Resonances: Collaborating on Crumb's 'Nocturnes'

Daphne Leong (speaker), piano, University of Colorado Boulder (USA)
Steven Bruns (speaker), University of Colorado in Boulder (USA)
Michiko Theurer (speaker), violin, University of Colorado Boulder (USA)

Session introduction
This session considers resonances among the domains of composition, scholarship, and performance as manifested in collaboration around George Crumb’s Four Nocturnes for violin and piano. It consists of three presentations and a performance, given by a theorist-pianist, a violinist-scholar, and a scholar focusing on Crumb’s compositional practice. The session begins with the question of collaboration across disciplines, and the things and people that make it possible: shared items, shared objectives, and shared agents. It then posits a central type of shared item: concepts arising from the transtextual relationships of Crumb’s scores and sketches. These textual interrelationships give rise to richly layered readings of the published scores of Four Nocturnes and other pieces from the same period. One such reading takes the concept of huecos—empty spaces charged with resonance—from Lorca’s poetry and with it illuminates the spaces of Four Nocturnes for the performer and listener. Our textual, conceptual, and performative explorations of the Nocturnes demonstrate how different kinds of knowledge might interact in a cross-disciplinary collaboration.

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