| Summary: | This document examines a somewhat neglected work by George Crumb—his
song cycle entitled Apparition: Elegiac Songs and Vocalises for Soprano and
Amplified Piano. This work is based on texts from Walt Whitman’s poem “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The approach taken is twofold: the musical
integrity of Crumb’s work is disclosed through a study of its motivic relations, and
its semantic content is examined through the relations it sets up between music and
text.
The introduction sets out the author’s position relative to some of the current
thought on the methodology of song analysis. It also gives some background
information about Apparition and points out its more traditional character in
comparison to the innovative series of works that constitute Crumb’s “Lorca Cycle.”
The musical images that appear in Apparition are intimately bound up with
the symbols and events in Whitman’s poem. An understanding of this poem is
therefore vital to an appreciation of the song cycle. Chapter One discusses the
features of Whitman’s poem that are salient to Crumb’s work.
Chapter Two provides a detailed analysis of each movement, taking into
account form, motivic content, compositional procedures, musico-poetic relations
and the function of each movement within the cycle as a whole. The analysis
reveals a highly unified cycle which derives most of its musical materials from
those presented in the first movement. The work takes as its central informing
principle, the idea of the cyclic nature of life and death.
|
|---|
