George Crumb

George Crumb’s “A Haunted Landscape”: A Guide to Mysterious Places

by

Much of the music of the American composer, George Crumb (1929-2022), drifts into the atmospheric, spectral world of “night music.” Evoking the hum of insects and the distant murmurs of a summer night, these are the eerie, nocturnal sounds that we hear throughout the music of Béla Bartók. It is also the “night music” of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, which Crumb called “very spooky music.” Crumb’s 1984 orchestral work, A Haunted Landscape, emerges over a nearly imperceptible …

Read more

George Crumb’s “Dream Sequence (Images II)”: A Spectral Soundscape

by

The American composer George Crumb passed away yesterday at his home in Media, Pennsylvania. He was 92. Crumb was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative colorists. His exploration of timbre led to the use of numerous extended instrumental and vocal techniques, such as a strummed or prepared piano and electronic amplification. He experimented with alternative forms of notation and theatrical performance elements. Throughout his music, the influence of Mahler, Debussy, and Bartók …

Read more

George Crumb’s “Dream Images”: Echoes of Faintly Remembered Music

by

In the score of his Dream Images (Love-Death Music) (Gemini), the American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) writes, “musingly, like the gentle caress of faintly remembered music (flexible and expressive).” This fleeting and atmospheric work for solo piano is the eleventh of twelve Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac which make up Crumb’s 1972 collection, Makrokosmos, Volume I, modeled after Bartók. In addition to its reference to astrology, the poetic title suggests the Liebestod (“love death”) of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Notated without …

Read more

George Crumb’s “Black Angels”: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land

by

Things were turned upside down. There were terrifying things in the air… they found their way into Black Angels. – George Crumb, 1990 Black Angels, a work for “electric string quartet” by American composer George Crumb (b. 1929), pulls us into a terrifying, nightmarish soundscape. Completed in March, 1970, the piece has been associated with the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the Vietnam era. Yet the strange, disturbing voices which haunt this music seem to transcend any one …

Read more

Music of Romantic Obsession

by

From Vincent Van Gogh to Charlotte Brontë, artists, writers, and composers have occasionally entered the strange, darkly irrational world of romantic obsession. With Halloween approaching, let’s take a walk on the creepy side and explore three pieces which grew out of (what some would call) unhealthy romantic obsessions: Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique Written partially under the influence of opium, Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique takes us into strange, hallucinogenic territory. It summons new sounds from the orchestra, which must …

Read more

The Wound-Dresser

by

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.) -Walt Whitman, The …

Read more

Music Fit for an Emperor

by

Violinist Mark Sokol passed away last week. He was a founding member of the Concord String Quartet. Between 1971 and its disbanding in 1987, the Concord String Quartet championed music by American composers including Charles Ives, George Crumb, Jacob Druckman and Morton Feldman. Mark Sokol later joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Here is the Concord’s recording of Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3. This quartet …

Read more