Today we’d like to introduce you to Ned Canty.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up outside of New York City, a chubby nerd who discovered that afterschool theater was a pretty decent place to meet girls. I spent most of college and a few years afterward training to be an actor, even making a living at it for a brief time before realizing I didn’t have the single-minded drive needed to overcome the uncertainty and humiliation of that lifestyle.
I made a lateral move into directing theater which led me to a year as an assistant director to a man who directed both theater and opera. He invited me to assist him the following summer on an opera. I told him I didn’t read music or speak Italian, and the only opera I had ever seen didn’t really engage me, so I thought I was a bad candidate.
He disagreed and having no other work lined up and many credit cards to pay down, I eventually broke down, thinking I would spend a summer as a tourist in opera land. It would be an adventure, at least. I never would have guessed I would fall deeply in love with the art, but reader, I did. Over the next several years I did less theater and more opera until I was focused exclusively on opera.
At a certain point in my freelance career, I found that I was getting less and less satisfaction from the “Art for Art’s Sake” approach to opera that most companies embraced then (and many still do). When a colleague suggested I apply for a job running a small music festival, I was taken aback, but I found over time that leading an arts organization made more and more sense to me.
I didn’t want to be someone who just critiques from the sidelines. I thought that I had something to offer the field, and began applying for General Director positions. In 2011, I moved to Memphis to take on the job of General Director, and I’ve never looked back.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
On a practical level, there were many bumps, most of them stemming from my not being a trained musician, but all of those things are as many strengths as weaknesses. I can’t explain the musicology of Mozart, but neither can most folks in an audience, which allows me to tailor the experience for them rather than critics or colleagues.
Similarly, there were and are financial struggles to running any arts organization, the pandemic being just one of the more forceful gut-punches of recent memory. But the fact remains that even pre-pandemic, audience behavior was changing rapidly, and we had to use all our ingenuity and will to innovate our way around them. Covid just brought things ahead.
Most challenging of all is the fact that I am a white male running a legacy arts organization in a majority Black city. As a child of Sesame Street, the 1970s, and a liberal NY upbringing, I did not show up in Memphis with the full toolbox I needed to meet the task. Thankfully many generous and patient colleagues in town helped me ask hard questions and begin a process of defining what I can and must do to move our company and art form forward. As the leader of a historically well-resourced organization that has served a majority white audience for many years, it is vital to engage in what might be called “artistic reparations”.
What can we do to build a more equitable arts ecosystem? How can we reallocate or repurpose some of the resources we take for granted to help organizations striving to serve communities we have failed in past decades? How can we ensure that everything we do is intentional in its goal of making Memphis a more human, joyous, and empathic place for every citizen? These struggles are not the ones I was hired to take on or the ones I thought I would find, but they are by far the most important ones I have ever engaged in.
The future of opera in America will be a function of how companies our size in “flyover states” can find ways to use the tools of opera for positive change. If we succeed, we create something new and vital. If we fail, we become a niche pleasure for coastal elites.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a director, I am known mainly for comedies. Making audiences laugh is my favorite thing in the world, and I don’t suck at it. I know many folks don’t think of opera as a funny art form, but Bugs Bunny begs to differ.
As a general director I am proudest of, and best known for, “30 Days of Opera”, our annual program that brings a month of free, daily performances into every zip code in Memphis. In its tenth year, the program has reached almost half a million Memphians and has been replicated in other cities across the nation.
If there is anything that sets me apart from some of my colleagues, it is the perspective that comes from opera being my second love. I spent my formative years wanting first to be a stuntman and then the American Kenneth Branagh, but I gave up those dreams. As I tell lots of young singers, from the perspective of where I was at their age, I am a failure. The thing I wanted then I gave up on. And thank God, because the last thing the world needs is another pretty-good actor.
My second love, opera, is massively satisfying, but I don’t put it on a pedestal. I don’t believe it has an inherent right to exist. I believe it needs to prove its worth by turning the opera house inside out and returning opera to its proper place as an art form for anyone with ears and a heart, not just a social signifier or elite temple of artistry.
What matters most to you? Why?
The only legacy I will have in this world is leaving it slightly better than I found it. I believe at a core level of faith that music and storytelling are the keys to creating empathy, the scarcest social resource of the age.
What matters to me is going to my grave knowing I did everything I could to fight the forces of division, the ranting faces on cable telling us all how different we are. Creating experiences that remind us all we are 99.7% the same is what I choose to fight for every day.
I’m not sure I could answer the question, “why”. What other choices are there? Making the world worse? Profiting myself and my family at the expense of my soul? Some truths are self-evident, or so I hear.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@operamemphis.org
- Website: operamemphis.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/operamemphis/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/operamemphis/
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/operamemphis/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OperaMemphisOfficial
Image Credits
Ziggy Tucker and Opera Memphis
