| Abstrakt: |
This essay addresses the problems of variety and eclecticism in the music of George Crumb through a study of the song cycle Apparition (1979). I adopt Ralph Waldo Emerson's Compensation--a broad, plural principle embracing cyclicity, periodicity, binary opposition, and convergence with the divine--as the perspective from which to interpret motivic threads that gather in the cycle's fifth song. I trace Emersonian themes in the cycle's text (a portion of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd") and music, identifying interactions among the pitch-class collections in Crumb's diverse palette as expressions of various, sometimes irreconcilable, categories of Compensation. This approach thus avoids choosing between labeling Crumb's music as novelty and asserting hidden structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
