Crumb, George | Grove Music

Grove Music Online 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

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