Hidden Disunities and Uncanny Resemblances: Connections and Disconnections in the Music of Lera Auerbach and Michael Nyman

Abstract

Does stylistic appropriation serve to create a sense of unity or disunity, continuity or fragmentation? Taking George Lipsitz's notion of ‘families of resemblance’ and intertextuality's dialogic qualities (as shown in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva), this article will put forward the argument that certain forms of quotation result in a kind of halfway house—an in-between state—where the text seemingly announces its own independence despite its (inter)dependence on a whole host of other intertexts. Unlike the collage-like, so-called polystylistic compositions of the late 1960s, which also used quotation, an altogether different and more deeply embedded form has developed since then, where the quoted material is integrated to a much greater extent on the surface, only to lay bare its ‘difference’ at a deeper level. Such ‘hidden discontinuities’ will be examined in relation to a single work, Lera Auerbach's Sogno di Stabat Mater (2005/2008), before applying Lipsitz's principle as a case study to Michael Nyman's oeuvre.

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