Crumb’sApparitionand Emerson’s Compensation

Abstract

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.

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