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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2019
Cat Hope's compositional practice is guided by a belief that music is inherently socially situated and can therefore be used as a tool for change. Through her 2019 opera Speechless Hope contributes to public discourse around the treatment of detainees in Australian offshore processing centres and engages more broadly with issues of nationality, human rights, displacement and the agency of voiceless minorities. This article demonstrates the way in which Hope presents identity in abstraction and complicates the binary of the self and the collective through musical acts of empathy. In doing so, she pioneers a new model which affords composers the ability to present progressive social arguments, crucial to a global political climate in desperate need of a recalibrated perspective of identity.
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