Unless you keep going forward, unless you keep doing new things-which is why I love doing new works-that's when the art form is going to stultify and die. And it becomes archeology.

Vincent Liotta is professor of music in Opera Studies at the IU Jacobs School of Music.

Liotta is co-founder of the Utah Festival Opera and a former faculty member of University of Nebraska at Omaha and University of Washington in Seattle.

He stage directed productions at the Chicago Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Houston Grand Opera; for world premieres of Coyote Tales, a new version of Frank Loesser's Greenwillow, and for the American premiere of Dragon of Wantley.

His IU Opera Theater productions include McTeague, The Ghosts of Versailles, and The Rake's Progress.