The bold new production of Monteverdi’s Poppea that Washington, D.C.’s INSeries Opera staged this year turned heads and raised eyebrows. Director Timothy Nelson (BM ’04, Composition) framed this production through a modern, cross-cultural lens, flipped gender norms by casting a mezzo-soprano as Emperor Nero, and wove South Indian instruments such as the sitar and mridangam into Monteverdi’s baroque score. Sanskrit hymns were introduced into the libretto and even the opera’s ending was rewritten. Reviewing for The Washington Post, critic Michael Andor Brodeur argued that Nelson exercised “a level of artistic license that really ought to require a permit.”
That quip raises deeper questions for Raluca Matei, a post-doctoral research fellow in Performing Arts and Health: “Who gets to decide what counts as a valid interpretation?,” she asks. “Must contemporary artists always remain faithful to the original? And why is blending different styles or eras often seen as problematic—especially in classical music—when it might instead open up new emotional and creative possibilities?
“In the Peabody Conservatory’s Dance BFA program, the answer is clear—students are trained to perform and choreograph across styles, from traditional to experimental,” she continues. “And no one appears bothered by such genre-blending practices.”
It’s another story in classical music education and performance writ large. Radical reinterpretations such as Nelson’s Poppea are vanishingly rare. Even when the staging is innovative, the musical performance often remains rigidly faithful to the score. As musicologist and King’s College London Professor Emeritus of Music Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has pointed out, classical music education allows almost no freedom for classical musicians to improvise, reinterpret, or deviate—expecting instead near-perfect reproductions.
Classical music’s cultural rigidity resonated with Matei and Giulia Ripani as performing arts and health researchers. Both Matei and Ripani are classically trained musicians—Matei vividly recalls resisting any deviation from expected stylistic norms during her training. “My teacher even praised me for it,” she adds.
Matei encountered Leech-Wilkinson’s writing several years after leaving professional performance behind, and his ideas challenged everything she had internalized: Why must performers be so constrained?, she wondered. What harm is there in a fresh interpretation if the composer is no longer alive? Why do we claim historical authenticity when so much of it is speculative or retrofitted to modern tastes?
“This epiphany was liberating and unsettling,” Matei says. “I had never seriously questioned these assumptions and, once I did, I couldn’t justify them. That realization hasn’t led me back to performing—at least, not for now—but it did fuel a desire to explore these issues more deeply.”
At Peabody, Matei and Ripani commiserated over how classical musicians are too often taught to fear mistakes and strive for perfection. “When we struggle with anxiety or burnout, we’re told to meditate or seek counseling—without questioning the systems that caused this distress in the first place,” Matei says. “It’s the public health equivalent of pulling drowning people out of a river without asking how they fell in—or who pushed them.
“That’s why we’re taking a broader, interdisciplinary approach to musicians’ mental health,” she continues. “Rather than focusing solely on individual resilience or stress management, we’re examining the deeper structural and cultural conditions that shape how musicians are trained, judged, and valued.”
Matei and Ripani’s research project, funded by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health through a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health initiative, brings together musicians, educators, and scholars from the performing arts, health, and the social sciences. So far, they have completed three major literature reviews and gathered insights from more than 125 participants, including music students, freelancers, orchestral players, educators, and experts from several disciplines.
One recurring theme they have encountered from respondents is the rigid norms of Western classical music education. “Our conversations with musicologists—building on the work of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson—led us to reflect on how discouraging radical reinterpretations of a score can erode performer autonomy and, ultimately, harm mental well-being,” Matei says. “To explore this idea, we’re turning research into performance.”
At the upcoming 2025 Performing Arts Medicine Association International Symposium running July 10 to 13 at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., they are presenting Beyond the Score: The Moonlight Sonata Reimagined through Sound and Movement. The concert-experiment features composer, pianist, and researcher Ji Liu performing several radical reinterpretations of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, “Moonlight Sonata,” accompanied by live choreography from faculty artist Kelly Hirina and Micah Shapiro (BFA ’25, Dance). Beyond the Score celebrates performer agency and cross-arts collaboration, asking: What happens when we prioritize expression over fidelity? How do musicians and audiences respond to a piece once freed from convention?
Matei and Ripani will collect reflections from both performers and audience members to explore how such work can lead to deeper emotional impact, and maybe even a healthier artistic culture.
The two are also preparing a concert informed by research for the inaugural Global Summit on Occupational Health in Music that Johns Hopkins University hosts July 9. Faculty artist Michael Hersch (BM ’95, MM ’97, Composition) composed Oaks cut for the pyres: Five songs after texts of Robert Lowell, a song cycle for bassoon and voice to be performed by faculty artist and soprano Ah Young Hong (BM ’98, MM ’01, Voice) and bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward. During the performance, researchers Matei and Ripani will display quotes drawn directly from their focus groups and interviews with musicians and scholars—giving voice to the raw emotional experiences that often remain hidden behind polished performances.
“Our goal is to bring research findings to life in a way that’s accessible, emotionally resonant, and artistically compelling,” Matei says. “Performances don’t merely illustrate a problem—they embody an alternative vision.”
By experimenting with cross-arts and cross-disciplinary formats and rethinking conventions, Matei and Ripani hope to spark new conversations about freedom, expression, and mental health in music. Because sometimes, the most radical change starts with the curiosity and courage to ask: What if we did things differently? A few approaches are explored in a pair of forthcoming online articles.