A waking dream

Gordon Brown always took the largest cup. Even now he is seizing MINE. He cannot have it, we wrestle with it and it spills. Yes, but what does it say about ME?

A way of thinking of Art as the expression of emotion: we should distinguish between representing, evoking and expressing ... The tragedy evokes feelings of pity and terror; the character, Macbeth, say, expresses emotion, resignation and weariness; and the actor represents that expression ... my students always conflate these distinctions, taking an instruction to write about expression as one to write about evocation. Sad music? sometimes evocative, sometimes also expressive of sadness in its pace and rhythm. A composer can write to order because they know how to represent a mood or feeling. But they can also express and explore feeling, and the point for us is not that it is theirs but that it expresses this, as in, say, Kindertotenlieder.