Nature’s Voice in Crumb’sAn Idyll for the Misbegotten

Author:

Cook Robert C.1

Affiliation:

1. University of Iowa

Abstract

George Crumb prefaces the score toAn Idyll for the Misbegottenwith a note identifying humankind as the “misbegotten,” rulers of an environmentally “dying world.” Crumb’s piece responds to these thoughts by evoking the “voice of nature.” To have a voice is to have acoustic agency, to have one’s presence acknowledged and heard. In this article, I explore what it means for nature and music to have voice in this sense, and how Crumb’sIdyllmay be heard to sing in nature’s voice. I investigate the role played in the work by a quotation of Debussy’sSyrinx, pertinent themes of voice and nature in the tales of Syrinx and Io by the Roman poet Ovid, and the aesthetic tendencies of American ecological thought, represented by Aldo Leopold. I show how Crumb subtly acknowledges the inseparability of culture and environmental impact, while simultaneously summoning listeners out into a soundscape in which Nature’s voices speak.

Publisher

Society for Music Theory

Subject

Music

Reference35 articles.

1. Allen, Aaron S. 2011. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.”Journal of the American Musicological Society62 (2): 391–94.

2. Allen, Aaron S. 2012. “‘Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s Violins and the Musical Trees of the Paneveggio.” InInvaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660–1830, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, 301–15. SVEC 8. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

3. Barolsky, Paul. 2003. “Ovid’s Web.”Arion11 (2) (Fall): 45–77.

4. Bass, Richard. 1991. “Sets, Scales, and Symmetries: The Pitch-Structural Basis of George Crumb’sMakrokosmosI and II.”Music Theory Spectrum13 (1): 1–20.

5. Bass, Richard. 1994. “Models of Octatonic and Whole-Tone Interaction: George Crumb and His Predecessors.”Journal of Music Theory38: 155–186.

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