thought it was fantastic. I've obviously seen a lot of opera and concert in my time and usually pre-pandemic. It was reserved for pieces that were either considered large or ambitious to stage, or very rare works, works that hadn't had enough precedent to be staged. So there are a lot more question marks around staging it. So doing it in concert made sense. It seems to me that opera having some opera is better than having no opera. So in the cases like my hometown of Ottawa where the opera company folded and then the National Arts Center Orchestra didn't do too much opera after that, they partnered on this Banff program. So they had the opera and concert in Ottawa before they went to Banff and it was just a beautiful thing to hear that Ottawa was having this sort of world-class opera again.

Elizabeth Bowman:

And I hope that they continue to program that way, start filling the halls, start getting people addicted to opera, and I mean it can only lead to more. But I think it's a great format to continue the tradition and keep the energy alive and it doesn't affect artistic integrity in a negative way. Right.

Timothy Myers:

It doesn't have to. No, not at all.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Do you find that post pandemic people are more interested in new opera, like new productions, new music, this kind of thing. I'm not sure if it's so a real thing or if it's just in my head, but I feel like there's more engagement with new stuff now that we are in this new state of mind or we've shocked ourselves into reality in some way.

Timothy Myers:

Right. Well, that's an interesting way to think about it, right Is, how has our reality shifted? And then, therefore, how and what we consume has shifted. Well, if you look at the Metropolitan Opera, for example, and the response they had to some of these contemporary pieces, and then their response to saying, okay, we're listening, we're paying attention and we're going to react, and for a company that large, that's an admirable tact to take, because that requires a whole lot of work, because, as far out as they are planned and all of the different cogs in that machine that have to move at the right time I mean, you know, you see the inside of that organization all the time because of Ben so for them to actually make that kind of programming shift that quickly, that takes a lot of doing. So you can tell that it's not some sort of erstwhile attempt to do something or well, let's push on this button and see if it works a little bit. I mean, they really made a strategic shift here and I think in other ways some similar things are happening.

Timothy Myers:

Right now I'm sitting in Atlanta, georgia, where I'm conducting Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell's the Shining, and it's a co-production between a very prolific theater here called the Alliance Theater and the Atlanta Opera. So of course my association with Atlanta Opera is long, and so that's how I came to the project. It's being performed at the Alliance Theater, which is a smaller theater, somewhere between six and 700 seats, and tomorrow night we open and have our first of 11 performances, almost all of which are completely sold out, and for our last two dress rehearsals we had pretty full houses too. So I think there is an appetite for stories that might feel like they have a bit more of a direct correlation to people's lives currently Not that BOEM is less magical, because it's not, and I don't think that people have a harder time getting into that but there has definitely been a push, sort of through COVID and as everyone started to actually have time to grasp and consider a lot of societal issues, that there is a presence of mind for things that tell stories to which we can very recently relate.

Timothy Myers:

Now I don't think that takes the power away from legacy repertoire right, because that's one of the great things is all of these pieces the Marriage of Figaro? If you learn one thing from the Marriage of Figaro is that the human condition is exactly the same now as it was 250 years ago, and so the enduring part of our art form is based on the human condition, and so I think people still have access to these other pieces and to enjoying them, to understanding the personal stories that are being told in these pieces, or just the complete fantasy land where they can go for a little while. But there does seem to be an interest in things that are a little bit more here and now.

Elizabeth Bowman:

Yeah, it used to be that new productions were very hard to sell. Now I think it's due to people being hungry for connection and because, like you say, people are interested in current events, current stories, current issues being spoken or sung.

Timothy Myers:

Do you think that some of it also has to do with the shifting landscape of ticket buyers and audience demographics?

Elizabeth Bowman:

Yeah, I really have no idea. I'm just asking, I'm just curious. I mean, like everything in our industry right now, it's ever shifting and people are constantly asking. We're all asking each other the same questions Like how do we go forward, how do we attain success, how do we fill up these halls? And I keep hearing about new productions being full, and I don't necessarily hear that about traditional productions, and I love traditional productions, I'm all for traditional productions and I'm also all for new music too.

Timothy Myers:

But coming from an awkward background.

Elizabeth Bowman:

of course, I'm all for everything, Thank you.

Timothy Myers:

Let's look at this. I remember a good friend and colleague who has done a lot of contemporary music and he and I were having a discussion many years ago now and he was. He and his wife were operating this new music collective and doing some super interesting programming and I was doing some playing and performing with them, and I remember him talking about how there's often been this paradigm in classical music where people come well, we're going to start them easy, super approachable, so that means that they get Bach and Mozart and then eventually they'll understand more complex things and then you know Tchaikovsky and then maybe even one day they're going to understand Mahler, and that that's a very antiquated idea because it doesn't A, it's not really proven to be true. That might be the way that you're kind of taught in music If you go to music school or you're you're taking music seriously as a practice. But even then I would argue that that's really really somewhat outdated now. But his point was that a lot of people will come to the music from the reverse perspective, right, so that they might come because they can hear something. You know, a modern, let's say Sarah Kirkland Snyder Okay, great example right Of this, of writing this really engaging, dramatic music that has a real voice to it, that's beautifully orchestrated, the themes are really well thought out and the way she creates architecture around them.

Timothy Myers:

All of these rights are very, very skilled composer, and that you know someone who was. You know, listening repertoire tends to be beyond the classical canon or the traditional classical canon will likely come to that much more quickly than they will relate to Bach or Mozart, right, and so I think we have to be willing to recognize that there's a shift in how we are reaching consumers and how they are coming to us, and I know that a lot of people in the industry do not like when I start saying things like talking about somebody as a consumer, but that's what they are. And you know, to your point of declining audiences, and my counterpoint of shifting audiences is that the Mets making this strategic shift, subscriptions are continuing to go down, which is an interesting thing that we could also talk about, because subscriptions in the rest of every, in every other area of life, are going up. Hmm, right, dramatically right, the things that we are tied to in our everyday lives that are subscriptions. I mean, it's trillions of dollars of all credit card charges annually.

Timothy Myers:

Aubrey Bergauer has some good data on this, if people want to look it up and so. But then in the arts they're declining. So why is that Right?

Elizabeth Bowman:

people want to be more spontaneous.

Timothy Myers:

Right, that's one of the reasons.

Timothy Myers:

Okay, so that tells you right there that there's a shift in consumer behavior and that's a dramatic shift. So, instead of someone saying you know, I'm committed to this organization enough that I'm going to give them money in advance a year in advance, right, or even at least months in advance to have seats and I trust enough that their programming is going to make me want to still turn up every Friday night at 7 30 pm and sit in the exact same seats in the hall, there are not as many people who are interested in doing that. Clearly, right, that's the sort of cult of optionality, right, that this, especially the younger generations, live in of wanting to have options and wanting to have those options up until relatively late in how they manage their time. So we're seeing all of these things shift and to me, the met making this choice is interesting because they're tracking it. They're saying, well, that might not have been the cup of tea of subscribers a decade ago, but that's where we're ruling the single ticket game now. So they're responding to the consumer.

Elizabeth Bowman:

So how do we incentivize subscription, right? I mean, obviously they give people discounts if they pick four shows, and that's been the model for ages and ages and never changed. It's sort of. Now I think we need to incorporate VIP parties or something along those lines, where you get a ticket to this subscription and you also get this experience that goes along with it. I know the men, they have the young professionals and I think that program does pretty well because they have a reception that's included and they all get to meet each other and then they go to the opera. So that's an experience and that's obviously. I mean I don't have the numbers, but from when I'm gather it's quite a successful program.

Timothy Myers:

Well, and I think you highlight something important there, lizzie, and that is that there are different things that people want out of the experience. I mean, if I put my Harvard Business School hat on for a second, a main theory in innovation, and especially disruptive innovation at HBS, is this idea of jobs to be done. So people are constantly hiring and firing products. Right, like I'm holding on my iPhone I mean this is something that I've hired because it is I can do almost all of the work that I need to do on it. It fits in my pocket, it can tell me directions on where to go, I can call and FaceTime my family and my kids on it. It's become my primary camera. My very, very nice Sony camera sits in a bag on the shelf 98% of the year now. Right, so I mean I hired all to do all of these things. It's my primary music player, etc. I could also fire it, right. So, and there are times when people do that and they say I don't want to be that attached, right, I don't want to be that connected, etc. And so the idea is that in our lives we're constantly hiring and firing products based on what our desires are, or really, let me say that more specifically, based on what problems we're trying to solve for an iPhone, you're sort of, you're solving for a bunch of problems, and that's why it's so ubiquitous now, because it solves a lot of different things. Right, there are a bunch of different things that are now in this one device, so that's obviously then understanding.

Timothy Myers:

The rise of smartphones is not shocking at all. You know, there are other things, for example, where someone might let's say they might fire religion and hire CrossFit, because they get a lot of the same. You get self-actualization, you get a community, you're feeling better about yourself, you probably have some long term vision, etc. Etc. Just maybe without some sort of religious figure, or maybe there is, and it's just a more secular figure, right? All that to say, people are constantly the hiring and firing things in their lives, and so there's interesting data to back up the assertion and this is interesting data from the advisory board for the arts, which is a thing that we're a part of in Austin and asking the question why do you come to the opera? I think there's been this line of thinking for a long time, that everybody who comes just wants to come to see a great opera performance, but that's actually not the case at all. It is a majority it is over 50% who say that on their survey. Now, for me, I would take that, whatever that number is, and kind of put it in a subset and evaluate those data independently to kind of drill down on that. But there are all of these other reasons why people show up and it's I want to do something new. This seems like something important in the community. I want to impress a date, I want to be around other people of like mind, so in the list is actually quite lengthy and those are just the sort of options that these people were given in the survey. So there's a host of other reasons why people become involved and I think you hit on one of them and we're talking about the Met. What is it under 40 program? That there's a reception, there's community, there's networking involved. When you're in that kind of community, this is a thing to do right and people can find, like I mentioned earlier, people of like mind or similar age, and you're going after similar things in life. That's a lot of cross referencing to get someone to do something. And I think pinning down some of these other reasons to get people in the door is really significant, and not expecting that they will become a traditional subscriber, but figuring out how do we help them solve a friction point in their life right?

Timothy Myers:

Our art form is over 400 years old and has had many evolutions of how people engage with it. Only until relatively recently in the lifespan of that art form has it been that you come into a theater, it gets dark, you shut up, you don't move from your seat, you don't applaud unless you're supposed to applaud somewhere but magically know that you know and etc. I mean this is ridiculous. I mean everybody knows that. I mean in the 19th century you did business at the opera. You draw that drape around your box and your dinner business, other things. Who knows right? So you know. And then it wasn't until later in that century.

Timothy Myers:

You know, wagner was like I really want people to be immersed in the Gesamtstkunstwerk of this right, and so I and he got a very wealthy patron, by the way, to you know, build him a theater where you couldn't see the orchestra and it was dark and the seats were not very comfortable and but people stayed put and, you know, didn't have all of these luxuries, etc. Etc. So that people focused on the drama or list, like turning the piano, so it was actually profile to the audience and have. So all of these things we, that we now pretend have been the way it always was are often relatively new inventions and things that now we say this is how it's done.

Timothy Myers:

And to me that's the most constraining factor to what we do. Right, the quickest way to remove a sense of belonging is to create an environment where people feel like they don't know what to do or what is proper, because there's there are very few people who want to go into that environment, feel that way and then return. Yeah, so how do we create this kind of thing? And yeah, I think some of it is like a reception or how do you have a giant party, for you know, it's really affordable for everyone involved and people have been trying, people have been working on this for a long time, right, yeah, but it's tricky because consumer behavior keeps evolving very quickly, that just gaining attention at any level is increasingly challenging. And then, like you say, then when you get them there, how do you give them this feeling of belonging and inclusion at some level, whether that's on the heart or head or soul level, wherever it is that pulls them to return?

Elizabeth Bowman:

Yeah, well, that's our challenge.

Timothy Myers:

It is. Well. That's why I keep pushing back on these things and sort of a lot of the resistance that's in our industry to look at case studies from for-profit industry and say, well, we couldn't draw parallels to that because that's a major business or a major or a popular artist and that's a different thing. But that doesn't mean that there are no correlations. That doesn't mean that there are no lessons to be learned right, that's true, yeah.

Timothy Myers:

Because there are plenty of these companies and, let's say, professional sports brands who were at the lowest ratings of ever and then, over a period of a decade, have all of a sudden become. I mean, the national football league is a great example, and now their last streaming deal was worth over a billion dollars, so I mean that's a great example. And then the decline of baseball in society. So there are lots of examples that we have in contemporary society that we in the arts can look to. And that doesn't mean that there are all direct correlations. It doesn't mean that they're one to one or A to A, but there are lessons to be learned about how other entities are achieving distinction among people who have resources. Right, they're just being choosy about where to invest them, and that's the challenge of figuring out that little piece right there. And my suggestion is that we look further afield from where we are and say, OK, what can be learned from these other areas? Right, what can we take? And maybe it's like we want to do the opposite, right?

Timothy Myers:

I think, when everybody keeps talking about branding opera as entertainment, in my personal opinion, that's the exact wrong thing to do. I think the strongest strategic move we could make right now is to brand opera as the antidote to modern entertainment. We are the one chance you can have where you get to come to a special place, you get to turn off that device and put it in your pocket and have a communal experience with people in an acoustic environment, in a live performance, where there are performers in front of you taking great risk to perform for you at a world-class level. This is where you get it. This is where you get to disconnect from that screen for 2 and 1 half hour, three hours of your night right.

Timothy Myers:

To me, that's the selling point. We can't compete in the entertainment space. The major streaming platforms can't even compete with themselves in the entertainment space. They're all putting tens of billions of dollars a year into content and they can find no competitive distinction. They're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, and by spaghetti I mean billions of dollars, right? So how do we say OK, clearly we can't even register in that. You could put all of the money put towards opera in a year in America and we wouldn't even be able to put a dent in getting noticed in that space.

Timothy Myers:

So I'm looking at how do we go after the untapped part of it. How do we say here's where we're singular, here's what we offer that you can get nowhere else in town, and that's why you should come check it?

Elizabeth Bowman:

out. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really great to hear your perspective. Always great to chat with you.

Timothy Myers:

Thanks for having me, Lizzie.