George Crumb

George Henry Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia on 24 October 1929. He is an American composer of modern and avant garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres and extended technique. Examples include spoken flute (one speaks while blowing into the instrument) and glass marbles poured onto an open piano. He studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston and received his Bachelors degree in 1950. After that, he studied for his Masters degree at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He continued his studies under Boris Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin from 1954-1955 and then received his D.M.A. in 1959 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Crumb taught at the University of Pennsylvania and retired after more than 30 years of service. Awarded honorary doctorates by numerous universities and the recipient of dozens of awards and prizes, Crumb makes his home in Pennsylvania, in the same house where he and his wife of more than 50 years raised their three children.

After initially being influenced by Anton Webern, Crumb became interested in exploring unusual timbres. He often asks for instruments to be played in unusual ways and several of his pieces are written for electrically amplified instruments.

Crumb's music often seems to be concerned about the theatre of performance as much as the music itself. In several pieces he asks players to leave and enter the stage during the piece. He has also used unusual layouts of musical notation in a number of his scores. In several pieces, the music is symbolically laid out in a circular or spiral fashion.

Black Angels (1970) is a piece which displays Crumb's interest in exploring a wide range of timbres. Written for amplified string quartet (referred to as "electric string quartet" by the composer in the score, although the instruments called for are acoustic ones), the players are required to play various percussion instruments and to bow small goblets as well as to play their instruments in both conventional and unconventional ways. It is one of Crumb's best known pieces, and has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet.

Black Angels (Images I)
Thirteen images from the dark land

Things were turned upside down. There were terifying things in the air ... they found their way into Black Angels. - George Crumb, 1990

Black Angels is probably the only quartet to have been inspired by the Vietnam War. The work draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. The score bears two inscriptions: in tempore belli (in time of war) and "Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970".

Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity -- God versus Devil -- implies more than a purely metaphysical reality. The image of the "black angel" was a conventional device used by early painters to symbolize the fallen angel.

The underlying structure of Black Angels is a huge arch-like design which is suspended from the three "Threnody" pieces. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).

The amplification of the stringed instruments in Black Angels is intended to produce a highly surrealistic effect. This surrealism is heightened by the use of certain unusual string effects, e.g., pedal tones (the intensely obscene sounds of the Devil-Music); bowing on the "wrong" side of the strings (to produce the viol-consort effect); trilling on the strings with thimble-capped fingers. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams and water-tuned crystal goblets, the latter played with the bow for the "glass-harmonica" effect in God-Music.

Program notes are from http://www.georgecrumb.net/comp/black-p.html