Month: February 2022

It’s always a pleasure to hear one’s work played well but even more so in the continuing era of Covid-19.  Yesterday I enjoyed listening to a rehearsal of my duo, Incantation, by violinist Euna Kim and violist William Lane at the beautiful and historic Haw Par Music.William is the founder and Euna a member of Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, a group doing more than any other to promote contemporary music in Hong Kong.  Yesterday’s gathering was a bit of a test run for what we all hope will be a future performance of this work once the world opens up a bit more.

Incantation was premiered in 2013 at the Aspen Music Festival, where I was one of ten Fellows working with Steve Stucky, George Tsontakis, and a venerable group of visiting faculty composers.  It seems both like yesterday and a lifetime ago.  The title evokes the repeated phrases, spells, rituals—these simple syllables—which have the power to stir emotions and also spirts.  In my music, at first these spirits take the form of repeated gestures and later raging scales and clusters.  Are these perhaps the same thing?

In advance of our rehearsal—and also during and following it—I made some revisions to the piece.  I rarely revise my work beyond a few small details and notations, but in this case I felt the need.  Somehow the several days of work I did a decade after “finishing” the piece—while only about 15% different—seem to make the piece around 30% better.  This is what we call musical math.

George Crumb (1929-2022). Often imitated. Never duplicated. We feel your music in our bodies as much as we hear it through our ears. From some primal state, it communicates with us directly, the way we experience Nature or the Spirit Realm: being alone in the woods and encountering an animal or a sudden rustling of trees.

The quote that I read or heard you say that I come to again and again was when you spoke of a very difficult period when you were unable to compose for a couple years and before you had found the sound(s) we now know as yours: “I couldn’t allow myself to write what had already been written” …or something very close to that. Is it too bold for me to believe I understand you?

Of course you had retired from Penn by the time I arrived, but with four of your students as my own teachers—Rouse, Ricardo, Jim, and Jay—your voice and wisdom were never far: “Crumb used to say…” and then your gentle cadence. Has there been an American composer whose actual speaking voice has been more widely imitated?

One of the blessings of being in Philly for 14 years was hearing the premieres of a few of your American Songbooks. These were huge pieces, dozens of percussion instruments on stage. Your sounds penetrate us. They haunt us. Beautiful dreamer…

When I say you’re a genius, I mean that when we study your music, we can see how it fits together, but that tells only part of the story. When the sound stops and the applause finish, we’re still left grasping as we ask: how did a man imagine this world?

Rest in peace, George Crumb. A Genius From West Virginia.