The Warning Never Heard

The Warning Never Heard is a four-movement piano suite about the mythical prophet Cassandra, the burden of foresight and the horror of not being listened to. 

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a Trojan priestess granted the gift of delivering true prophecies, but the curse of never being believed. Famously, Cassandra foresaw the fall of Troy, attempting to warn the Trojan people of the Greek warriors hiding within the Trojan Horse. She was not heeded, leading to tragedy.

In a world in which ‘truth’ has never been more unstable, I wanted to think through the affective experience of vehemently believing something, but being unable to communicate it, and being made to feel uncertain within it. I wanted to explore a figure trapped inside visions, where every attempt to communicate them became warped.

I was interested in the challenge of writing this as an instrumental piece, without relying on any text. This creates an extra layer of translational warping: often, the piano is desperately trying to communicate something, but try as it might, a piano cannot speak.

Cassandra in this piece feels circular – things loop around in unexpected ways, often feeling trapped. I conceived of many sections as ‘wave-like’, as if being trapped in a very immersive dream. At the same time, I also wanted to think through the beauty of some of these visions, with moments designed to evoke figures floating across a field of vision. I was particularly inspired by some of Anne Carson’s writing around Cassandra in her work Cassandra Float Can, to think about the strange anachronism of time going out of order, and to feel time, from Cassandra’s perspective, as a massive expanse. This is someone who is acutely aware of, and sometimes overwhelmed by, the weight of history and their place within it.

While the feeling of not being listened to is not an exclusively gendered phenomenon, I also wanted to think through the dismissal of women’s voices under the guise of shutting down ‘female hysteria’, and the violence of that shutting-down. 

This piece is dedicated to the many people – from climate scientists to survivors of abuse – who bravely tell the truth without being believed.