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Crumb is also a developer of extended instrumental and vocal technique. Crumb can be considered part of the timbralists and the timbralism movement his music usually fit in with the school of timbralists who modified existing acoustic instruments (if you’ll remember, there were two schools of timbralists: those who created new sounds electronically, and those who produced sounds by experimenting with existing acoustic instruments Crumb belongs in the latter camp)(Cope 50). Some of his most successful students include the composers Christopher Rouse, Jennifer Higdon and Osvaldo Golijov, one of my personal favorite composers of all time.Īs a composer, Crumb was influenced by Webern and his pointilistic serialism, which can be clearly seen in Crumb’s music. After graduating, Crumb landed a gig and taught composition at the University of Colorado and then later the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained for over 30 years retiring in the last decade. It was written in June, 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania. His very next piece was Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) (Cohen 12).
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In 1971, Crumb won an International Rostrum of Composers Award from UNESCO for Ancient Voices of Children. Black Angels for Electric Sting Quartet is probably Crumb’s most famous piece. Crumb is one of the most decorated composers of our times he won a Pulitzer Prize for Echoes of Time and the River: Four Processionals for Orchestra in 1968. For his doctorate, Crumb studied at the University of Michigan with Ross Lee Finney, and earned his DMA in 1959. He obtained a masters degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Bachelors from the Mason College of Music in Charleston in 1950. George Crumb was Born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929. Thus this piece still has connection with Western Art music in the sense that it is a program music.George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae or, Voice of the Whale (translated from Latin) Without the program aspect of this piece, I would very like go to a different direction when try to make sense out of this piece. My own interpretation of the piece is that this piece’s emotion and tension has some connection with the very concepts of “Black Angel”, “Darkness”, and“Profanity”. The title, Black Angel, and its subtitle, “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land”, gives suggestions for the audience to establish their own listening experience according to the music and to the implication of the program. Program music is a tradition of the Western Art Music, fully developed during the Romantic period. For instance, I would like to label this music as a program music. These new techniques add new feelings into this piece.īlack Angel has some underlying connections with Western Art Music traditions. For instance, in some part, Crumb utilizes “scooping effects”, in which the high violins play fast glissandos to sound like crying and yelling in other parts, Crumb also uses violins to imitate a flute by bowing their strings with the back of the bow (the wood). These techniques produce a violent and grotesque quality for the piece. While in Beethoven’s String Quartet the violinists play their instruments with conventional standards, Crumb developed several techniques producing sounds that we did not hear previously. It reminds me of the extreme expressionist in the modernism era.Ĭompared with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Movement II, Black Angel does not have a form, a rhythmic pattern. Personally I really appreciate the frank and unconstraint anxiety the piece displays. The use of instrument is also challenged in this piece, with the violins being performed in unconventional way that will make a traditional violin teacher turn pale. It sounds like an experiment of dissonance intertwining with irregular beats in the rhythmic line. With exceptions of few fragments, the piece has no clear and consistent motifs, themes, or melody.
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Therefore, this piece is highly free and depends on the interpretation of the performers. Many parts in this work are not written in bar lines, making it impossible to have strict meters. Crumb basically gives each of these elements a new meaning in his work, Black Angel. At the beginning of the course, we learned basic musical elements to be rhythm, meter, tempo, pitch, melody, dynamics, instrumental textures, harmony, tonality and form, etc. Crumb’s work challenges almost every aspect of the definition for music.