Cone's and Kivy's ‘World of Opera’

Abstract

‘If music is a language, who is speaking?’ asked Edward T. Cone on the first page ofThe Composer's Voice(1974), later turning to such questions as ‘does a vocal persona [whether protagonist of a song or character in an opera] know he is singing?’ And does that persona hear the accompaniment? Cone's answer then was that ‘Consciously, he neither knows that he is singing nor hears the accompaniment; but his subconscious both knows and hears’.