Tag: David Bowie

In New York the other night at Old John’s Luncheonette, prior to catching a performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 8 with the New Conductors Orchestra, I was asked by my companion for the evening, the filmmaker H. Paul Moon, off the top of my head, for the quintessential piece of Halloween music. With my back to the wall, I blurted out George Crumb’s “Black Angels.”

This spinetingling piece, for electric string quartet, has lived in my head and fired my imagination for some 40 years. The first time I ever encountered it was on George Diehl’s “Music Through the Centuries,” on Philadelphia’s late, lamented classical music station, WFLN. Diehl, one time program director of the station, who also provided program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra, engagingly introduced Crumb’s otherworldly, often hair-raising piece by placing it in context, deftly illuminating its structure, and supplementing it with recordings of other works referenced within. This was fascinating radio. I have no hesitation in crediting “Music Through the Centuries” as a principal influence on my own radio show, “The Lost Chord.” So, thank you, George Diehl, wherever you are!

Sure, “Black Angels,” subtitled “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land,” was conceived as a reaction to the Vietnam War, but real-life horrors aside, this is one haunting, magical piece. It’s not for nothing that it was embraced by David Bowie, that it inspired David Harrington to form the Kronos Quartet (after he too encountered it on the radio), and that William Friedkin included a passage in “The Exorcist.”

There are references to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” Tartini’s “The Devil’s Trill,” and the medieval plainchant “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) – quoted in so many works by Berlioz, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others, as well as making an appearance under the opening credits of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

But it was not Crumb’s intention to evoke jeering demons, necessarily. The composer saw it 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 – implied 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.”

Its thirteen movements are divided into three larger groups.

I. Departure

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

II. Absence

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

III. Return

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

Each player is required to play a variety of instruments and to employ extended techniques.

Violin 1

• maraca
• 7 crystal glasses
• 6″ glass rod
• 2 metal thimbles
• metal pick (paper clip)

Violin 2

• 15″ suspended tam-tam and mallet
• contrabass bow (for use on tam-tam)
• 7 crystal glasses
• 6″ glass rod
• 2 metal thimbles
• metal pick (paper clip)

Viola

• 6 crystal glasses
• 6″ glass rod
• 2 metal thimbles
• metal pick

Cello

• maraca
• 24″ suspended tam-tam, soft and hard mallets
• contrabass bow

Of course, Crumb was more than simply a “Halloween” composer, though his music can be creepy as hell. Many of his chamber works, especially those that employ percussion and voice, are models of economy and elegance. I always think of him as a kind of spiritual descendent of Charles Ives, in that many of the curious sonorities he explored, especially in the context of his song settings, seem to suggest truths beyond our workaday concerns.

That said, here’s some sensational Crumb to play when you’re alone with the lights out.

Crumb died last year at the age of 92. Remembering him, blackly, on his birthday.

“Black Angels” in concert

“Black Angels” with score

“A Haunted Landscape”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWa4eXg-Jdo

“Star-Child” (Watch out for that “Musica Apocalyptica,” beginning at 11:47!)

“Ancient Voices of Children” in concert (“Ghost Dance” at 17:55)

George Crumb was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1968, for “Echoes of Time and the River,” and a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition in 2001, rather appropriately, for “Star-Child.” All or most of his music is available in the “Complete Crumb Edition,” an ongoing project on Bridge Records, Inc.