Notes for: July 19, 2011
George Crumb is one of the most respected of the generation of American composers who reached maturity in the third quarter of the 20th century. He has received grants and awards from the Fromm, Coolidge, Guggenheim, Koussevitzky and Rockefeller Foundations and from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1968 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Echoes of Time and the River, an orchestral work, and in 1971, the International Rostrum of Composers (UNESCO) Award for his entire body of compositions.
Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia, into a musical family – his father was a band leader, his mother, a cellist, and his brother, a flutist. He studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston, and earned advanced degrees at the Universities of Illinois and Michigan. Teaching appointments followed at the Universities of Colorado and Pennsylvania. For many years he has been composer in residence at Pennsylvania.
Crumb is best known for his settings of verse by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, particularly in his Ancient Voices of Children and four books of Madrigals. In addition, he has composed a large number of instrumental works, using unusual instruments or combinations of instruments, and producing an enormous range of instrumental effects and sonorities. He has also used such unconventional means as electronic amplification, tuned water glasses, quotations from other composers and masks for the performers.
Vox Balaenae, composed in 1971, was inspired by a tape recording by a marine scientist of the sounds emitted by the humpback whale. Crumb was struck not only by the quality of the sounds themselves but also by the natural phenomenon of the huge animals singing as they swam through the ocean. Music might be defined as a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse,” he has written, and this seemed to apply to whales as well as to human beings.
To depict the sounds of the whale and its marine environment, Crumb scored the work for flute, cello and piano, all electronically amplified. He added color by calling on the flutist to sing and play simultaneously, the cellist to tune his or her strings off their normal pitch, the pianist to strum the instrument’s strings pizzicato, and the cellist and flutist to strike crotales (antique cymbals).
Further, he directed the performers to wear either black half-masks or visor masks. “The masks,” he explained, “by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent symbolically the powerful, impersonal forces of nature, that is to say, nature dehumanized.” To provide a further sense of the whale’s ocean surroundings, he suggested deep blue stage lighting.
Crumb himself has described the music as follows:
“The form of Voice of the Whale is a simple three-part design, consisting of a prologue, a set of variations named after the geological eras, and an epilogue.
“The opening vocalise, marked in the score, ‘Wildly fantastic, grotesque,’ is a kind of cadenza for the flutist, who simultaneously plays his or her instrument and sings into it. This combination of instrumental and vocal sound produces an eerie, surreal timbre, not unlike the sounds of the humpbacked whale. The conclusion of the cadenza is announced by a parody of the opening measures of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra [also used in the film 2001]. The sea theme, marked in the score, ‘Solemn, with calm majesty,’ is presented by the cello in harmonics, accompanied by dark fateful chords of strummed piano strings.
“The following sequence of variations begins with the haunting sea gull cries of the Archeozoic era, marked, ‘Timeless, inchoate,’ and, gradually increasing in intensity, reaches a strident climax in the Cenozoic era, marked, ‘Dramatic, with a feeling of destiny.’ The emergence of man in the Cenozoic era is symbolized by a restatement of the Zarathustra reference.
“The concluding Sea Nocturne, marked, ‘Serene, pure, transfigured,’ is an elaboration of the sea theme. The piece is couched in the luminous tonality of B major, and there are shimmering sounds of antique cymbals played alternately by the cellist and flutist. In composing the Sea Nocturne I wanted to suggest a larger rhythm of nature and a sense of suspension in time. The concluding gesture of the work is a gradually dying series of repetitions of a ten-note figure. In concert performance the last figure is to be played in pantomime to suggest a diminuendo beyond the threshold of hearing.”