How Much Of You Is In Your Voice?
Feature
Hannah Conway, composer and artistic director of Sound Voice, considers voice as an inextricable part of all our identities, and how we navigate its loss.
When one of my closest family members lost his voice due to a stroke and terminal cancer, it was devastating – shattering for us to lose that precious connection.
Over the following year after we lost him, I realised that as a composer, writing opera and working with singers throughout my career, I’d never really deeply thought about the value and fragility of our voices. I’d taken everything for granted. I’d never truly appreciated why it is that we need our own, unique sounding voice and what happens when that ability to express ourselves, to ‘sound’ like oneself, disappears.
What are we left with? How can we continue to be ourselves amongst the people we love?
These questions motivated me to draw together a team of unlikely collaborators. I wanted to gather those with experience of voice loss and their families, artists and professionals with an expert connection to voice and discover the meaning of ‘voice’ and how the concept of voice intersects with identity. People from healthcare, technology, biomedical research and neuroscience were connected with those affected by Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease and throat cancer.
Together with the brilliant writer Hazel Gould, we led them through an intense artistic process of exploration; singing, writing, exchanging stories, research and experiences. Singing was new for most, and for many terrifying prospect, so an equal, non-hierarchical space was established quickly. Mutual respect between people who would never normally meet in the same room grew, and the teams became closely knit. We laughed, we cried and we discovered so much about what it is to be human and to have a voice. The installations we present at Kings Place in January 2022 emerged from three of the six works we wrote, collating the stories and experiences of all. They focus on two individuals, Tanja and Paul, and a third piece.
‘‘I wanted to platform voices that are never heard in the concert hall’’
I believe that these works have immense power because of the rich combination of performers, harnessing their dramatic conviction, driven by the musical quality and unique colour combination of both operatic and changed, sometimes deteriorated, voices which are able to communicate everything, every nuance. By creating these pieces with a team of people across multiple sectors, I’ve seen real impact and innovation take place: profound changes thinking, transformed professional practice and groundbreaking new research directions, all set in motion. Sound Voice is now a fully-fledged company, using the arts as a catalyst for cross sector exchange the healthcare, science, education and technology industries. I hope, most importantly, that we’ve created works that invite audiences to think about the value of their own voices, and offer a small insight into the lives and stories of people who have lost theirs.