![]() ![]() “I was rewriting composers I loved,” he said. His career as a composer began traditionally enough. “I prefer to do it the slow, old-fashioned way,” he said. He believed that written music should look the way it sounds, meaning that some of his published scores consist of the staves going round in circles rather than in the straight lines that most musicians are used to.Īlthough he claimed to have no particular skills as a calligrapher, Crumb eschewed the use of a computer, meticulously drawing the scores himself over many weeks and months. “Expel breath violently, like a sneeze,” was a typical instruction.Ĭrumb also sought to challenge the norm in other ways. Fritzi, the second and most memorable of these miniatures was a brown male dachshund who, according to the composer, had “a pronounced impetuosity and irrepressibility of spirit”.Ĭopious footnotes in his scores would explain to the performer the dizzying array of effects he sought, such as singing into a cardboard tube, walking slowly offstage while performing or playing glasses tuned with water. Closer to home, Mundus Canis (1998) for guitar and percussion was written in homage to a canine quintet who were at various times part of the Crumb household. Like Debussy before him with Balinese music, Crumb was drawn to the music of other cultures, using harmonies from Borneo, Africa and South America. The first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects”, was used in the soundtrack of the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. It became one of Crumb’s best-known compositions and was recorded by the Kronos Quartet. “Truly, at times it sounds like the devil’s own work,” Bowie said later. ![]() Black Angels, a stinging anti-war string quartet written in 1970 in response to Vietnam, “scared the bejabbers” out of the pop singer David Bowie when he first heard it. There was sometimes a dark side to his music. ![]() There were several books of madrigals based on Lorca’s work, while in Ancient Voices of Children (1970) Crumb introduces tiny sounds on mandolin and harp as well as an exotic array of Tibetan prayer stones as somewhere off-stage a soprano intones Lorca’s verse. He was also influenced by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, whose work he said was loaded with musical images and images of nature. Long before it became fashionable he was seizing on environmental themes, such as in Vox Balaenae (“Voice of the Whale”, 1971), a piece that weaves real whale calls into a musical fabric that is performed by three players, often masked, on electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano, and which became his signature tune. George Crumb, who has died aged 92, was an avant-garde American composer best known for his use of unusual timbres, different performing techniques and unconventional forms of notation in the late 1960s and early 1970s nothing in the realm of art music caught the mood of New Age spirituality so perfectly as his quietly haunting works.Ĭrumb’s music leapt over the boundaries of concert-hall performance, incorporating elements of theatre and often challenging the way that most people expect musical instruments to be played. ![]()
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