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Evan Kassof Discusses the Future of Academia, Professional Opera

Tom Jakob | 8/1/2023

Completing five academic degrees in music ought to leave any person with thoughts and feelings about higher education and the world of professional arts. Evan Kassof, composer, producer, and union organizer, does more than hold a conversation; he is actively carving out solutions to issues of inequity and abuse that have become all too common in the historically “business-as-usual” fields of opera and academia.

Many of the pursuits that Evan dedicates himself to derive chiefly from the exciting and often misunderstood or over-scrutinized world of New Opera. As a founding member of the Philadelphia-based ENAensemble, Evan is all about finding ways to bring something new to the historically-conservative world of opera. That often means breaking down barriers that have plagued both the industry and its audiences for decades.

“I was in my last semester of coursework doing a Ph.D. at Temple and I was taking composition lessons with a professor,” Evan says. “We were just talking about what I wanted to do career-wise and whenever I was like, ‘Well, yeah, I want to be in opera’ he's like, ‘Well, then you need people to know you write opera.’”

ENAensemble began in 2018 as a joint venture between Evan and his two co-founders, Nicole Renna, and Anaïs Naharro-Murphy. On the day that Evan and I spoke over the phone, ENAensemble was celebrating its five-year anniversary. In those five years, ENAensemble has successfully staged a number of shows in a variety of venues across the city of Philadelphia, often in public libraries. ENAensemble’s biggest achievement of late was securing an art and culture grant through The Philadelphia Cultural Fund.

“Putting that grant together was super wild because it’s a pretty sophisticated application,” Evan says.

As Evan puts it, some grant applications are simple while others are less so. And all that work might be wasted if an applicant is not applying as a 501(C) 3 or a fiscally sponsored organization.

“If people are starting their own thing, they [usually] need to be either fiscally sponsored or be a 501(c)(3),” Evan says. “Really it is a form of means testing. They want to see that you've already existed. How you've existed without any money up to that point is not their problem. And I think actually fiscal sponsorships are really cool when you're a young organization that doesn’t have a fully fleshed-out mission statement. You probably shouldn't be committing to a full-on 501(c)(3) status, which requires a real board of directors and a mission statement.”

Despite his expertise, Evan once, and still does sometimes find himself scratching his head at what seems to be an ever-increasing dearth of hard skills being taught in higher education, such as how to layer audio in a DAW or how to properly mic a performer. Whether it’s a music conservatory, a journalism school, or even engineering courses, Evan believes students are being led down paths that force them into a place of dependence on a broken system, which perpetuates a constant cycle of abuse that plays out dualistically in the industry and in higher education.

“Even in engineering school, most people who become civil engineers are working with unions all the time, and they're being taught to beat unions, even though unions do safer, better work on time, under budget,” Evan says.

Evan has considerable experience working with labor unions, which all center around the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association (TUGSA), for which he served as President in his final year of grad school. As such, he believes that the issues facing workers in both artistic academia and professional arts are “almost entirely the same problems, just the scale is different.”

“Priorities in scale rub up against thresholds for individuals,” says Evan. “If [ENA’s] funding amount goes down by 10%, we can’t just pay everybody 10% less because we're going to go under a threshold where they won't do it at all. So, we actually run into this problem where 10% less means that actually we have two fewer people that we can work with, even though maybe we're only working with seven people.”

TUGSA went on strike in January to demand higher pay, better working conditions, health care coverage for dependents, and paid parental leave. More than 750 student teachers and research assistants refused to cross the picket line for 42 consecutive days, eventually winning their demands against the University administration. Evan was a staff organizer, even though he had already graduated and was no longer in the TUGSA bargaining unit. This is because Evan was brought back in 2021 to help draft TUGSA’s new contract with the University, which was eventually adopted after a series of negotiations and the strike that Evan helped lead.

If one considers the high-profile strikes that WGA and SAG-AFTRA members are carrying out at the time of writing, Evan’s words ought to be seen as wildly cogent. The problems of academia workers and industry workers are not at all dissimilar and in fact, might even play into one another to some degree.

“Traditional opera caters to often outdated aesthetics at the expense of new approaches, new subject matter, and new tastes,” Evan stated in an email.

“And in the conservatory world, that hyper-informs the decision-making of administrators and faculty and students,” Evan says.

Thus Evan believes that solidarity between the two seemingly disparate fields of academia and the entertainment industry might not be a wasted effort by any means. Evan encourages academic workers to do the obvious.

“If you can donate to their strike funds, do it. If you can go to a picket line, do it. If someone goes on strike, respect the picket line,” Evan says. But in the longer term, Evan believes academic professionals who are training people to go into unionized creative fields must implement labor history and rights awareness into their curriculum.

“There are real ways in which people are not prepared to join the labor force as a stagehand or as an actor or as a camera operator,” Evan says. “Those could be alleviated in school when there are faculty who are all card-carrying members of these unions who are like, ‘Hey, I'm a card-carrying member of this union. This is what this means, this is how it works.’”

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