The memory of dead composers, if remembered at all, often hangs on a single piece. In the case of George Crumb it will undoubtedly be ‘Black Angels’ his, the electric string quartet he composed in 1970. It was actually supposed to be an ordinary string quartet, but the current affairs of the Vietnam War forced themselves, as witnessed by the grim subtitle ‘Thirteen images from the Dark Land’; the screeching electric violins grew into an enduring anti-war statement. In 2017, Crumb called the undiminished topicality of ‘Black Angels’ in this newspaper “the sadness of the piece”.
George Crumb, one of the greatest composers in the United States, died Sunday in his hometown of Media in rural Pennsylvania. He was 92 years old.
Crumb was born on Black Thursday, the first day of the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s. He grew up during the Second World War, studied at several smaller institutions in the US and spent some time in Berlin on a scholarship. Pianist and friend Margaret Leng Tan, who premiered several of Crumb’s works, described him five years ago as follows: “George looks like a used car dealer, but he reads Goethe in German.”
‘Universal music culture’
Crumb was a contemporary of the Darmstadt avant-gardists, led by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, but always steered clear of schools and system coercion. He managed to escape the radical music-philosophical break of 1945 and went his own way in the still young American composing tradition. Later in life, he proclaimed the expectation that music from all cultures would come together in a universal music culture, although his sounding music was free from wee New-Age clichés.
Where the European hour-zero composers drew a line through music history and wanted to reinvent the rules, Crumb always felt part of a continuum. As a child he listened to folk music, he could vividly remember how his father played Mozart’s ‘Clarinet Concerto’, he loved Tchaikovsky and Bartók. “But their genius cannot be copied, and I’m lucky that I realized that early on,” Crumb said in 2017 in NRC . His oeuvre is full of music quotes.
Music in which echoes blow
He transformed Crumb’s fascination for unusual playing techniques and instruments and his gift for admiration into an idiom full of echoes and dreams, music in which it always seems to blow, fragments from elsewhere, recognizable, wrapped in a sensual spatial beauty that immediately appeals but that is reserved with her secret. The shrill sound world of ‘Black Angels’ is therefore an exception in Crumb’s oeuvre of eclectic and collage-like pieces: here the dream has become a bitter, loud nightmare.
Although he had an optimistic nature, Crumb’s music often had a dark side too – just listen to the hauntingly beautiful orchestral work ‘A haunted landscape’ (1984) , instrumental but inspired by the poetry of Federico García Lorca. Crumb discovered Lorca at university and over the years set many of his poems to music. Besides a penchant for the dark, he learned something else from Lorca: the enormous emotionality that simplicity could bring about.
Prices and Holland Festival
In 1968 Crumb won a Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral suite Echoes of time and the river† The recording of Star Child (1977) for large orchestra, soprano, children’s choir and male choir, his most extensive work, was awarded a Grammy in 2001. Among his most important works is the series of piano books ‘Makrokosmos’ from the 1970s, in which he examined all possible techniques and sound sources of the instrument. Since the beginning of this century he has been writing the series ‘American Songbooks’: idiosyncratic but always recognizable arrangements of traditionals such as ‘Go down, Moses’.
In 2017, Crumb was focus composer at the Holland Festival, where ‘Black Angels’ and a new piano cycle, ‘Metamorphoses’ were performed. Crumb, who was unable to fly due to poor health, had to cancel.