Clean as a Whistle

This essay attempts to develop an interpretative framework for effects of timbre in selected twentieth-century instrumental music. My approach draws on ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales’s concept of “perceptualization” in order to establish expressive associations of transparency and turbidity with sinusoidal purity and spectral noise, respectively. I explore how these sonic tokens of purity and impurity are in turn mapped onto concepts of spirituality and corporeality in music of Varèse, Stockhausen, Messiaen, Gubaidulina, and especially George Crumb, whose workBlack Angelsis singled out for a detailed discussion of its timbral processes and their interpretive possibilities.

Between Romanticism and Modernism and Postmodernism: George Crumb’sBlack Angels

This article discusses the use of tonal quotation/pastiche in George Crumb’sBlack Angels(1970) in the context of an analysis of the entire work. I draw from Losada’s work on postmodernism and collage to understand the organization of the quotation/pastiche movements, and I draw from Bass’s work on Crumb to understand the non-tonal pitch structures in the quartet as a whole. But I suggest that the quartet—an unusual combination of palindromic design and goal-oriented, programmatic activity—also engages the paradigms ofErlösung(Darcy) and teleological genesis (Hepokoski), which suggest a link betweenBlack Angelsand the romantic symphonic tradition and which provide a context for understanding the role played by the quotation/pastiche movements in the work.