George Crumb (1929 - 2022)
The first thing one notices when approaching a score by the American composer George Crumb, who died Monday at 92, is the beauty of his calligraphy. In a bygone age before computers took over music notation, composition students and composers studied musical penmanship and took care in ensuring their handwritten scores were legible and hopefully aesthetically pleasing. But even during that analog age, George Crumb stood alone. The near perfect curvatures and swoops that bend and entangle staves into peace signs, zodiac symbols, or something out of a satanic cult could easily stand alone hanging on the walls of a contemporary art exhibition. Unlike most musical scores, Crumb’s have an uncanny ability to look like a physical manifestation of the sounds he created; heavy black boxes indicating a pianist use their forearm to depress a cluster of keys, canonic musical lines falling inward in concentric circles. His obituary in The New York Times quoted the flutist Tara Helen O’Connor who described his scores as “his way of expressing how music flows through time…[he] also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”
But beyond the sheer aesthetic value of the score is of course the music itself. Crumb, like a handful his contemporary colleagues across the pond, was interested in the very stuff of sound itself. Rather than using musical color as window dressing for melodic lines or harmonies, Crumb lets color lift most of the weight in this works. As such, a great deal of his output was written for solo piano as well as a vast array of percussion. He had percussionists smack chains against large gongs, bow crystal wine glasses to create an ethereal hum, hit the inside of the piano with an open palm for a rich boom, and dip large cowbells into water for a sustained tone which bends and evaporates. These odd sounds Crumb congers up seem to emerge organically out of the primordial ooze of the earth, as though these deep rumblings, piercing shrieks, and distant bells have been going on for millennia.
And even though this almost prehistoric type of music making had followers on other continents, Crumb’s boyhood memories of growing up in the hills of Appalachia gave his pieces a uniquely American sound. Think as if we excavated the hundreds of layers behind the music of Aaron Copland or Stephen Foster to find what elements of the land inspired their tunes. During the last twenty years, for instance, Crumb focused almost entirely on cycles of songs scored for vocalist, percussion quartet, and piano which re-contextualized familiar American folk tunes in an eerie and haunting soundscape. His 2004 cycle, American Songbook IV (The Winds of Destiny), written shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, takes classic Civil War tunes like ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again’ and places it in a misty soundscape of distant, deep bass drum booms with the vocalist singing the folk tune ironically or with deep cynicism. The final song, ‘Shenandoah,’ sounds as though the tune is echoing against the southern mountains that Crumb knew so well in the far off distance.
George Crumb’s music has a spiritual, theatrical, bombastic, and often times ritualistic quality to it. His landmark 1970 work Black Angels for amplified string quartet has the players whisper, make noises with their tongues, and shout. The piece, written as a reaction to the Vietnam War, integrates these sounds into an utterly convincing nightmare of a piece. I remember distinctly first hearing this piece when I was back in high school and being completely blown over by the fact that the first violin in the movement ‘Sounds of Bones and Flutes’ sounded like a flute (accomplished by a technique in which the player bows the strings with the wood side of the bow rather than the hair).
In Ancient Voices of Children, also from 1970, Crumb sets text by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a poet he was seemingly obsessed with for most of his career. The work feels like glancing in on some sort of cult like ceremony from an alien nation. When the work opens, a soprano sings, chants, and yells into an open piano creating a haunting resonant echo, as though someone is singing from deep inside a well. During the final movement, a boy soprano who has been heard but not seen comes onstage, singing with the soprano. The work ends with the text “… and I will go very far … to ask Christ The Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child.” The premiere recording of the piece on the Nonesuch label sold more than 70,000 copies making it one of the best selling 20th century classical recordings ever.
For all of it’s eerie bombast and intellectual rigor, Crumb’s music has a great ability to communicate to an audience. There is a wonderful beauty that emerges from his works, albeit almost always shrouded in a dark veil.
About an hour before I wrote this, I was in a class at Indiana University in which there was a bit of snickering from the professor about the recent death of George Crumb. “I guess he’s a type of composer I have to appreciate but don’t like to listen to at all.” This was met with some sizable agreement from the class of graduate students. And who can really blame them? Crumb has been relegated to the slot in the music history textbook in which they point to how crazy his scores look and how loud the opening of Black Angels is. And with that ends most student’s relationship with Mr. Crumb. There is a bit of knowing what you are getting yourself into with Crumb’s music. You will be engaging with a composer who wants you to listen, carefully and deeply, and be, in the end, rejuvenated and maybe even a little disturbed. As there is room in the visual arts and film and television and novels to be uncomfortable and disturbed, so is there in music.
But if you are willing to go on a deeply cathartic, theatrical, and haunting journey through instrumental and vocal colors and sounds — and yes even harmony and melody — you have found the right composer.
