KATHRYN L. CATON

Kathryn Caton is Lecturer of Musicology at the University of Houston Moores School of Music. Her scholarship explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera, the long avant-garde, and experimental, collaborative, and participatory performance. Her first book, Participatory Opera: Power and Agency in Post-Wagnerian Performance (Routledge, April 2026), offers a critical analysis of spectator immersion and participation in contemporary opera, and resultant intersections with notions of individuality and community within these emerging contexts. As such, her monograph explores traditional roles of “audience,” “performer,” and “author,” and situates Euro-American participatory opera within the broader context of participatory philosophy, theory, and art of the twentieth century. Reviews of her book note its resituating of contemporary operatic experiments within broader dialogues, praising its “incisive critique of the cultural capital and political valence of ‘participation’ in 21st-century opera,” and stating that it “prompts a crucial re-examination of this frequently invoked yet heavily freighted term within experimental music and performance studies.” As a whole, Caton’s book reveals participatory opera as a contested site of meaning and intention, particularly agile and adaptive, and inherently value-laden, political, and antagonistic.

Caton serves as the co-chair of the Society for American Music’s Experimental Music Interest Group and has presented research at local, national, and international conferences and published in Opera Quarterly. Equally at home in academia and public musicology, Caton has appeared as an invited panelist for Houston Grand Opera’s production of Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s opera Silent Night, the Houston Symphony’s League of American Orchestras Conference on Richard Strauss’s Salome, and Houston’s NPR segment Town Square with Ernie Manouse. She received her PhD in Musicology and Ethnomusicology and her master’s in Voice Performance from the University of Kentucky, and a bachelor’s in Voice Performance from Concordia College.