Just because someone classifies you as avant-garde doesn’t mean your music can’t be fun. Join me today as we celebrate two of music’s more engaging avant-gardists, George Crumb and Luciano Berio.
Crumb, who makes his home in Swarthmore, Pa., near Philadelphia, turns 87 today. Sure, he’s written his share of spooky music, but, like Charles Ives, personal connections and playful juxtapositions are seldom far away. For example, he’s devoted his twilight years to colorful and inventive settings of hymns and folk tunes from his formative years, growing up in West Virginia, which he’s collected into seven cycles for voice and percussion, titled “American Songbook.” These are remarkably effective and affecting works, especially when heard live in concert and the breadth and subtlety of the instrumentation can be fully appreciated.
Be that as it may, what we’ll hear this afternoon are five humoresques, titled “Mundus Canis” (“A Dog’s World”), a musical portrait gallery for guitar and percussion of the Crumbs’ family dogs. Apparently Yoda, a fluffy white mixed-breed adopted from a New York City pound, was especially disobedient.
In his best-known music, Berio had a tendency to work in collages (a term the composer disliked), but he also made groundbreaking use of electronics and extended techniques. There’s none of that in his own set of “Folk Songs,” from 1964. Written for his wife, the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, the songs are mostly drawn from traditions of various countries and cultures, but some of them were actually written by Berio himself.
We’ll also raise a glass to German-Jewish composer and conductor Ferdinand Hiller, a close friend of Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn and Hiller were both directors of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. One of Hiller’s pupils was Max Bruch, who was not Jewish. It was through Hiller that Bruch was introduced to the Yom Kippur prayer “Kol Nidre,” which became the basis for one of Bruch’s most famous concert pieces. Hiller was also the dedicatee of Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
I hope you’ll join me for music of Crumb, Berio, Hiller and more, today from 4 to 7 p.m., on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
PHOTO: George Crumb with “bad dog” Yoda
