2025; dur: 10′; a performance for onstage actor/singer, live and in recording; Score at Verlag Neue Musik
In 1989, Kate Bush wrote the song “The Sensual World”, inspired by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joye’s Ulysses, exploring the idea of how a literary character might experience the world with fresh eyes and senses intact. In Too Much To Carry, the “Woman” character is thrown into the world as a broken mirror of our human heritage.
Too Much To Carry is a four-act monologue with a range of associations on the GOD – DOG axis. The Woman seeks to re-establish a somehow broken relationship with the many items carried by humans in general: our context-dependent staged lives, concrete and metaphorical objects with emotional or historical heritage, the tools of language, the relationship with God.
God appears in the third act as an indirect voice, speaking in the language of predictive texting (as typed from the composer’s digital communication device to the premiering actress of the piece) or simply being very straightforward, trivial. The Woman strives to reconnect to human relations and responsibility, despite the imposed spectacle.
Dedicated to and to be premiered by Alwynne Pritchard.