2025 Manchester Music Analysis Conference

Manchester, England | July 14, 2025

2025 Northeast Conference of Music Theorists

Williamstown, Massachusetts | April 4, 2025

Spoken Paper Presentation

This paper analyzes string chamber works of the last half century to examine contemporary epistemological relationships between chamber music and the natural world. I theorize three nodes along a spectrum of representation considering the chamber ensemble and organic life: iconic representation, enacted representation, and realization. Caroline Shaw describes her string quartet, Valencia (2012), as “an untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange.” Through iconic representation, Shaw’s Valencia shares audible (physical) resemblances to the shape, texture, and bright quality of its signified. Henri Dutilleux’s first string quartet, Ainsi la Nuit (1976), epitomizes his notion of “progressive growth,” in which musical objects represent organic life by undergoing the very processes that enact it. The metaphor of progressive growth extends beyond iconic resemblance and indexicality: musical objects—like living beings—are able to predict (musical) futures and contemplate (musical) pasts. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Spectra (2017) and Enigma (2019) involve a provocatively different conceptual relationship between chamber music and the natural world: “My music is written as an ecosystem of materials that are carried from one performer—or performers—to the next throughout the process of the work.” In chamber music ecosystems, the chamber ensemble advances beyond metaphor entirely to realize a real-world relationship of the natural world. I account for musical, physical, and metaphorical energy transfers as they produce varying states of (im)balance between musical sounds and their human producers, revealing how the chamber music genre can represent not just social interactions, but those between a species and its environment.