This article focuses on three of Beat Furrer's works described as opera or music theatre: Begehren (2001), FAMA (2005) and Wüstenbuch (2010). Each of these pieces sets texts from Roman, contemporary and historical authors in exploration of the liminal spaces between life and death, and the possible transitions between them. In Wüstenbuch one such text is included from the Papyrus Berlin 3024, known as the source of the Ancient Egyptian philosophical text ‘The Dispute between a Man and his Ba’, a reflection on the meaning and value of life and the transition between life and death. Furrer's compositional style does not offer a linear narrative on such questions but rather multiple perspectives and tableaux, each of which calls the others and itself into question. In order to explore this and understand what the meeting and interchange of the different texts and authors offers within the context of Furrer's music, I outline a method of ‘listening intertextually’ in order to hear the liminal spaces not only within but between these compositions. I consider the hybrid and hypertexts that arise within the music, and the ways that they can be therefore considered – as in the subtitle often given to FAMA – a ‘drama of listening’.

In Homer's The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are on their way home to Ithaca when they land on a remote island inhabited by lotus-eaters. The locals share their indolent-making lotus plants with the Greeks, such that the troops’ homeward journey is disrupted and they find themselves in a state of limbo. Identities, both individual and communal, become entangled and blurred. Beat Furrer takes these sorts of uncertainties of self as inspiration in his Lotófagos (2007) – that is, Lotus-eaters – scored for soprano and double bass, which sets José Ángel Valente's poem of the same name. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's conception of bodies, this article argues that the identity of an elusive but persistent collective subject in Valente's text can be found within the difference between the two performers’ bodies in Furrer's setting. The pair's movements weave in and out of each other, moving through spectres of each other's material, fleetingly suggesting cohesion through tension before jettisoning this for what contextually appears as relief. As such, the series of surreptitious vignettes presents a ‘conatus’ of the piece defined by tension, emulation and transience; Furrer's Lotófagos creates space for Valente's mysterious subject to be presented as the immanence of forces between two performing bodies.

The present study aimed to increase understanding of how singing activities may be initiated in primary school, and what support and assistance teachers require to conduct singing activities as an integrated part of the school day. Five music teachers participated in a focus group interview. The following main themes were identified: 1) pedagogical and methodological flexibility, 2) the role of routines and familiarity, 3) the embodied and multimodal dimensions of singing, 4) the importance of accompaniment and instruments, 5) the experience of insecurity and obstacles and 6) the perceived synergies between singing and other learning activities. This knowledge may be important to integrate within music teacher education in order to secure singing’s place in schools.