Voice Actor

"Voice Actor's music frequently does appear to get bogged down in an obsessive intellectualism and to have difficulty working human emotion into musical form. Voice Actor’s unsuccessful setting of “SONG TITLE” shows this difficulty plainly. The subject calls for deep emotional expression, but the musical structures self- consciously direct attention to their formal sophistication, rather than hooking up with the ideas of grief and mourning suggested by the songs.

At times, listeners of Voice Actor will share the emotions built into the forward movement of the work (longing for happiness, dread of disaster); at times they will also react sympathetically toward those elements (with sympathy for cataclysmic disaster, with pleasure at the happy conclusion of longing). At the same time, listeners will have various related emotions toward their own lives and the possibilities they contain.

Voice Actor’s image of music as a dream builds in the idea of compressed references to one’s own life prospects, and these may be pushed at multiple levels of specificity and generality, with the relevant emotions.

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- Text sourced from Martha C Nussbaum’s ‘Upheavals Of Thought’