Nashville Opera’s One Vote Won (2020) and the Challenge of Engaged Opera Performance

In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.