Hearing Voices

Composer Jocelyn Pook’s great aunt Phyllis Williams spent much of her life in an asylum struggling to make sense of the voices she heard. She recorded her experiences in a series of diaries and notebooks.
Hearing Voices combines Phyllis’s testimony with that of four other women diagnosed with mental illness, spanning several generations: artists Bobby Baker and Julie McNamara; Mary Pook, another of Jocelyn’s relatives; and seamstress Agnes Richter, who stitched cryptic texts into a jacket she wore in a German asylum at the turn of the last century.

Singer Melanie Pappenheim duets live with recordings of the women’s words, protests and laughter and striking visuals from Dragan Aleksic.

Hearing Voices is a collaboration between Jocelyn, Melanie and director and dramaturg Emma Bernard. The production, conducted by Charles Hazlewood, premièred in 2012 by the BBC Concert Orchestra at Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of H7STERIA and was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.

It was reworked at Tête à Tête in 2015 for chamber ensemble, in collaboration with director Bernard, singer Pappenheim and artist Dragan Aleksic. Dragan’s installation will accompany Hearing Voices at the Coronet.