Un’intervista con George Crumb su YouTube, registrata nel novembre 2007.

Anna Sale speaks to Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and West Virginia native George Crumb. She spoke to him in November 2007 when he was back in his home state to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Russ Barbour is the video editor and co-producer of this piece. It first aired Dec. 20, 2007, on the program “Outlook” on West Virginia PBS.

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Natale si avvicina e per me le feste comandate sono periodi nefandi e depressi, così cerco di addolcirle con un po’ di musica, magari a tema, ma diversa dal solito.

George Crumb ha scritto questa Little Suite for Christmas per piano solo nel 1980.

Si tratta di un brano dolce e silenzioso, ma nello stesso tempo molto energico, giocato su un dialogo fra suono e silenzio, con eruzioni sonore, lunghe pause e frasi esitanti.
Qui Crumb rinuncia all’amplificazione e agli oggetti inseriti su/fra le corde che usava nel Makrokosmos, ma si concentra sul suono dello strumento, con corde lasciate vibrare, pedali, armonici, risonanze e pizzicati.

Il risultato è contemplativo e affascinante. Un pezzo che mostra come si possa scrivere musica contemporanea ma accessibile e godibile nello stesso tempo.

Questa esecuzione, registrata all’Istituto di Giornalismo e Letteratura di Mosca e messa in linea dall’etichetta Top 40 e dall’Internet Archive, vi permette anche di ascoltare Pavel Dombrovsky, giovane e talentuoso pianista moscovita che, pur avendo solo 24 anni, ha già vinto vari concorsi internazionali e suonato in mezzo mondo.
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George Crumb’s reputation as a composer of hauntingly beautiful scores has made him one of the most frequently performed composers in today’s musical world. From Los Angeles to Moscow, and from Scandinavia to South America, festivals devoted to the music of George Crumb have sprung up like wildflowers.

George Crumb wrote A Little Suite for Christmas for piano in 1980. Approximately 15 min length, this perfect piece of music is so minimal and so energetic at the same time. The main idea of this work is dialogue between sound and silence, which is the fully legitimate member of George Crumb’s music. The long pauses between intensive moments of piano blasting can prepare the listener very well to conceive all musical ideas, and the whole impression is really stunning.

This work, exclusively released by Top 40, is a live recording of George Crumb’s “A Little Suite for Christmas“, performed by Pavel Dombrovsky, young and very talented pianist from Moscow. Though Pavel is only 24 years old, he was already a laureate of many international awards, and performed live in England, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, France, Poland and all over the world.
This act was recorded live at 16th December, during the public performance at Moscow Institute of Journalism and Literature at Moscow.

• George Crumb - A Little Suite for Christmas for piano - streaming audio - mp3

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Art of the States è una iniziativa partita nel 1993 per promuovere la musica contemporanea americana nel mondo.
Si tratta di un archivio che ospita composizioni di autori americani, giudicate importanti e/o interessanti. A partire da questo materiale si realizzano programmi radio distribuiti anche all’estero (un programma mensile su 75 stazioni nazionali e 50 radio estere).
ll tutto, inoltre, è accessibile via internet: le composizioni prescelte si possono ascoltare quasi sempre per intero in RealAudio.
Attualmente gli archivi ospitano 300 composizioni di 200 autori americani anche giovani, per circa 65 ore di musica, ma sono in continua espansione.
Notate anche che non si tratta di una iniziativa statale, ma privata: una associazione non-profit che si mantiene grazie a donazioni (le spese sono minime). I produttori rispondono ai nomi di Joel Gordon e Matthew Packwood.

Da Art of the States trarrò parecchio materiale.
NB: per ascoltare musica da Art of the States dovete avere RealPlayer. Lo trovate qui (anche per mac e linux).
Iniziamo con

George Crumb - An Idyll for the Misbegotten (Images III) (1986)
per flauto amplificato e 3 percussioni
Kristen Halay flauto, Brian Scott, W. Sean Wagoner, Tracy Freeze percussioni

I feel that ‘misbegotten’ [trad: figlio illegittimo, bastardo] well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time. Mankind has become ever more ‘illegitimate’ in the natural world of plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentlessly eroded, and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature’s ‘moral imperative.’
[George Crumb]

Crumb suggests, “impractically,” that the music be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” (Crumb) Over a slow bass drum tremolo, the flute begins its haunting melody, which over the course of the piece includes quotations of Claude Debussy’s solo flute piece Syrinx and spoken verse by the eighth-century Chinese poet Ssu-K’ung Shu: “The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.” Far from a traditionally peaceful idyll, the music’s energy and dynamics gradually rise and fall, with a sense of desolation throughout.

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Tanto per fare un po’ di polemica inutile, mi chiedo che difficoltà ci sia a fare una cosa del genere anche qui. Costa pochissimo. Si tratta solo di riunire una commissione una volta l’anno, mantenere un sito web e chiedere ai compositori di cedere i diritti per la trasmissione via internet. Notate che, negli Stati Uniti l’iniziativa ha vinto il premio ASCAP (la SIAE americana) nel 1997, per l’opera meritoria nella diffusione della musica contemporanea. Di conseguenza, avere un pezzo in Art of the States è diventato motivo di vanto.

Mi chiedo cosa succederebbe qui se chiedessi la stessa cosa ad autori, editori e discografici. Anzi, penso proprio che lo farò, tanto per vedere cosa mi dicono. In fondo questo blog è già una cosa del genere, ma se notate, non c’è quasi mai musica italiana, ma nella maggior parte dei casi è di origine anglosassone.
Questo perché è abbastanza facile trovare musica anglosassone legittimamente messa in rete da qualche organizzazione o dagli stessi autori, così come è semplice ottenere i permessi per brani non ancora in rete: basta inviare una mail e tutti rispondono ringraziando per l’interesse.

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La Fondazione Pulitzer ha messo in linea Black Angels (Images I), quartetto d’archi amplificati di George Crumb, probabilmente l’unico quartetto ispirato alla guerra in Vietnam. È una bella partitura, anche graficamente. I titoli dei movimenti, poi, sono fantastici (mi piace molto il 2.3 “Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura”).
Non credo sarà in linea per molto tempo.

Black Angels (Images I) by George Crumb from the Pulitzer Foundation’s site

movements
I. DEPARTURE

1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects
2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes
3. Lost Bells
4. Devil-music
5. Danse Macabre

II. ABSENCE

1. Pavana Lachrymae
2. Threnody II: Black Angels!
3. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura
4. Lost Bells (Echo)

III. RETURN

1. God-music
2. Ancient Voices
3. Ancient Voices (Echo)
4. Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects

Program Notes (from the author’s site)

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 numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These “magical” relationships are variously expressed; e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. An important pitch element in the work — descending E, A, and D-sharp — also symbolizes the fateful numbers 7-13. At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili.

There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (in the Pavana Lachrymae and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work); an original Sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic; the sustained B-major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (”Day of Wrath”). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the “Devil’s Trill”, after Tartini).

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.

George Crumb - Black Angels (Images I) - members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

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Un lavoro importante di Crumb sono i quattro libri del Makrokosmos (1972-1974). I primi due libri sono per pianoforte solo (amplificato), mentre il terzo (chiamato anche Music for a Summer Evening) è per due pianoforti e percussioni ed il quarto (noto anche con il titolo Celestial Mechanics) per pianoforte a quattro mani.
Il nome di questo ciclo allude ai sei libri pianistici del Microcosmos di Béla Bartók; come il lavoro di Bartók, il Makrokosmos è costituito da una serie di brevi pezzi dal carattere differenziato. Oltre a quella di Bartók, George Crumb ha riconosciuto in questo ciclo influenze di Claude Debussy, sebbene le tecniche compositive utilizzate siano molto differenti da quelle di entrambi gli autori citati. Il pianoforte viene amplificato e preparato sistemando vari oggetti sulle sue corde; in alcuni momenti il pianista deve cantare o gridare alcune parole mentre sta suonando.

Il primo libro, del 1972, ha come sottotitolo “Twelve fantasy pieces after the Zodiac” e infatti i movimenti sono ispirati ai segni zodiacali.

Qui ascoltiamo il primo movimento:
Primeval Sounds (Genesis I) Cancer [G.R.]
(per il significato delle iniziali, vedi le note dell’autore, qui sotto), eseguito da Margaret Leng.

Note di programma dell’autore / Author’s program notes:

The title and format of my Makrokosmos reflect my admiration for two great 20th-century composers of piano music — Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. I was thinking, of course, of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Debussy’s 24 Preludes (a second zodiacal set, Makrokosmos, Volume II, was completed in 1973, thus forming a sequence of 24 “fantasy-pieces”). However, these are purely external associations, and I suspect that the “spiritual impulse” of my music is more akin to the darker side of Chopin, and even to the child-like fantasy of early Schumann.

And then there is always the question of the “larger world” of concepts and ideas which influence the evolution of a composer’s language. While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the “magical properties” of music; the problem of the origin of evil; the “timelessness” of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life (so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler); the haunting words of Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie” (”The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”); and these few lines of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält” (”And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are all falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands”).

Each of the twelve “fantasy-pieces” is associated with a different sign of the zodiac and with the initials of a person born under that sign. I had whimsically wanted to pose an “enigma” with these subscript initials; however, my perspicacious friends quickly identified the Aries of Spring-Fire as David Burge, and the Scorpio of The Phantom Gondolier as myself.

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Un lavoro importante di Crumb sono i quattro libri del Makrokosmos (1972-1974). I primi due libri sono per pianoforte solo, mentre il terzo (chiamato anche Music for a Summer Evening, parte del quale ascoltiamo qui) è per due pianoforti e percussioni ed il quarto (noto anche con il titolo Celestial Mechanics) per pianoforte a quattro mani. Il nome di questo ciclo allude ai sei libri pianistici del Microcosmos di Béla Bartók; come il lavoro di Bartók, il Makrokosmos è costituito da una serie di brevi pezzi dal carattere differenziato. Oltre a quella di Bartók, George Crumb ha riconosciuto in questo ciclo influenze di Claude Debussy, sebbene le tecniche compositive utilizzate siano molto differenti da quelle di entrambi gli autori citati. Il pianoforte viene amplificato e preparato sistemando vari oggetti sulle sue corde; in alcuni momenti il pianista deve cantare o gridare alcune parole mentre sta suonando.

Crumb - from Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III), 5 - Music of the Starry Night (1974), for 2 pianos and 2 percussionists

Program Notes (excerpt):

As in several of my other works, the musical fabric of Summer Evening results largely from the elaboration of tiny cells into a sort of mosaic design. This time-hallowed technique seems to function in much new music, irrespective of style, as a primary structural modus. In its overall style, Summer Evening might be described as either more or less atonal, or more or less tonal. The more overtly tonal passages can be defined in terms of the basic polarity F#-D# minor (or, enharmonically, Gb-Eb minor). This (most traditional) polarity is twice stated in “The Advent” — in the opening crescendo passages (”majestic, like a larger rhythm of nature”), and in the concluding “Hymn for the Nativity of the Star-Child”. It is stated once again in “Music of the Starry Night”, with the quotation of passages from Bach’s D# minor fugue (Well-tempered Clavier, Book II) and a concluding “Song of Reconciliation” in Gb (overlaid by an intermittently resounding “Fivefold Galactic Bells” in F#). One other structural device which the astute listener may perceive is the isorhythmic construction of “Myth”, which consists of simultaneously performed taleas of 13, 7, and 11 bars.

Other notes in english from official site
Altre note in italiano da Orfeo nella rete

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Un brano acquatico ed evocativo questo Vox Balenae composto nel 1971 da George Crumb per flauto, violoncello e piano, tutti amplificati (non c’è trattamento audio; ci si limita all’amplificazione).
Ispirato a una registrazione di canti delle balene, il brano imita e trasfigura i suoni della natura, che divantano materiale da elaborare musicalmente.
C’è anche un aspetto teatrale: i musicisti devono indossare una maschera intesa a cancellare la loro umanità per portarli a impersonare le forze della natura. Inoltre, l’esecuzione dovrebbe avvenire in luce blu.
Di questa composizione Crumb dice:

The form of Vox Balenae (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 instrument and sings into it. This combination of instrumental and vocal sound produces an eerie, surreal timbre, not unlike the sounds of the humpback whale. The conclusion of the cadenza is announced by a parody of the opening measures of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra.
The Sea-Theme (”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 Archezoic (”timeless, inchoate”) and, gradually increasing in intensity, reaches a strident climax in the Cenozoic (”dramatic, with a feeling of destiny”). The emergence of man in the Cenozoic era is symbolized by a partial restatement of the Zarathustra reference.
The concluding Sea-Nocturne (”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 10-note figure. In concert performance, the last figure is to be played “in pantomime” (to suggest a diminuendo beyond the threshold of hearing!); for recorded performances, the figure is played as a “fade-out”.

Geroge Crumb - Vox Balenae (1971) per flauto, violoncello e piano, tutti amplificati.

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