An eccentricity? An aesthetic priority? Whatever the case, Crumb has turned out to be a durable survivor of the American avant-garde, perhaps because he was never really a part of it. In years past, his manuscripts have sometimes come in different colors of ink. He loves inventing new time signatures that look like hieroglyphics. something that looks good on a blackboard," he said, citing Paul Hindemith as an example.Ĭrumb does take a certain delight in how his music looks on the page. If you get too analytical about your music, it becomes more like a textbook illustration. Hasn't he ever been curious to analyze what's really going on in his music? Though he was on the University of Pennsylvania faculty for more than three decades - analyzing scores by students such as Osvaldo Golijov and Jennifer Higdon - Crumb won't consider subjecting his own music to that kind of scrutiny. At last year's Ojai Festival in California, director Peter Sellars staged one of Crumb's songbooks, a collection of Civil War songs titled The Winds of Destiny, with soprano Dawn Upshaw costumed as a traumatized Afghan-war veteran. "Ĭertainly, he's remarkably easygoing about how his music is reincarnated.
"I'm sure there is some rational process involved.
"I hardly know any facts about the construction of my music," he says. How Crumb came to do this is hard to say: His process is too intuitive for self-analysis. One new feature of Voices From the Heartland is the presence of Navajo and Pawnee chants, the words of which are similar in tone to the Chinese poems Gustav Mahler used in his Das Lied von der Erde. Though Philadelphia has surprisingly extensive percussion rental agencies, baritone Mason is bringing American Indian rattles in from Boulder, Colo., where he lives.
A percussionist found the crazy thing and I thought of a way to use it. Here's the African-Brazilian berimbau," a stringed instrument that makes a buzzing sound. It's in a very soft range, like a disembodied human voice. Though the huge battery of percussion is used with spare precision - there are only four players - the voices have to be amplified, especially in passages inspired by the flocks of crows in the composer's backyard.Ĭrumb flips through the score: "Here I use a low-pitch siren. His daughter, Ann Crumb, is again a featured soloist, along with baritone Patrick Mason. It's typical of Crumb's otherworldly ominousness, heard most famously in his settings of Garcia Lorca poems, titled Ancient Voices of Children.Īs with his six previous songbooks, the new one builds phantasmagorical sound environments around hymns, spirituals, and folk songs, many of which he heard during his upbringing in Charleston, W.Va. In the basement studio of Crumb's home in Media (where he barricades himself away from the six household dogs), you can pick up a cylinder resembling a sawed-off mailing tube, pull the string hanging out of the bottom, and hear the sound of a cavernous exhalation. They do."Īs it is, Voices From the Heartland, the seventh set in his "American Songbook" series, will be premiered Saturday and Sunday by Orchestra 2001 with a Balinese anklung, an Afro-Brazilian berimbau, and 98 other percussion instruments that are as hard to imagine as they are to pronounce. "Oh, I know," said the soft-spoken Pulitzer-winning composer, who is 82.
#It found its way into black angels crumb quote full
After a full decade of near-annual George Crumb premieres - and with them, landscapes of sounds undreamed of - Orchestra 2001 has completely earned its latest running joke: When the players are ambushed by odd noises on the street, they say, "Don't let George hear that one!" - meaning, he might put it in his next piece.