ABSTRACT
This chapter explains music's voices participate in an active interplay between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Ethics requires a voice, but a voice which ultimately does not say anything, being by virtue of that all the louder, an absolute convocation which one cannot escape, a silence that cannot be silenced. Even before we are born, we hear the sound of our mother's voice. As we draw our first breath, our cry becomes our first autonomous expression in the world. The voice is one of the most fundamental human attributes; it is a means of rational communication and emotional expression, and is imbued with subjectivity. With this in mind, there are some relatively obvious links between voice and ethics. Our focus on ethics, intersubjectivity and voice has allowed a new narrative level of Wozzeck to emerge. The chapter analysis the catharsis remains at a distance from the drama, and therefore Wozzeck could be said to offer brutal realism for its characters.
