Do you notice a mistake?
George Crumb occupies a unique place in the landscape of North American composers. While his musical and poetic sources are for the most part drawn from continental Europe, to which he became attached while studying with Boris Blacher in Berlin, his treatment of them remains distinctly American. Crumb did not simply take cursory inspiration from American folk traditions, nor did he fully embrace the radical questioning of Western music composition associated with John Cage and the New York School. Even less did he pursue the complex harmonic and rhythmic systems explored by Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter. Instead, Crumb carved out a narrow space between Western cultural heritage and a deeply personal mode of searching for new sounds. This liminal quality makes his music distinctive, a quality that also stands out in the highly personal, almost visual calligraphy of his scores.
Crumb let his music speak for itself; he made few public statements and wrote even less, outside the prefaces to his scores. His discretion is reflected in his instrumentation for small chamber music ensembles and vocalists — notably Jan DeGaetani, who was one of his favorite performers.
The first phase of his composing career, 1945 to 1955, reveals a strong affinity for modal and rhythmic writing, influenced by Bela Bartók. These traits are especially evident in his Cello Sonata, still his most performed piece from this period. By 1962, a more personal voice begins to emerge with Five Pieces, notably in his exploration of the piano’s interior (plucked strings, glissandi) through extended techniques that he would use again in works that followed (e.g., Makrokosmos). It was also in the early 1960s that Crumb’s compositional language was most profoundly shaped by his discovery of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry, reflected in his Night Music I and culminating in one of his most celebrated pieces, Ancient Voices of Children.
Honoring Bartók and the Études of Debussy, Crumb’s music retains a fundamentally tonal framework while drawing on chromatic and modal elements such as the whole-tone and octatonic scales. These run through many of his scores, particularly the four volumes of Makrokosmos — a title that alludes to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos though with the opposite ambition of encompassing the whole universe.
From the 1960s onward, Crumb’s musical world is shaped less by a focus on compositional language — which was never his primary concern — than by a deep exploration of the relationship between music and instrument, and music and voice, as well as by reflection on the role of the performer. Works written in this vein were, for the most part, chamber music pieces.
In contrast to historical genealogy focused on a Western context, Crumb proposed “total” musical history, made possible on a global scale in the 1970s by sound recording and broadcast technologies and the rise of vinyl records (well before the greater “totality” offered by the internet). Crumb thus reserved the right to borrow freely from any musical culture and combine influences in new ways. This approach, which he described in his article “Music: Does It Have a Future?”(1980), allowed him to fuse together different sources within a single work, whether they remain perceptible as such or are absorbed into the musical discourse.
Crumb’s music surprises — juxtaposing unexpected elements, producing a sound that has been freed from chronology and cultural temporalities. This shows in two primary ways. First, his compositions feature unusual instrument combinations, especially plucked strings such as mandolin (Ancient Voices of Children), electric guitar (Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death), banjo (Night of the Four Moons), and sitar (Lux Aeterna). Other instrument choices or references include Caribbean steel drum, Cambodian angklung, Japanese kabuki, Brazilian cuica (A Haunted Landscape for orchestra, 1984), Appalachian dulcimer, African talking drum, Mexican rain stick, and harmonica (Quest, for guitar, saxophone, harp, upright bass, and percussion, 1990).
Second, Crumb employs quotation, which he integrates sparingly into his work. For example, in Litany of the Galactic Bells (Makrokosmos II), an evocation of the coronation scene bells from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godounov transforms almost imperceptibly into a short excerpt from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. “The effect is somewhat like the changing colors of a prism,” Crumb noted.1 Similarly, a subtle, pizzicato allusion to Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantaisie appears in A Little Suite for Christmas.
Quotation is more explicit in Black Angels, composed in tempore belli, during the Vietnam War. References to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and Dies Irae appear alongside the tritone interval (“diabolus in musica”) and Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata, evoking the struggle between God and Satan. Drawn from our collective musical memory, these citations give the piece a cosmic dimension. Other notable instances include quotations from Bach, Schubert, and Chopin in Night of the Four Moons, a work for five instruments, composed in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.
In much the same spirit, Crumb employs pastiche (for the saraband evoking the Spanish Renaissance in Black Angels), parody (Thus Spake Zarathustra in Vox Balaenae), and stylistic allusions (flamenco underpinning the Lorca texts in Ancient Voices of Children).
This recurring practice of musical quotation points to programmatic intentions, even though Crumb sometimes distanced himself from this in favor of stylistic pluralism, as, for example, in A Haunted Landscape and Quest. Despite the poetic and symbolic titles of his works and their movements, the allusions in Black Angels — which depict the opposition between good and evil, God against Satan — or the use of zodiac signs in Makrokosmos and of numerology (again, in Black Angels) betray a desire to imbue the music with a “message.” It is a particularly significant act in works where the musical language alone is not inherently narrative — except, notably, in the vocal pieces based on Lorca texts.
By the same token, Crumb sets some of his pieces in a particular historical context, be it an astronaut’s voyage to the moon or the Vietnam War in Black Angels. The latter piece, “conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world,”2 features a score that includes shouting, chanting, whistling, and whispering to heighten its dramatic impact. While Crumb’s music does not take a political stance, it engages in an internalized theatricality — one made explicit through Crumb’s own commentary and the visual and staging aspects of his scores.
When Crumb notes that his music for Processional (piano, 1983) was meant more in praise of nature than of humans, he is seeking to expand his music’s symbolic power, providing a philosophical backdrop that suggests “a larger rhythm of nature” and “a sense of suspension in time.”3 However, this does not prevent him from incorporating naturalist effects: one can hear seagulls and humpback whale songs in Vox Balaenae, crickets in Federico's Little Songs, insects in Black Angels, and an owl in Night of the Four Moons.
In these instances, Crumb again harkens to something cosmic, notably through the numerical symbolism present in Black Angels, where the numbers 7 and 13 recur throughout (for example, “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land”). Numerology and symbolism also guide the large-scale form, conceived as a palindrome of instrumental ensembles (from quartet to duet, with the fullest instrumentation at either end and in the center), and the intervals (the descending E–A–D# pitches), as well as the performers’ role. The four instrumentalists are invited to count aloud in different languages to represent international reactions to the war. It should also be noted that the number 7 occurs frequently in Crumb’s organization of his own work (five songs with two instrumental interludes in Ancient Voices, seven nocturnes in Night Music I, etc.) This same cosmic reference becomes explicit in Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV): “Cosmic Dances for Amplified Piano, Four Hands.”
Crumb also organized his works in sets, as in Night Music I and II and the five “Variations on Sea-Time” (the second movement of Vox Balaenae), each of which is associated with a geological era. Other sets include the Images in Black Angels, Dream Sequence), Echoes I and II (respectively, Eleven Echoes of Autumn and Echoes of Time and the River), the four zodiac-themed collections in Makrokosmos, and his Lorca-inspired works, all the way to his more recent two volumes of Spanish Songbooks (2008-2009) and seven volumes of American Songbooks (2003-2011).
“Some of my music is mythological just in expression,” Crumb noted.4. Here, again, we see the liminal nature of his composition, the line he traced between symbolism and seeking out the greatest possible diversity of sound. It is almost as if Lorca were describing Crumb in the lines quoted in the final movement of Ancient Voices of Children:
… and I will go very far,
Farther than the seas,
Close to the stars,
To ask Christ the Lord
To give me back
My ancient soul of a child.
Among the most defining characteristics of Crumb’s work are his references to Lorca, implicit in the eight scores that begin with Night Music I (1963), continue with the four volumes of Madrigals (1965-1969), Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death (1968), and Night of the Four Moons (1969), and close with Ancient Voices of Children (1970). He would return to Lorca again in 1986 for Federico's Little Songs for Children and in 2008 and 2009 for The Ghosts of Alhambra (a cycle based on the Poema del Cante Jondo) and Sun and Shadow, respectively, both part of his Spanish Songbook cycle. Crumb’s love of Lorca is a guiding thread in his vocal music, which also draws on the works of other poets such as Walt Whitman (Apparition, 1979) and Edgar Allan Poe (The Sleeper, 1984).
Crumb shows the same interest in Lorca’s simple poems, such as Canciónes, as he does in Casidas and Gacelas from Lorca’s later years, approaching them all with the same minute care. He attentively stitches together poems or play excerpts, sometimes borrowing from different collections and using just one or two verses, as in Madrigals I-IV or Night of the Four Moons. Other times, he establishes hidden links among his works, as when he draws excerpts from the same poem for different pieces (Ancient Voices No. 4 and Madrigals IV/2, or Ancient Voices No. 5 and Madrigals II/1).
The discretion noted in Crumb’s compositional approach was matched by that of Lorca, who remained humble in his transmission of Andalusian folklore and in his way of drawing from existing material to imbue it with renewed meaning. This convergence between a poetry inherently musical — Lorca was also a musician — and Crumb’s writing reaches its fullest expression in Ancient Voices of Children, where Crumb expanded the instrumental palette to support a vocal line that evolves from fragmented phonemes to fully developed song (“The child looks for his voice” — the cycle’s first line).
Lorca’s poetry, haunted by themes of childhood and death, resonates with the sonoridades negras del Duende (the “dark sounds” of the duende) as described in his essay “The Theory and Play of the Duende.” Crumb sought to embody this instinctual mystical struggle in his best vocal compositions.5
Though he never used electronics or mixed media, Crumb began using amplified and electric instruments starting with Makrokosmos and then in numerous scores after the 1970s. Intended as a means of exploring sound in its most elusive dimensions, amplification serves to enhance the pianist’s direct interaction with the soundboard, enabling effects such as pizzicato or muting. This is just one example of the doubling effect that is present throughout Crumb’s music. Others include the soprano singing above the open piano with the pedal pressed down to create a resonant chamber, the child’s voice creating a ghostly echo of the soprano’s, in Ancient Voices of Children. Another is the flutist singing into their instrument while playing in Vox Balaenae.
This doubling effect extends to stylistic allusions that create both temporal and cultural distance (such as the evocation of a viol consort in Black Angels), as well as the array of auxiliary instruments assigned to performers. In Ancient Voices, the pianist not only plays the piano strings with a thimble but is also directed to play a toy piano; the mandolin player is called to play the musical saw, and the oboist a harmonica. In Black Angels, each musician doubles on additional percussion instruments, including maracas, tuned crystal glasses (producing a glass harmonica effect), tam-tams, and other accessories intended to expand their repertoire of unexpected sounds.
This use of instruments, a hallmark of Crumb’s music, is further reinforced by theatrical directions carefully described in the prefaces to his scores. Musicians are instructed to move around the stage slowly — the child and the oboist in Ancient Voices — or to play offstage, as in Dream Sequence, where a glass harmonica is heard from behind the scenes while the four main musicians perform on stage. Other staging instructions include a choreographed exit at the end of Night of the Four Moons and the use of masks in Vox Balaenae and Lux Aeterna. “The masks, by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent, symbolically, the powerful impersonal forces of nature (i.e., nature dehumanized).”6
Crumb’s music has been choreographed many times, further demonstration of its impact through multiple dimensions of doubling — expressed again in one of the Lorca verses used in Madrigals (IV/1): “Why was I born surrounded by mirrors? The day turns round me. And the night reproduces me in each of her stars.”
1. Accessed at https://www.yourclassical.org/episode/2006/11/12/crumb-goes-macro. ↩
2. Quoted in the liner notes of George Crumb: Black Angeles/Charles Jones: String Quartet No. 6 & Sonatina for Violin & Piano, New World Records, Cat. No. NWCRL283, 2010-02-16. Accessed at https://www.newworldrecords.org/products/crumb-black-angels-jones-string-quartet-no-6-and-sonatina-for-violin-piano. ↩
3. From Crumb’s annotations to his list of compositions, found in George Crumb, Profile of a Composer, ed. Don C. Gillespie, Edition Peters, 1986. ↩
4. Interview 9 December 1997, Rutgers University. ↩
5. Federico Garciá Lorca, “Theory and Play of the Duende,” trans. A.S. Kline, 2007, accessed at https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.php. ↩
6. Program notes for “New Music Concerts, 1973-74 series, Finale Concert of the Season, Guest Composer: George Crumb.” Walter Hall, Edward Johnson Building, University of Toronto, 30 March 1984. Accessed at https://www.newmusicconcerts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/March-30-Concert-Program.pdf. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?