Lear Settings

This paper explores the concept of authorial voices and subjectivity in the ACE- and PRS-funded Creative Partnerships film Lear Settings (2009), a collaborative musical artwork that combines educational outreach with contemporary music written specifically to appeal to both audiences and the academy. Authorial networks and intertextuality are central to this film’s construction. The resulting complexity, which has in part been led by the restrictions of its funding conditions, may present some spectators with difficulties for ascertaining meaning; and yet, it is proposed that through challenging conventional approaches to narrative the work has greater capacity to articulate the complex dialectics of specific psychological and musical premises. Authorial and narrative networks raise questions about the nature of quality in art that intentionally embraces the unevenness of its contributors’ skills. In order to address such issues the work’s architecture is discussed in some detail and it is proposed that through establishing the work’s underlying analytical voice one can begin to rationalise the various authorial and (implied) narrative voices that emerge.