Crumbing undone: The orchestral music of George Crumb as seen through Jonathan Kramer's lens of the postmodern

Paul, Cody Alexander

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116352 Copy

Description

Title

Crumbing undone: The orchestral music of George Crumb as seen through Jonathan Kramer's lens of the postmodern

Author(s)

Paul, Cody Alexander

Issue Date

2022

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Carrillo, Carlos

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Carrillo, Carlos

Committee Member(s)

• Bashford, Christina
• Taube, Heinrich
• Tipei, Sever

Department of Study

School of Music

Discipline

Music

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

A.Mus.D. (doctoral)

Keyword(s)

• George Crumb
• Jonathan Kramer
• postmodernism
• A Haunted Landscape
• Echoes of Time and the River
• orchestral music
• 20th century music

Language

en

Abstract

This paper examines and analyzes two orchestral pieces by George Crumb, Echoes of Time and the River: Echoes II (1967) and A Haunted Landscape (1984), and compares their musical characteristics with Jonathan Kramer’s sixteen musical characteristics of the postmodern from his book Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening. By summarizing Crumb’s compositional style and analyzing the pitch, harmonic, rhythmic, timbral, textural, and orchestrational characteristics of Crumb’s orchestral works, as well as the composer’s attitudes toward music, it can be determined that Crumb’s orchestral works firmly exemplify the postmodern aesthetic and attitudes as defined by Kramer. Crumb’s multicultural synthesis of music of the past and present, frequent use of musical quotation, the pervasive juxtaposition of contrasting ideas, rejection of modernist ideals but integration of their musical techniques, and his unconventional use of musical temporalities orient his musical style strongly toward that of the postmodern. This paper re-orients and defines Crumb’s music within the postmodern stylistic context and clarifies his often nebulous and imprecisely-defined compositional idiom. By doing so, this paper hopes to reignite interest in the orchestral music of George Crumb, start a conversation about the classification of Crumb’s compositional style, and contribute insight into his mind and works.

Graduation Semester

2022-11-30T12:50:45-06:00

Type of Resource

• text
• still image

Copyright and License Information

© 2022 Cody Alexander Paul

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