\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s rare for a composer to quickly find a broad audience. It usually takes years, or even decades, and sometimes doesn\u2019t happen at all.<\/p>\n
The American composer George Crumb, though, who was born in 1929 and died two years ago<\/a>, reached wide prominence within a decade. He found his musical voice in the early 1960s, and by 1968 had won the Pulitzer Prize, not to mention a bevy of grants and fellowships. Perhaps most important, his premieres were seen as genuine events, such as the pandemonium<\/a> that was said to have greeted \u201cAncient Voices<\/a> of Children<\/a>,\u201d his 1970 setting of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca for soprano, boy soprano and chamber ensemble.<\/p>\n What explains Crumb\u2019s near-immediate assimilation to the musical mainstream?<\/p>\n There was, first and foremost, his dizzying sonic imagination. Crumb took the extended techniques that originated with Henry Cowell and John Cage and exploded them, plying instruments for virtually any sound they would yield and creating a vast new timbral universe.<\/p>\n His scores \u2014 created by hand and themselves works of art<\/a> \u2014 are rife with exacting instructions to performers: how to thread paper between the strings of a harp, or how string players should use the thimbles on their fingers. In \u201cAncient Voices,\u201d there is an 86-word note instructing the pianist how to use a chisel (Crumb specifies the size) to create a glissandos on the piano strings that last well under a minute. He insisted that his extended techniques were not mere sound effects, as some listeners believed<\/a>, but essential elements of musical expression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In addition, Crumb was largely untouched by the rift between serialists and tonal composers that split the music world in the 1960s and \u201970s. His writing was so original, it seemed to sidestep that whole fiasco. Indeed, there was something both timely and timeless about Crumb\u2019s music. His pieces had titles that evoked distant worlds and had deep, primordial resonances, but they were unmistakably of their day. In \u201cBlack Angels,\u201d one of his most famous works, symmetries, numerology and religious allusions in the score were accompanied, Crumb said, by \u201cvibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam time.\u201d The score is inscribed as having been completed on \u201cFriday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli),\u201d or \u201cin time of war.\u201d<\/p>\n Bridge Records, the label based in New Rochelle, has been recording Crumb\u2019s music since it was founded in the early 1980s. (The guitarist David Starobin, who created it, and Becky Starobin, his wife and the label\u2019s president, met Crumb in 1971 at Peabody Institute.) Since 1991, Bridge has been issuing recordings in its Complete Crumb Edition<\/a>, the kind of high-quality audio documentation few composers receive.<\/p>\n Many entries in the series mix older and newer compositions, creating fascinating cross-sections of Crumb\u2019s evolution. That wasn\u2019t intentional, David Starobin said. \u201cA lot of it happened because we wanted to issue the new music as it was composed,\u201d he added. In striving for each release capturing a \u201cportrait of the moment,\u201d the label often filled in the albums with older works from Crumb\u2019s catalog.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The final entry, Volume 21, came out earlier this year. To mark both its completion and what would have been the composer\u2019s 95th birthday year, I recently listened through the entire edition \u2014 a lengthy and luxurious immersion in the composer\u2019s singular vocabulary, which became a fixture of my daily life. Even the subway started to sound like one of his creations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What follows is a sequence of snapshots from Crumb\u2019s output, in order of their appearance in the complete edition. Not everything in his oeuvre is of the same level of quality, as the composer even admitted, but there are gems throughout. I skipped some of the more popular works to focus on the underappreciated ones.<\/p>\n Lorca\u2019s poetry, and especially his surreal visions of death, were a near-constant in Crumb\u2019s early composing. \u201cGeorge always says this is going to be his last Lorca piece,\u201d his wife told The New York Times in 1970<\/a>. \u201cThen he goes right down in the basement and writes another one.\u201d A chamber ensemble of amplified guitar, double bass and keyboards, along with some 50 percussion instruments, creates a feverish mosaic of noise, including an electric harpsichord that sounds oddly akin to turntable scratching. Over all that, the baritone Sanford Sylvan declaims, \u201cLittle black horse\/Whither with your dead rider?\u201dYet in the refrains and \u201cdeath drones,\u201d Crumb deploys silence to masterful and chilling effect.<\/p>\n In the late 1980s, Crumb experienced a creative block that largely halted his composing<\/a> for several years. This work, requested by Starobin (who plays on the recording), was the breakthrough, a darkly spacious sextet for guitar, soprano saxophone, harp, double bass and two percussionists. The wild sonic invention of earlier years is largely gone; the instrumental palette, narrower. In their place is a sure sense of pacing and flow, along with some of the most openly beautiful writing in Crumb\u2019s output. A serene ending is undercut by eerie, shifting chords in the bass and the saxophone\u2019s microtonal shadings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bartok was a significant influence on Crumb\u2019s development, and nowhere is it more apparent than in this 35-minute work for two amplified pianos and another battery of percussion. The instrumentation (minus amplification), of course, matches that of Bartok\u2019s groundbreaking Sonata, and both contain new sonorities effected by the ingenious handling of the assembled forces. Above all, each composer creates his own haunting instance of \u201cnight music\u201d: apparitional sounds evoking the mystery of the nocturnal world.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fair to say that Crumb wrote more comfortably for chamber groups of his own devising than for orchestra. Among his symphonic works, the cantata \u201cStar-Child,\u201d which the New York Philharmonic and Pierre Boulez premiered in 1977<\/a>, gets most of the attention, but I find it overblown and unrewarding. (Boulez was apparently not the composer\u2019s biggest fan.) More successful is this Ivesian piece whose title, Crumb wrote<\/a>, \u201creflects my feeling that certain places on the planet Earth are imbued with an aura of mystery.\u201d Over a deep drone in the basses, sounds from the orchestra\u2019s strata mingle and dissipate, with brief storms of percussion disrupting the calm. Despite the large array of forces, it has the subtlety of chamber music.<\/p>\n More Lorca: His poetry is the catalyst for four sets of three madrigals, each set scored for soprano \u2014 here the outstanding Tony Arnold \u2014 and two other instrumentalists. Often, Crumb sets only a single sentence of a poem, and the long melismatic lines reinforce the link with the Renaissance roots of these pieces. The startling transparency of the textures brings a listener in proximity to the theatrical intensity of his vocal writing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The American Songbooks, seven in all, were the major compositional focus of Crumb\u2019s last two decades. At the suggestion of his daughter, Ann, Crumb began revisiting old American folk songs, which he set for voice, amplified piano and percussion quartet. These sturdy tunes and spirituals were clearly responsible for reigniting his inspiration late in his career. Even so, I find them at best a mixed bag. The moods are less varied than in Crumb\u2019s earlier vocal works, and the familiar melodies sit uncomfortably over the turbulent instrumental writing. \u201cUnto the Hills,\u201d centered on songs of Crumb\u2019s native Appalachia, is to my ears the most consistently rewarding, the dark nature of many of the lyrics finding a perfect complement in both Crumb\u2019s accompaniment and Ann\u2019s unaffected singing. \u201cPoor Wayfaring Stranger,\u201d which opens and closes this Songbook, stands as one of the most effective creations of his later years: a vision of death delivered with quiet dignity and deep, unsettling resonances.<\/p>\n Bridge\u2019s edition includes two recordings of Crumb\u2019s nine \u201cruminations\u201d on Thelonious Monk\u2019s \u201c\u2019Round Midnight\u201d for amplified piano. Each has its virtues, but I prefer this atmospheric and mysterious performance by Marcantonio Barone. Monk\u2019s famous melody winds its way through Crumb\u2019s kaleidoscopic presentation \u2014 here accompanied by icy block chords, there sitting over an uneasy ostinato in the bass. There are also rare moments of levity when allusions to Debussy\u2019s \u201cGolliwog\u2019s Cakewalk\u201d punctuate the shadowy landscape.<\/p>\n The 21st and final volume in the Complete Crumb Edition turns out to be one of the most satisfying as an individual release. It opens with \u201cProcessional,\u201d a dreamlike piano piece that Crumb, recalling Debussy\u2019s description of his \u201cImages,\u201d called \u201can experiment in harmonic chemistry.\u201d The pianist Gilbert Kalish, whose association with Crumb goes back more than half a century, offers the version without extended techniques, playing with no-nonsense command. Then, we hear one of Crumb\u2019s final compositions, the muted and reflective percussion quartet \u201cKronos-Kryptos,\u201d played by the Curtis Institute of Music\u2019s Ensemble 20\/21. The Sonata for Solo Cello, one of his earliest and most-played works, follows, in a forceful performance by Timothy Eddy. Finally: A reprise of \u201cProcessional,\u201d in a version played by Barone with extended techniques in a few sections. At the end, the music drifts gently into silence, a fitting conclusion to Bridge\u2019s entire project.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death\u2019 (1968)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Quest\u2019 (1994)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III)\u2019 (1974)<\/h2>\n
\u2018A Haunted Landscape\u2019 (1984)<\/h2>\n
Madrigals, Books I-IV (1965-1969)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Unto the Hills (American Songbook III)\u2019 (2001)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik\u2019 (2001)<\/h2>\n
\u2018Processional\u2019 (1983) \u2018Kronos-Kryptos\u2019 (2019) and Sonata for Solo Cello (1955)<\/h2>\n