A professional opera company based in Bloomington-Normal is kicking off several months of programming beginning in April, highlighting Black composers and others who wrote operatic music about the Black experience in America.
MIOpera is among 200 Illinois nonprofits to receive a Healing Illinois grant, as part of a joint effort between the Illinois Department of Human Services and the Field Foundation championing community-led efforts to address racial inequities.
I, Too, Sing America extends from April to June, beginning with a master class and recital on back-to-back days with soprano Carren Moham, professor emeritus of voice at Illinois Wesleyan University. On May 17, baritone Jason McKinney performs as concert vocalist, actor, professional football player and anti-war activist Paul Robeson. In June, the company will produce Beneath Suspicion, a one-act opera about Mary Bowser, a formerly enslaved woman who worked as a Union spy during the Civil War. The program’s second act is a piece blending gospel and African American spirituals with opera in a cantata based on text by Sojourner Truth.
Artistic director Tracy Koch said the series is aimed at dispelling stereotypes about opera.
“The genre has been used by Black people to tell stories—their stories, other stories—throughout time,” she said. “Using this genre as a Black woman expressing stories makes it more accessible to people of color.”
The title, I, Too, Sing America, is from a Langston Hughes poem.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When the company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too am America.
—Langston Hughes
Coming up in the opera world, Koch said she was often the only person of color in the room.
“Sometimes I still am,” she said. “When I went to school—I actually got my music degree at Illinois State University—at the time, Black composers, the music was not a part of the canon of repertoire that students studied.
“You had your Beethoven, your Mozart, your Schumann, Schubert, Puccini, Verdi. But they didn’t have [Harry] Burleigh. Or Florence Price. It wasn’t seen as the standard of music, because it wasn’t European.”
Koch said that's changing.
“I feel very blessed, because I feel like my generation has really seen those changes quicker than past generations,” she said. “There are pieces now of composers of color and stories of color in the repertoire, where if you’d gone back 20 years, you would not have seen that. It would have just been Porgy and Bess.”
But audiences for classical music remain stubbornly old, white and rich, which is perhaps why Healing Illinois was drawn to MIOpera’s proposal.
Koch said the $20,000 grant supporting the series is the largest in MIOpera’s history. Koch and her husband, John Koch, launched the organization in 2011 as a training program for early career opera singers. They developed into a professional company in 2019, producing a mixture of full-length operas and musicals, plus salons scattered throughout the year.
Thank you, Timothée Chalomet
Even as Illinois rewards efforts to diversify the arts and appeal to a wider audience, the Trump administration has retreated, making the arts a prime target for the president’s “anti-woke” agenda. In the wake of all that, actor Timothée Chalamet found himself as the subject of artists’ ire when, in a conversation with Matthew McConaughey, he said “no one cares” about opera and ballet.
“Number one, thank you, Timothée,” Koch said. “Maybe it was a little bit, you know, an off-cuff remark, but it’s kind of true. In the mainstream of the arts, opera and ballet—they do get a little bit of a bad rep because of historical contexts.
“Who got to afford ballet and opera in this country? That was the elite and the rich. And that’s something that opera and ballet are trying to do away with by offering lower price tickets, bringing it to children and educating about the genre, bringing new audiences. Opera and ballet are really trying to bring this artistry to the masses.”
Koch encourages people to find out for themselves if opera is for them.
“Why don’t you come to your own assumption?” she said. “Don’t listen to Timothée Chalamet. Go to MIOpera. Seek it out.”
I, Too, Sing America begins April 10, with various events through June. For details and tickets, visit miopera.squarespace.com.
