GEORGE CRUMB (b. 1929)Apparition (1979)

This chapter explores George Crumb’s cycle, Apparition. As a display piece and an evocation of fantasy and colour, the piece can prove enthralling for the listener. Here, the pianist is an equal partner, with a wide-ranging virtuoso role for one adept in modernist techniques, including using the inside of the piano. The piece also shows Crumb’s innate understanding of the voice and its timbral possibilities. Notation is often ‘free’ and spatial, and could appear challenging to the uninitiated, but it all turns out to be eminently practicable. Much use is made of elaborate melismas, including passages of rapid grace-notes, and the interval of a seventh seems to be especially favoured—the singer has to tune a great many of these, often exposed, and unaccompanied at a quiet dynamic.

Sonorism

In this chapter, the use by twentieth-century composers of tone color, or timbre is explained with examples by those who made its use central to their compositional output. Poland, freed from the bonds of communism and the Soviet state, relaxed controls over the arts and in 1956 initiated the Warsaw Autumn festival where avant-garde Polish and Western music could be heard. Kazimierz Serocki cofounded the festival, contributing to the percussion canon his timbre-based sextet, Continuum. In the United States, the American composer George Crumb definitely had an ear for timbre coupled with a love for percussion evident in the works discussed. A young Polish/American composer, Marta Ptaszynska, created a number of works for both solo and ensemble percussion in the latter half of the century. Her work Siderals was conceived as an audio-visual, or mixed-media work utilizing ten percussionists, magnetic tape playback, and lighting. The three composers highlighted in this chapter approached the use of timbre in differing ways.

Nature’s Voice in Crumb’sAn Idyll for the Misbegotten

George Crumb prefaces the score toAn Idyll for the Misbegottenwith a note identifying humankind as the “misbegotten,” rulers of an environmentally “dying world.” Crumb’s piece responds to these thoughts by evoking the “voice of nature.” To have a voice is to have acoustic agency, to have one’s presence acknowledged and heard. In this article, I explore what it means for nature and music to have voice in this sense, and how Crumb’sIdyllmay be heard to sing in nature’s voice. I investigate the role played in the work by a quotation of Debussy’sSyrinx, pertinent themes of voice and nature in the tales of Syrinx and Io by the Roman poet Ovid, and the aesthetic tendencies of American ecological thought, represented by Aldo Leopold. I show how Crumb subtly acknowledges the inseparability of culture and environmental impact, while simultaneously summoning listeners out into a soundscape in which Nature’s voices speak.

The Semantics of Death Image in “Madrigals” Supercycle by George Crumb

Considers a unique song cycle of the postmodern epoch - “Madrigals” by American composer George Crumb. The author addresses the semantic meaning of Death image in particular and reveals parallels in its representations by the composer and by Federico García Lorca. It is argued that Crumb used particular phrases of the Spanish poet and dramatist to create the original dramaturgy that deepened the tragic death imaging.