Why it's not just about opera ...

It’s World Opera Day!

As a relative newcomer to opera, I have been wondering how to help people find their way to this incredible art form. Today seemed like a good day to start.

But then I remembered it’s about more than opera - as amazing as opera is. It’s about any engagement with the arts, in any form.

At the risk of oversimplifying, people's experiences with the arts exist on a spectrum. On one end are the arts as entertainment, perhaps a welcome escape from reality. On the other end are the arts as critical commentary on important social issues.

Both are important. But what may be more important is that we engage with the arts at all.

Many careers ago, I wrote a PhD thesis on the nature of aesthetic experience. The conclusions I came to in 1999 still resonate with me today.

According to scholar Peter Abbs, the arts, no matter what their form, allow us to access a different kind of intelligence, one that works not through logic and rational thought (concepts) but through perceptions, emotions, and sensory experience (percepts).

I believe the ability to engage with the world through both concepts and percepts, reason and emotion, might just hold the key to a more positive, peaceful future. Whether we walk through the world as leaders, parents, partners, citizens, or colleagues, our ability to engage in multiple ways, through multiple intelligences, has the potential to broaden our range of both intellectual and empathetic response. This can only be a good thing.

Lofty, academic stuff.?But hold on … here it is again, this time expressed through the wise words of one of Karen Gallas’ grade 1 students in her book The Languages of Learning:

“A poem is a little short, and it tells you some things in a funny way. But a science book, it tells you things like on the news … but in a poem, it’s more … the poem teaches you but not just with words”.

From the mouths of babes.

Today, on World Opera Day, consider tapping into your multiple intelligences and engaging with the arts, in any form.

And if you’re in Edmonton, and intrigued by this thing called opera, consider learning more about it (here’s one helpful link) and attend one of the amazing shows being offered by Edmonton Opera this season, including Puccini’s soaring and beautiful Tosca!?