FAMILY OPERA INC
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Mission Statement
The North Cambridge Family Opera (NCFO) provides an opportunity for children and adults to experience and enjoy telling a story through song by performing original, high-quality, fully-sung operas and choral works for audiences of all ages. Our casts of children and adults come from Cambridge and other communities in the greater Boston area. We encourage participation by multiple family members. Solo and chorus roles varying widely in difficulty are assigned to both children and adults, so that everyone is both challenged and given an opportunity to succeed. To the extent possible, productions are financed through donations and volunteerism. NCFO began as participants in the second North Cambridge (NoCa) All Arts Open Studios weekend in May 1999, and has since incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit and produced a family opera every spring. Since 2007, NCFO has also presented a concert of science songs every year as part of the Cambridge Science Festival.
About This Cause
North Cambridge Family Opera History and Programs Creation of NCFO The North Cambridge Family Opera Company (NCFO) is a non-profit, community- based organization that produces contemporary, high quality operas and science cantatas for audiences of all ages, sung by casts of adults, children and teens from the community. NCFO was founded in 1999 by David Bass, who had composed an opera based on the first Star Wars movie as a way to give his seven-year-old autistic spectrum son an opportunity to develop his considerable vocal abilities. A group of 26 singers from 17 families performed Space Opera as part of the 1999 North Cambridge All Arts Festival Open Studios, with the role of Luke Skywalker played by David's son. David was moved by the positive effect the experience had not only on his son, but also on relationships within and between the participating families, and NCFO was born. Annual Family Opera Each year since the 1999 performance of Space Opera, NCFO has produced an original opera sung by a cast of adults, children and teens for audiences of all ages. The operas are fully staged with professional sets, scenery, choreography, costumes, makeup, lighting, sound engineering, and computer-realized musical accompaniment. The opera accepts everyone (ages seven and up) who would like to perform. Auditions are for casting purposes only. The opera helps inexperienced performers gain poise and confidence as part of a large chorus, with a small solo as well for all those who want one. For more gifted or experienced singers, there are principal solo roles and challenging small, close harmony ensembles. We also provide professional group instruction in voice, drama and dance for all participants, and everyone has the opportunity to work one-on-one with a professional vocal coach. Cast members and their families support the production by volunteering at least eight hours, often more. Many adults and teenagers learn new skills by working on set construction, lighting, costumes, props, makeup, and the administrative aspects of producing an opera. Our 2015 family opera will be Kids Court with libretto by John Kane and music by David Bass. It is a story of reality TV run amok. In this farcical satire, underage plaintiffs and a jury of their (kid) peers beset the beleaguered grownup defendant, while the irrepressible Judge Trudi doles out justice in front of a live studio audience. It is raucous fun for audiences of all ages. Annual Science Cantata In 2006, NCFO was invited by the director of the MIT Museum to perform a “science cantata” as part of the first annual Cambridge Science Festival. The science cantata consists of 20 or so songs about some field of science. Past topics have included Darwin and evolution, astronomy, the science of communication, water, and the range of sizes of things in the universe. Each year since the first Cambridge Science Festival, NCFO has formed an unauditioned multigenerational chorus of people ages 5 to grandparents. For some numbers we are joined by choruses from several of the Cambridge elementary schools. The chorus is directed by a professional conductor at weekly rehearsals, which include discussions of the science that is in the songs, giving kids (and adults) a chance to ask questions and talk about what they know. The songs are in a variety of styles and of varying difficulty. The full chorus focuses on the easier numbers, while a self-selected subset of the chorus stays after rehearsal to work on the more challenging a cappella and close harmony songs. The science cantatas also include a medley of some of the songs written in the public school song-writing workshops described below. The science cantata performances are accompanied by a slide show of art inspired by the music, created by children in the chorus and in the Cambridge Public Schools. The slides also include the song lyrics. This year’s cantata is called A Little Light Music: Songs of Electromagnetic Radiaion, since 2015 is the International Year of Light. We have contacted eight composers who are writing songs about various aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum, including rainbows, lasers, northern lights, parts of the spectrum seen by different animals, and many other topics. Cambridge Public School Song-writing Workshops To further reach out and connect with the community, each spring since 2007 NCFO has commissioned David Haines, a British composer and educator who is interested in and knowledgable about science, to lead song-writing workshops in the Cambridge Public Schools K-5 schools. Mr. Haines has contributed both operas and science songs to the NCFO repertoire. Mr. Haines encourages the students to organize their ideas into lyrics, bringing together content with rhythm and rhyme. He then evokes from the students melodies that must match both the scansion and the mood of the lyrics. The students are immensely proud of their creation, particularly if it is selected to be performed as part of the science cantata (see above). These workshops are extremely popular with both students and teachers. Teachers are often surprised and very pleased with how much students remember about a science topic, even one that they may have covered months before. The students are excited and often surprised to learn that they can actually write lyrics and a melody. The workshops are a wonderful chance to combine science, language arts and music. By approaching science in a different way, many students become excited about it in a way they hadn’t been before. We have appended some of the teachers' comments about these workshops. Special Events Our operas and science songs are written by gifted, prominent composers and lyricists from all over the world, many of whom visit Cambridge to attend the performances. NCFO periodically sponsors ad hoc special events such as lectures, solo performances or meet-the-composer receptions involving these talented visiting artists. This year we anticipate a visit from John Kane, a British writer and actor who wrote the libretto for our family opera, Kids Court. Mr. Kane performed for many years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and wrote hundreds of scripts for BBC Television. We will arrange a public presentation by Mr. Kane, with a reception, so the NCFO performers and audience can get to know this remarkable man better. Accessibility To ensure that anyone who would like to can take part in our family opera or science cantata, we do not charge a fee for participation. Instead, we accept voluntary contributions from participating families, which average around $200 per family for the opera and $100 for the science cantata, although the range of amounts is very wide. We are happy with donations of whatever amounts our participants can comfortably afford. We also do not charge admission to our family opera and science cantata performances, so that financial considerations will not pose a barrier to attendance. We do accept donations at the door for our family operas, which average between $5 and $10 per person (not much different from what our ticket prices would be). In keeping with the spirit of the Cambridge Science Festival, the science cantata performances are entirely free. Opera Commission There are few entirely sung works available that are suitable for casts as large as ours, or suitable for an audience as diverse in ages as ours. In 2012 we contacted numerous composers’ organizations and university composition departments, requesting proposals for a new family opera. Out of more than 60 proposals, we selected one submitted by Paul Phillips, a composer who conducts the Brown University Symphony Orchestra, and Bill Harley, a Grammy-winning story-teller and performer. This team is currently working on the opera and we hope to be able to perform it for the 2016 season. It is a story about people in the Arvin camp for displaced farm workers in California during the depression. It is a coming of age story about a talented young singer who decides to leave the camp and her family to further her vocal talents. It will contain American folk themes in addition to new music. The camp, known as Weedpatch, is a setting that will easily accommodate lots of adults and children. We are eagerly looking forward to receiving the draft of the first act in the near future. Summary and Mission Statement NCFO’s mission is to: • introduce children and adults to opera (telling a story through song with staging) and science cantatas (combining poetry, accurate scientific concepts and song) as both a listening and participatory experience; • promote widespread accessibility to these musical formats by accepting all who want to participate and by keeping performance and participation costs low; • introduce elementary school children to song-writing, which allows them to be creative in a way that is new to most of them; and • bring the work of gifted contemporary composers and librettists to Cambridge and neighboring communities through NCFO performances and special events. In the process of creating a family opera or science cantata production, our performers become a real community. Many friendships are formed as new skills are being learned. Each year, perhaps a quarter of our participants are new to the opera or chorus, and the rest are returning families. This year’s opera cast includes 20 people who have been with the group for eight years or more, some from the beginning in 1999. On the surface, NCFO is about performing new vocal music for adults and children. But more fundamentally, we are a community of families, reaching within ourselves to learn new skills, among ourselves to form new bonds as we strive for common goals, and outward to our city to share what we have found and created.