Opening Ears, Opening Doors

Two Butler School of Music faculty members partner with Austin Opera and Austin Public Libraries to bring opera to kids in summer program

by Alicia Dietrich

Assistant Professor of Voice Liliana Guerrero didn’t grow up in a household of opera-goers, and in fact, she didn’t have her first exposure until she was in high school, even though she played flute in marching band and was thinking about a career in music as a band director.

“But then I found out about opera,” Guerrero said. “I got really into voice lessons, and that completely changed everything that I was going to do.”

She’s often wondered how her pathway might have been different if she’d known about opera earlier. What other opportunities might have come her way if she’d had more access to opera as a kid?

Musicology Professor Charles Carson also stumbled across opera by accident in elementary school when an outreach group came to his school and performed opera excerpts.

“The next day, they put us on a bus and took us to Houston Grand Opera, and from that moment in third grade on, I’ve thought opera is the best thing,” Carson said. “I think about how if there’s one kid out there like me — if I can pay it forward to this one kid, then I’ve done my duty.”

Guerrero joined the Butler School of Music faculty in 2023 and partnered with her colleague Carson during her first year to create a youth engagement program to bring opera to children in Austin. While they first talked about a weeklong summer camp, they quickly realized the logistics of feeding children and managing liabilities of a summer camp were beyond their resources. So, they pivoted to partner with Austin Opera and Austin Public Libraries to propose a summer programming series across different branches last summer. 

Their proposal was awarded a 2024-25 Community Engagement and Public Practice Seed Grant Recipient from the College of Fine Arts, which helped them purchase supplies and pay local artists for the program.
They planned a six-event series held at library branches across Austin in June and July. Guererro and Carson wanted to highlight many aspects of what it takes to make an opera beyond just the singers, so each event focused on a different aspect of opera:

• The Singers
• The Story
• The Set Designer
• The Orchestra
• The Choreographer
• Putting It Together

They chose branches from neighborhoods all over Austin to widen the reach of their programming as much as possible and serve different demographics. The program drew more than 350 attendees, and the children responded enthusiastically to the programming. 

“One student told me, ‘This sounds like mariachi music,’” Guererro said. “And I said, yeah, it kind of does, doesn’t it? Because you have that full-bodied singing. It’s very lush. Maybe he’s distinguishing that there’s brass and strings — there could be many, many things that he heard. But that was exciting to me because it was a way for them to connect to something that was foreign and see that opera’s really not that different.”
Guerrero said the children also connected to the program when they talked about all the different languages that opera uses.

“They loved the idea that there were so many languages that opera is sung in, and they were racking their little minds to come up with the most obscure languages that they had heard of to ask me if there was an opera in that language because there probably is,” she said.

They also hosted an instrument petting zoo with a flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, violin, viola, cello and piano for kids to not only handle, but play. The children lined up for the tuba, delighted in blowing into it and ran to the back of the line to wait for their turn to play it again.

“I just want there to be awareness in children that there are jobs that use your creativity and your imagination, and you don’t have to lose that as you become an adult,” Guererro said. “You might not become a famous opera singer, but you might really enjoy being in choir as an engineer or you might be a fantastic pre-med pianist who applies to UT and double majors in both areas.”

The program entered its second summer this year with six programs across new library branches in town, and Guerrero and Carson hope to secure grant funding to build on what the college’s seed grant made possible for the program. They brought back some guest artists from last year and a few new faces.

Both Guerrero and Carson are passionate about providing access to music, and they’re also deeply committed to the idea that exposure to the arts makes for better citizens. 

“Not every student out there is a potential music major or a professional musician,” Carson said. “I mean, I hope they are, but even bigger than that, I want my neighbor, who’s an accountant, to care about music as much as I do now. They don’t have to sing. But when I go to the shops, I want people to care enough that they will support it in their society. I think that just helps everyone. And we’re always on the lookout for planting the seeds for our class of 2034.”