Voice and register: composing from Love’s Work

One of the striking elements about Love’s Work is how Gillian Rose moves abruptly yet fluidly between registers of expression. The text amalgamates confession-like passages that detail her own intimacies and quietudes alongside sentences that are far more removed, flirting with the aphoristic. An example of this can be found in chapter 5:

Hands no longer marvel at the beauty of hands: they cease to stroke, slowly, repeatedly, the long, speechful fingers; her hands can no longer reach their short, maladroit, childlike friends. Palm no longer paddles in palm, kissing with inside lip.

Lips still meet lips, full enough for breach of promise, unlike the lipless organs of politicians. Lip no longer sucks in lip, tongue roving around the songlines, greeting whorl upon whorl of inner ear. The embrace of face by face is the true carnival of sex beyond gender.

He no longer calls my name. (He no longer even uses my name.)

‘Loss’ is a loose description. The movement from eros passion through the passion of faith to the everyday and the ethical, enhanced when together and, equally, when apart, is missing. In place of the unselfconsciousness of mutual love, its berth of listening stillness, a hateful self-regard is unleashed to gnaw the Beloved, the disappointed one.

Loss is legion. If the Lover finds the entanglement of love too harrowing, then, as it pulls back, his harrow crushes the Beloved, also caught in its path. Lover and Beloved are equally at the mercy of emotions which each fears will overwhelm and destroy their singularity. For the Lover, these are the frightening feelings roused by the love: for the Beloved, these are the frightening feelings trusted to love, but now sent back against her. Patient, she is now doubly violent agent: against his desire and against her desire returned. He covers his eyes with index finger and thumb and says, ‘This is not my story.’¹

In this passage Rose oscillates between bodily sensuality, philosophical reflection and political critique, constructing a sort of polyphony. The passage begins in a sensory register, where hands, lips, and tongue function as extensions of speech through touch. The phrase ‘long, speechful fingers’ illustrates the collapse of corporeal communication, an erosion of physical intimacy as a form of expressive language. Rose foregrounds the sensory organs as vehicles of discourse, turning touch into a mode of articulation.

This tactile voice then merges with a political critique, contrasting the lips of lovers: ‘full enough for breach of promise’ with ‘lipless organs of politicians’. The association of political figures with an absence of lips signals a failure of embodied truth, positioning public rhetoric as devoid of the sincerity that intimacy demands. In this juxtaposition, Rose extends the voice of Eros into a broader critique of political insincerity and betrayal.

Moving beyond the immediate experience of loss, Rose enters an existential register, reflecting on the transformation of love’s intensity into an ethical condition. The passage’s exploration of ‘the movement from eros passion through the passion of faith to the everyday and the ethical’ suggests that love transcends the realm of personal attachment, morphing into a commitment to an ethical way of being. Here, love is not merely an individual experience but a force that carries ethical weight.

The voice fractures further in the latter half. When Rose writes ‘He no longer calls my name. (He no longer even uses my name.)’ the parenthetical aside performs an act of doubling, indicating a split between internal awareness and external absence. This fragmentation intensifies in the final moment, when the lover denies participation in the narrative by stating ‘This is not my story.’ The erasure of agency disrupts the coherence of the account.

In these five short paragraphs voices emerge, dissolve and return as echoes, tracing the instability of relational experience through shifting registers of speech. Perhaps, then, it is through such interplays of voice that capabilities of love are articulated, whilst, simultaneously, these tensions express the labour that love requires. In any case, through adopting such rhetoric, Rose’s voice and its sentiments appear as resonance between that which is intimate and that which is removed.

Such observations resound within and might be articulated further by Jean-Luc Nancy, even if Rose herself infamously expressed a disdain for poststructuralism.² Nancy writes:

[Voice] is formed by a gap, by an opening, a tube, a larynx, throat, and mouth, traversed by this nothing, by this utterance, by this expulsion of voice. The voice cries in the wilderness because it is itself initially such a wilderness extending through the very centre of the body, beyond words.³

For Nancy, there is paradox and tension inherent to voice: it is both an expulsion and an absence, that which is material and bodily, and that which is alterative and alternative to these limitations. Voice reveals the body’s interiority whilst simultaneously exceeding it. Voice is a sort of resonance amongst its self, perhaps even a resonance between its own voices. Such concerns of the aural recall Nancy’s writings on listening, which contribute to this reading of register, space and interplay:

To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place. To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other. Listening thus forms the perceptible singularity that bears in the most ostensive way the perceptible or sensitive (aisthetic) condition as such: the sharing of an inside/outside, division and participation, de-connection and contagion.⁴

If voice is structured by absence, listening is what renders that absence relational, creating a spatiality in which both the listener and sound are mutually implicated (if a meaningful distinction can be made between the two). Nancy presents listening as a condition that exists simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving boundaries between self and world. He emphasizes that listening is not passive reception but a participatory event that both fragments and connects, creating a space for selfhood through this act of openness.

Taken together, these passages suggest a relationship between voice and listening: voice emerges through absence, while listening transforms that absence into a shared spatiality. In Nancy’s formulation, listening is not simply hearing sound but engaging in a process of division and participation where the self is constituted through an interplay of interiority and exteriority. The wilderness of voice, which stretches beyond words, is met by the spatiality of listening, which does not merely take in sound but actively reshapes the conditions through which presence and absence interact. Or – in plain terms, and to return to Rose – the extract of Love’s Work might be read as an enactment of the doubled space of listening, where names fade, voices break and physical intimacy is rendered speechless.

I was invited to think through these observations on Rose’s text when singer Lotte Betts-Dean asked me to compose a piece for mezzo-soprano and electronics as part of her Voice Electric project. My aim was not to somehow represent Rose’s mode of expression, nor Nancy’s interpretations of the voice and listening, but rather to consider how registers within a written voice interplay with an outer, externalized voice, treating these relationships themselves as musical material for composition.

Live and electronic voices

The piece consists of a live performance alongside pre-recorded audio. The live part utilizes only the first three of the five paragraphs quoted earlier from Love’s Work. The majority of this part is built upon three simple, plaintive, narrow melodies, marked as M1, M2 and M3. Over the course of the seven-minute piece, I freely manipulate them, fragmenting, reshaping and playing with their form. This sense of looseness and instability is reinforced by the absence of a time signature and strict tempo marking. Additionally, I invite the singer to sporadically add ornamentations, such as trills and turns, at their discretion. The effect, I hope, is a music that feels constrained yet continuously toys with its own boundaries, suggesting but never committing to a forward motion. Such an arrangement and treatment of pitches and rhythms grounds the differing registers of Rose’s text. To my ears, there is an interplay, even an implicit tension, in a text comprising leaps of vocal register being ambiguously contained by its performance.

The fragmented momentum of these three melodies is interjected with something of a refrain, the passage highlighted with a solid line, and the title of the composition, They no longer call my name. (They no longer even use my name.). This material provides a disruption to the quasi-hypnosis. The passage sits in a slightly lower yet distinctly noticeable register for a mezzo-soprano voice. It also departs from the fluid rhythms of the surrounding material by introducing a tempo marking and shorter note values. The disturbance is subtle, insufficient to break the coherence of the vocal line, but, to my ears, pronounced enough to stand out. I chose to change the pronouns from ‘he’ to ‘they’ to underscore the ambiguity of voices outlined in my reading of Rose’s text: in this context, ‘they’ might refer to a singular individual, a group, or perhaps even different registers of one’s own voice (or self, even).

The pre-recorded material comprises multiple overlaid melodies originally written for another project, using misremembered fragments of Love’s Work as their text. Importantly, these melodies were captured using a stethoscope microphone. There is a sort of opacity, then, produced through the resonance of a chest, a microphone with a lower fidelity than what might be used for the external voice, and the pulse of a heart. The sounds are evocative of and capture literal intimacy, vibratory patterns caught in the vocal folds from which they emerge. However, there is also a sense of severance to them – it is clear these sounds are somehow external to the performer despite their evocation of the internal. They are not an amplification of the singer in real time, but are suggestive of an intimacy somehow held at arm’s length.

This material emerges three times alongside the live performance. To my ears, these sounds that so evidently signal internality deployed in such a manner might be read either as piercing or permeation of the live performance: another voice, one that is both intimate and distant, almost as if described by the leaps of Rose’s written vocal register, now contend with the contained performance of its very expression.

For the purposes of this publication I provide a video of the piece’s premiere by Lotte Betts-Dean at Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall, Leeds, on 20 March 2024, and, below, the score and performance notes.⁵ Though these materials are simple enough to be performed by very many singers, a successful rendition depends entirely upon a singer who is both technically proficient for a subtle and understated delivery and emotionally sensitive enough to convey Rose’s ultimately heart-breaking words. Lotte performs this piece beautifully – sympathetic and trusting performers make a composer’s role infinitely easier and more rewarding.

Footnotes

1. 1. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, Chatto & Windus, London, 1995, pp. 67–8. ↩

2. 2. The most sustained critique of poststructuralism can be found in Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken NJ, 1991. ↩

3. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Vox Clamans in Deserto’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al., Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1993, pp. 234–47; p. 23. ↩

4. 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Fordham University Press, Fordham NY, 2007, p. 14. ↩

5. 5. https://youtu.be/UM2vbEW3TyQ. ↩