Nature’s Voice in Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten

Abstract

George Crumb prefaces the score to An Idyll for the Misbegotten with a note identifying humankind as the “misbegotten,” rulers of an environmentally “dying world.” Crumb’s piece responds to these thoughts by evoking the “voice of nature.” To have a voice is to have acoustic agency, to have one’s presence acknowledged and heard. In this article, I explore what it means for nature and music to have voice in this sense, and how Crumb’s Idyll may be heard to sing in nature’s voice. I investigate the role played in the work by a quotation of Debussy’s Syrinx, pertinent themes of voice and nature in the tales of Syrinx and Io by the Roman poet Ovid, and the aesthetic tendencies of American ecological thought, represented by Aldo Leopold. I show how Crumb subtly acknowledges the inseparability of culture and environmental impact, while simultaneously summoning listeners out into a soundscape in which Nature’s voices speak.