On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I was listening to Q the other day whilst doing the work at the day-job, and they had host Tom Power interviewing this big-name opera singer, Michael Fabiano. As they do. I'd strongly recommend listening to the interview, whether you care about opera one way or the other.

One of the things Mr. Fabiano mentioned in passing was how a lot of people in the audience got up to all manner of hijinks back in the 19th century, up to and including "fornicating". Naturally, this got me thinking of opera as being the 19th Century equivalent of the drive-in movie theatres of the 20th. Because some things - like human behaviours - only change venues over the centuries.

Which led to me thinking of some of the stuff diane_duane included as a sidebar plot in her Star Trek novel Dark Mirror, involving Will Riker and wo'rIv puqloD mogh (AKA Worf, son of Mogh) exploring violence in opera...up to and including riots that occasionally brought down governments.

And then Mr. Fabiano also went on to invoke Hans Zimmer in passing as part of a way of linking certain genres modern cinema to their operatic forbears. Not a bad choice. I'd add John Williams - the composer, not my father - and Bear McCreary...particularly the latter's work on Battlestar Galactica. Orchestrations that threw in everything from taiko drums to bagpipes, sometimes in the same anthem, and made them work together. Both in support of the drama on the screen and as stand-alone music.

And I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this.