McLuhan, for all the densities and sometimes wild assertions scattered among his acute and prescient perceptions, proposed the arts as points of humanizing resistance against the burgeoning electronic environment. And surely it must be opera’s mission now to defend its natural state, its wholeness, to insist on itself not as an extension of Man, but as Man; not as secondary orality, but primary; not in the context of no context, but in context; not as liquid, but solid; not as derivative, but as the thing to be derived from. Good luck and Godspeed to us with that.

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NEXT TIME: I will be perusing the announcements of the 2021-22 season in New York, in  hopes of finding a work/production/cast combination that might merit a Here-and-Now forecast. The ETA is Friday, July 9.

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