Crumb, George | Grove Music

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Crumb, George (Henry )

Richard Steinitz

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2249252 Published in print: 26 November 2013 Published online: 16 October 2013

(b Charleston, WV, Oct 24, 1929). American composer. Born to accomplished musical parents, he participated in domestic music- making from an early age, an experience that instilled a lifelong empathy with the Classical and Romantic repertory, as his Three Early Songs (1947) exemplify. He studied at Mason College (1947– 50), the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MM 1953), the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (Fulbright Fellow, 1955–6), where he was a student of Boris Blacher, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (DMA 1959), where his teachers included Ross Lee Finney. At Ann Arbor, Crumb encountered the poetry of Federico García Lorca and listened with fellow students to Folkways recordings of world music. Debussy and Mahler were early influences, as well as Ives and the hymnody and revival songs in which Crumb was also immersed. But it was European music from Stravinsky and Ravel to the Second Viennese School and Dallapiccola that is reflected in his first significant composition, Variazioni (1959) for large orchestra, in a synthesis never doctrinaire, but sophisticated and transparent, displaying already an acute sensitivity to color.

In the year of its completion, Crumb accepted a post at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1959–64) where, although employed as a piano teacher, his first mature works were composed. These include Five Pieces for Piano (1962), Night Music I (1963), which began as an instrumental composition but “came into focus” when he decided to set two poems by Lorca, and Four Nocturnes (1964). In all of them, delicate timbral effects combine with Webernesque pointillism and a wide range of references to create the atmospheric chiaroscuro that became a trademark of his style.

In 1964 Crumb received a Rockefeller grant and was for a year composer-in-residence at the Buffalo Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. The following year he was appointed Professor of Composition at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement 30 years later. His early years at Penn were especially productive. He wrote the four books of Madrigals (1965– 9), Eleven Echoes of Autumn (1965), Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), Night of the Four Moons (1969), inspired by and composed during the Apollo 11 space flight, the string quartet Black Angels (1970), a strikingly dramatic, surreal allegory of the Vietnam

Page 1 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). War, and the widely acclaimed Ancient Voices of Children (1970). In 1968 he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Echoes of Time and the River (1967), the second of three orchestral works in his output.

Eleven of Crumb’s compositions have connections with Lorca, whose surreal and explosive imagery inspired from him musical landscapes of a similar luminescence and intensity. In Ancient Voices and Night of the Four Moons, for example, Crumb set texts that reveal the poet’s interweaving of fantasy and reality, of childish innocence and adult voluptuousness, of life, love and mortality; his perception of the elements (earth, moon, sea, etc.) as animate spirits; and his vivid evocation of actual sounds. To serve such powerful imagery, Crumb developed extended performance techniques, some of which have acquired considerable notoriety. The score of Ancient Voices requires a “paper-threaded” harp, a chisel to be slid along a piano string so bending its pitch, and tuned “prayer stones.” In Black Angels the performers trill with thimble-capped fingers, and simulate the sound of viols by bowing on the fingerboard between the left hand and scroll. In Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale) (1971) the flautist is required to play whilst simultaneously singing, and the cellist executes glissandos of artificial harmonics to imitate the cries of seagulls. Crumb’s scores abound in such delightful ingenuities, the delicate effect of which is frequently enhanced by amplification.

A habitual feature is his love of musical quotation. Invariably it serves an emotive or symbolic purpose, as exemplified by the strands of Bach’s D sharp minor fugue from Das wohltemperierte Clavier, ii, which trail through the final section of Music for a Summer Evening (1974). Textual quotations from Salvatore Quasímodo, Blaise Pascal and R.M. Rilke (describing the loneliness of Man “falling” through the frightening infinity of space) precede three of its movements, underlining a search for meaning, reconciliation, nativity and assurance. To further this quest, Crumb chooses a fugue in which,, having reached the minor key with the maximum number of sharps, Bach modulates even further to the sharp side (necessitating a profusion of double sharps) as if aspiring to spiritual transcendence. Surrounded by incandescent eruptions, the Bach extracts float softly aloft, the upper line of the piano shadowed by the vibraphone, an effect that is almost unbearably poignant.

Where no direct quotation will serve, Crumb has drawn on his gift for pastiche. His parody of a Spanish Renaissance sarabande in Black Angels is one such example. Particularly memorable is the end of Night of the Four Moons which, with its uncannily apt Lorca texts, is a musical and poetic allegory of Man’s “capture” of the moon. The performers exit the stage like astronauts returning to earth, leaving a lone spotlit cellist sustaining slowly rotating high harmonics (“Musica Mundana”). Interrupting this icy oscillation, the audience hears from off stage, like an intermittent distant radio transmission, snatches of a pastiche Mahlerian Berceuse in the affectingly “warm”

Page 2 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). key of F sharp major (“Musica Humana”). It is both a reference to Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and a nostalgic symbol of humanity heard, as it were, from the impersonal vastness of space.

Many of Crumb’s works include an implicit or real theatricality, ensuring him a significant place among postwar exponents of music theater. Yet his art is naturally monodic, expressed through subtleties of nuance, manner and coloration; perhaps poised above a trance-like drone, or exploding with iridescence—always magical and mysterious. Achieving so much with only a handful of musicians, it is hardly surprising that his music has been popular with dance companies—and was treated between 1965 and 1985, for instance, to over fifty different choreographies worldwide.

Apart from his three orchestral compositions, Crumb has attempted only one large-scale work, Star-Child (1977), a Ford Foundation commission for Pierre Boulez and the New York PO, which requires four conductors, soprano soloist, men’s chorus, children’s choir (also playing handbells), and a large orchestra encircled by eight percussionists. Star-Child expands upon the technique of simultaneous unsynchronized cycles used in Dream Sequence (1976). The Latin text leads from darkness to light, despair to redemption, a characteristic progression for Crumb. But the music is essentially reflective and illustrative, static rather than dynamic, and has been criticized for failing to live up to its cosmic concept.

No essential differences in method or feeling appear between the scores of the 1960s and 70s and those of later decades. During the 1980s and 90s Crumb composed more slowly, perhaps due to his acknowledged difficulty in evolving new concepts. Quest (1990, rev. 1994), for solo guitar and five players, is one of the more substantial works from this period. But, in the new millennium, he has again become prolific. Inspired by his daughter Ann—a singer and actress whose career encompasses jazz, classical music and Broadway—he embarked on what eventually amounted to fifty-two settings of vernacular songs, grouped in six American Songbooks (2002–7). The original hymns, spirituals, Civil War songs and folk songs are presented virtually unaltered. But the accompaniments for amplified piano and four percussionists (who deploy more instruments than in any of his previous works) are similar to the manner of Crumb’s earlier Lorca settings. At times this can result in an uneasy marriage between the popular melodies, devoid of their traditional harmonies, and the esoteric instrumental textures. But in Unto the Hills (American Songbook III), actually the first to be written, the Appalachian folk songs used are less familiar, and the childlike innocence of the originals, clothed in Crumb’s haunting, unearthly sound-world, is undoubtedly effective.

Crumb returned to the poetry of Lorca in his The Ghosts of Alhambra (Spanish Songbook I) (2008) for baritone, guitar and percussion, and Sun and Shadow (Spanish Songbook II) (2009) for female voice and amplified piano. The first sets seven poems from Poema del Cante Jondo, the second five poems selected by the

Page 3 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). composer, this time in English translations. Two instrumental works in this decade take further his characteristic writing for amplified pianos.

Most of Crumb’s published scores are facsimiles of his manuscript, distinguished by astonishing clarity, precision and elegance, and by arresting graphic symbols in which staves are bent into arches, circles and other pictorial devices. In the two volumes of Makrokosmos (1972–3)—each a set of “12 Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac” and steeped in multiple references—every fourth piece is notated as a symbol, with staves drawn to represent, for example, a cross (“Capricorn”), a double star (“Gemini”), a spiral galaxy (“Aquarius”). His concern for the visual has led to many of the published scores having uncommonly large dimensions. Critics have accused him of emphasizing surface sensation at the expense of real substance. But one can argue that the medium is the message: the allusions, stylistic juxtapositions and whimsical quotations are the music’s very heart. These evocative soundscapes have an alluring breadth, and their uniquely haunting atmosphere has earned Crumb many admirers. Works

(published unless otherwise stated)

Instrumental

Str Qt, 1954, unpubd

Sonata, vc, 1955

Variazioni, orch, 1959

5 Pieces, pf, 1962

4 Nocturnes (Night Music II), vn, pf, 1964

11 Echoes of Autumn, 1965 (Echoes I), a fl, cl, vn, pf, 1966

Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II), 4 processionals, orch, 1967

Page 4 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Black Angels

13 Images from the Dark Land (Images I), elec str qt, 1970

Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale), 3 masked musicians: elec fl, elec vc, elec pf, 1971

Makrokosmos I, 12 fantasy-pieces after the Zodiac, amp pf, 1972

Makrokosmos II, 12 fantasy-pieces after the Zodiac, amp pf, 1973

Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III), 2 amp pf, 2 perc, 1974

Dream Sequence (Images II), pf trio, perc, 1976

Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV), amp pf 4 hands, 1979

A Little Suite for Christmas, AD 1979, pf, 1980

Gnomic Variations, pf, 1981

Pastoral Drone, org, 1982

Processional, pf, 1983

A Haunted Landscape, orch, 1984

An Idyll for the Misbegotten, amp fl, 3 perc, 1986

Zeitgeist, 2 amp pf, 1987, rev. 1988

Quest, solo gui, s sax, hp, db, 2 perc, 1990, rev. 1994

Easter Dawning, carillon, 1991

Mundus canis (5 Humoresques), gui, perc, 1997

Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik, amp pf, 2001

Other worldly Resonances, 2 amp pf, 2002, rev 2005

Page 5 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Other instrumental works (all unpubd)

2 Duos, fl, cl, ?1944

4 Pieces, vn, pf, 1945

Sonata, pf, 1945

Poem, orch, 1946

Pf Trio, 1946

Prelude and Toccata, pf, 1947

Gethsemane, orch, 1947

Sonata, vn, pf, 1949

3 Pieces, pf, 1951

Prelude and Toccata, orch, 1951

3 Pastoral Pieces, ob, pf, 1952

Str Trio, 1952

Sonata, va, pf, 1953

Diptych, orch, 1955

Vocal

3 Early Songs (R. Southey, S. Teasdale), Mez, pf, 1947

Night Music I (Lorca), S, pf + cel, 2 perc, 1963

Madrigals, Book I (Lorca), S, vib, db, 1965

Madrigals, Book II (Lorca), S, fl + pic + a fl, perc, 1965

Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death, Bar, elec gui, elec db, elec pf + elec hpd, 2 perc, 1968

Page 6 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Madrigals, Book III (Lorca), S, hp, perc, 1969

Madrigals, Book IV (Lorca), S, fl + pic + a fl, hp, db, perc, 1969

Night of the Four Moons (Lorca), A, pic + a fl, banjo, elec vc, perc, 1969

Ancient Voices of Children (Lorca), S, Tr, ob, mand, hp, elec pf + toy pf, 3 perc, 1970

Lux aeterna (Requiem mass), 5 masked musicians: S, b fl + tr rec, sitar, 2 perc, 1971

Star-Child (parable, after Dies irae, Massacre of the Innocents [13th century], Bible: John xii.36), S, children’s chorus, male speaking chorus, bell ringers, orch, 1977

Apparition (from W. Whitman: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d), S, pf, 1979

The Sleeper (E.A. Poe), Mez, pf, 1984

Federico’s Little Songs for Children, S, fl, hp, 1986

Unto the Hills (American Songbook III), S, amp pf, 4 perc, 2001

A Journey Beyond Time (American Songbook II), S, amp pf, 4 perc, 2002

River of Life (American Songbook I), S, amp pf, 4 perc, 2003

Winds of Destiny (American Songbook IV), S, amp pf, 4 perc, 2004

Voices from a Forgotten World (American Songbook V), male & female voice, amp pf, 4 perc, 2006

Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI), male & female voice, amp pf, 4 perc, 2007

The Ghosts of Alhambra (Spanish Songbook I) (2008)

Sun and Shadow (Spanish Songbook II) (2009)

Page 7 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Other vocal works (all unpubd; various texts)

4 Songs, 1v, cl, pf, ?1945

7 Songs, 1v, pf, 1946

Hallelujah, chorus, 1948

A Cycle of Greek Lyrics, 5 songs, 1v, pf, ?1950

MSS in Wc Principal publishers: Belwin-Mills, Peters

Bibliography

R.H. LEWIS: “George Crumb: Night Music I,” PNM, 3/2 (1964–5), 143–51

R. STEINITZ: “George Crumb,” MT, 119 (1978), 844–7

D. GILLESPIE, ed.: George Crumb: Profile of a Composer (New York, 1985)

E.H. SPITZ: “Ancient Voices of Children: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation,” CMc, no.40 (1985), pp. 7–21

E. BORROFF: Three American Composers (Lanham, MD, 1986)

J. CARBON: “Astrological Symbolic Order in George Crumb’s Makrokosmos,” Sonus, 2/2 (1990), 65–80

M. ROSINSKA: “Symbolism in George Crumb’s Madrigals,” Muzyka, 35/1 (1990), 27–38

R. BASS: “Sets, Scales and Symmetries: the Pitch-Structural Basis of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I & II.” Music Theory Spectrum, 13/1 (1991), 1–20

E. STRICKLAND: American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music (Bloomington, IN, 1991)

Page 8 of 9 PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). S.M. BRUNS: “‘In stilo Mahleriano’: Quotation and Illusion in the Music of George Crumb,” American Music Research Center Journal, 3 (1993), 9–39

T.L. RILS: “A Conversation with George Crumb,” American Music Research Center Journal, 3 (1993), 40–49

R. BASS: “Models of Octatonic and Whole-Tone Interaction: George Crumb and his Predecessors,” JMT, 38 (1994), 155–86

G. SMITH and N. WALKER SMITH: New Voices: American Composers Talk about their Music (Portland, 1995)

M. ALBURGER: “Day of the Vox Crumbae: An ancient, angelic interview with the phantom gondolier (MakroCrumbos, Vol.1),” 20th Century Music, 4/4 (1997), 10–18

D. COHEN: George Crumb: A Bio-Bibliography (Santa Barbara, 2002)

S. BRUHNS and O. BEN-AMOTS: George Crumb: the Alchemy of Sound (Colorado Springs, 2005)