ABSTRACT
Newly composed music demands active listening rather than the less dynamic relationship evoked by the familiar canon. Unexpected music—such as that found in George Crumb’s song cycle Apparition—creates an entirely different dynamic between composer, performer, and audience, in which the live performance is integrated with the subjective process of preparing it. We present a series of analytic vignettes to demonstrate how the oscillation between imaginative and intellectual modes of engagement is evident in our preparation of Apparition for performance and in writing this chapter.
The authors draw upon their collective imaginative and intellectual experience as a vocalist/theorist and a theorist/pianist to explore the tensile polarity between performance | analysis and imagination | intellect. The concepts of play (the foundational impulse for musical participation), rehearsal (the interaction with the musical score and physical and social environments), and improvisation (the fusion of analysis, performance, and composition) are discussed in the paired analytic vignettes. These concepts are explored in detail in the song “The Night in Silence under Many a Star,” which opens Apparition and returns with variation to mark the cycle’s conclusion.
