Temporality and Texture in the Performance of George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening

Abstract

Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III, 1974) for two amplified pianos and percussion by George Crumb is one of the first works written after 1945 to use the same ensemble inaugurated by Béla Bartók in his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between temporality and texture in the performance of Music for a Summer Evening. The highly diversified textures in terms of colour and density, as well as the tempo palette offer performers a high degree of freedom in their interpretation. Seven recorded performances of the work, covering a period of more than forty years (1975–2017) are compared according to the methods I developed during previous studies (Lalitte, Philippe. 2015. Analyser l’interprétation de la musique du XXe siècle. Une analyse d’interprétations enregistrées des Dix pièces pour quintette à vent de György Ligeti. Paris: Hermann; Lalitte, Philippe. 2018. “L’interprétation de Sopiana pour flûte, piano et bande de François-Bernard Mâche.” In François-Bernard Mâche: Le poète et le savant face à l’univers sonore, edited by Geneviève Mathon and Marta Grabocz, 299–318. Paris: Hermann; Lalitte, Philippe, and Vincent Grepel. 2017. “Prêt-à-porter ou coupe sur mesure? Liberté et contraintes dans l’interprétation de la Sequenza III de Berio.” Filigrane 22.). The article sheds light on issues such as the fidelity to the score, the singularity of some interpretations, the impact of texture on the temporality of performance, and the potential effect of the number of musicians in the ensemble.