Opera Outside the Box
By MJ Manning
USC Thornton Composition alumnus Ben Beckman is changing what opera can look like for a modern audience.
Growing up in a musical family, Ben Beckman (MM ‘26) was always encouraged to explore his interests. From piano to French horn to composition and even conducting, he’s never been the kind to fit the mold. Within the opera community, he has sought to breathe life back into the form by reminding audiences of the power of human connection.
“The opera world can be very hierarchical and very rigid,” said Beckman. “We really desired to reclaim an artistic agency that we felt we had lost since being out of school, so we started Park City Opera.”
When Beckman was in high school, he attended the prestigious LA Phil Composer Fellowship Program taught by Pulitzer Prize finalist, Grammy Award-winning composer, and USC Thornton faculty member Andrew Norman. It was there that he got his first taste of what Thornton could offer him in the future, and his first formal training in composition. The piece he developed, “Freeway Observations” (2019) would later go on to be performed by Thornton Edge, an award-winning ensemble led by Donald Crockett, professor and chair of the USC Thornton composition department.
“I really struggled to write that piece when I was in high school,” Beckman added. “It was my first real experience where I had a piece performed, and it was a huge growth experience for me as a young composer.”
Following his fellowship with the LA Phil, Beckman would go on to study at Yale College, pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in Music.
While at Yale, Beckman conducted the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra, winning the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize for promising young composers, the Joseph Selden Memorial Award for notable contributions to the field of music, the Beekman Cannon Friends of Music Prize for most outstanding senior thesis in the music major, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for particularly gifted young musicians.
“I think the way my diverse skill set played into these was simply that I was eligible for awards in many categories — be it performance, composition or academics,” said Beckman.
Beckman pursuing music, both as an artist and a scholar, naturally led him to become the multi-hyphenate he is today. His creative and academic mind led him to create this expansive work, and be a perfect fit for a such program offered at Thornton.
Following his graduation, Beckman worked at numerous different Opera companies including the Pacific Opera Project, the Opera Company of Middlebury Vermont, and the Sarasota Opera — a major regional opera company in the U.S.
“I went to work for Sarasota Opera as their apprentice on the music staff,” said Beckman. “They threw me into the opera world and I fell in love with it. It was while I was in Sarasota that we founded Park City Opera.”
Park City Opera is a 501(c)(3)-certified nonprofit founded in 2024 in Park City, Utah as a joint venture between Beckman, who serves as the Artistic Director, Lena Goldstein the Executive Director, and Development Director Lisl Wangermann, whom he met during his time at Yale. After graduation, they were all looking for that sense of artistic freedom they had in college, but had since struggled to recapture.
Opening Park City Opera, the three sought to bring an audience-centered focus to opera, working to breathe a new life into the art form by reimagining what opera can look like through experimental staging and unconventional venues focused on building community in Park City in an accessible way.
“It’s been really important to us to establish Park City Opera as a local organization – for the community, inspired by the community,” said Beckman. “Our very first summer, no one knew who we were. We called it our preview summer. We just did concerts for free to raise awareness. We fundraised so that in our second summer, we could put on a full opera production, The Barber of Seville, in August. Then we did a holiday opera in December, David Conte’s The Gift of the Magi.”One of the founding pillars of Park City Opera is community engagement. Prior to the opening of The Barber of Seville, Beckman held a free public seminar on the history of opera in Utah.
“For some people, accessibility is about programming music that’s easy to listen to or programming music that people know, but that’s not really accessibility,” said Beckman. “Accessibility is about not undercutting your audience, programming difficult music when you need to program difficult music, but giving everyone the tools to engage with it.”
For the team at Park City Opera, this means giving audiences an education that they can connect to. “People who come in with an education and knowledge of the form have many more tools to engage with the art form,” said Beckman.
Education remains at the forefront of Beckman’s work. Even as he worked to co-found Park City Opera, he continued his own studies, completing a Masters of Music in Composition at USC Thornton School of Music.
“I’ve always been interested in composition, and when I did the LA Philharmonic program in high school with Andrew Norman, he was a huge draw applying to USC,” said Beckman. “I loved working with him as a teacher and we kept in touch when I was in college. That was a huge pull to be back in Los Angeles.”
Years later, Beckman is now part of the same group that gave him his start in composing: Thornton Edge.
“I was offered this teaching assistantship to manage Thornton Edge, the contemporary music ensemble,” said Beckman. “The financial support combined with the ability to work with this ensemble is amazing. And to work with Donald Crockett on top of that, is a real gift.”
For Beckman though, the connection to Thornton Edge is rather personal.
“There was a woman who ran the LA Philharmonic Program for the three years that I was a part of it, named Sarah Gibson,” said Beckman. “She was my composition teacher and an extremely talented pianist. She was also an alum of the USC Composition Department and held the Thornton Edge teaching assistantship when she was here and she passed away. I’m kind of trying to do Sarah proud, in a way.”
At Thornton, Ben has been able to further his compositional studies under the tutelage of Andrew Norman once again, as well as accompanying the USC Thornton Opera in their mainstage productions. His class schedule includes opera coaching with Thornton Opera Music Director Brent McMunn and conducting classes with Larry Livingston, Head of Conducting and former dean of Thornton.
“When I applied to grad school, I thought I needed to stop doing all these other things and focus on spending two years composing,” said Beckman. “And then I got into USC and they said, ‘No, we took you because we want you to pursue piano and all of these other interests. It was the happiest accident of all, because here I am, excited about embarking on these huge projects.”
Splitting his time between Park City and Los Angeles, Beckman is gearing up for Park City Opera’s third summer season, where they will feature performances of Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land, as well as a full-scale production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. In tandem with the founding and expansion of his company, Ben continued to further his education at USC Thornton, additionally pursuing coursework in Conducting to pair with his Masters of Music in Composition.
“I’m someone who has had very diverse musical interests in training within classical music,” said Beckman. “A lot of the time, people say ‘Pick a lane!’ or ‘Focus on something.’ I’m at a point in my career where I’m feeling that pressure immensely. But then there are some people who encourage me to be the artist that I want to be and explore. At USC everyone is so supportive of the things that everyone else is doing, that environment has been really special to be a part of over the past two years.”
In an institution such as the Thornton School of Music, students are encouraged to constantly push their creativity and to chase their passions. With world-class faculty, resources, and facilities, students at Thornton have the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of music education, performance, production and business, always pushing the medium forward.
