“My husband was born in Tennessee and raised in North Carolina, and he gets along well with George. “He is one of those people you meet so seldom, people with something real beneath the surface,” she said not long ago. The mezzo‐soprano Jan DeGaetani, for whose rare combination of vocal and dramatic talents Crumb has composed several of his best works, one of his warmest admirers, both professionally and personally. As he himself hears it, his music is a mixture of influences that include the lean textures of Webern, the nostalgic allusiveness of Mahler's popular tunes, the “night music” mood of Bartok, the vocal technique of Sprechstimme (half‐speaking, half‐singing) from Schoenberg's “Pierrot Lunaire,” and so on. (More extroverted composers sprint to the stage to hug and kiss the artists and shake hands with everyone in sight, including the stagehands necessary, to prolong ovations.)Ĭrumb also rejects with a disconcerted widening of the eyes any suggestion that the technical devices in his scores are his inventions, and a countryboy inflection creeps into his voice at such times: “Gosh, no, it's all been in the air for some time, you know.” His penchant for tricking up the piano strings with bits of hardware and for plucking the strings with the fingers, his use of a toy piano to tinkle out “fist du bei mir” from Bach's “Anna Magdalena Notebook”-such novelties were innovations of John Cage or Henry Cowell or others. Usually he sits near the rear of the hall and accepts applause by bobbing up and down a couple of times while holding up a hand as if to plead for clemency. When praised or even when required to take bows after a premiere of one of his works, he reddens and takes on the look of a hunted animal. He is almost desperately reticent about himself and his work. A 45‐year‐old professor of composition at the University of Pennsylvania, he lives in the Philadelphia suburb of Media with his three children and his wife Elizabeth (he met her when they were students at Mason College in Charleston, W. George Crumb himself seems on casual acquaintance an unlikely fellow to have entertained such darkling fantasies, or to have stirred up the avantgarde musical community. What is this singular music that can draw to ardent support both from sophisticated observers of the avant‐garde and from concertgoers to whom modern music is usually a closed book? And who this strange musician?
Schonberg summed it up The Times: “In recent years George Crumb has been talked about, and praised, more than any other composer of the American avant‐garde.” Although Crumb takes the stance of mystical poet rather than scientist, he has become a pivotal influence in American musical development during a period when science-or at least the apparatus of science-has lorded it over art and intimidated many artists. Crumb's works add up to “some of the most poetic and atmospheric music written in this century.” The New Yorker's Andrew Porter was “bowled over, like just about everyone else.” Alan Rich confessed in New York magazine, after hearing Pierre Boulez lead the New York Philharmonic “Ancient Voices”: “I'm not sure mere words on paper can explain why Crumb's music makes sense but it remains for me as powerful and moving contemporary creation as I know.” Over and over, in comments on the music, a few significant words keep turning up: poetic, atmospheric, mysterious, evocative. To Eric Salzman, writing in Stereo Review.
#The magic circle of infinity series#
The American composer's recent works, such as “Ancient Voices of Children” and the “Makrokosmos” series for amplified piano, have been greeted in rhapsodic terms not often applied to modern music.
Although there are dissenting voices, leading music critics as well as ordinary music listeners have been lining up behind George Crumb with rare show of agreement during the last few years.
0 kommentar(er)
