George Crumb-Introducrion Of

George Crumb

Biography

George Crumb was born on October 24, 1929 in Charleston, West Virginia. Interestingly enough, his was on the same day as infamous the stock market crash in Wall Street that was later deemed as "Black" Tuesday. His father, George Crumb Sr., was a clarinetist, and his mother, Vivian Crumb, was a cellist. George Junior studied piano and composition as a young child. Among his many activities at the time, young George often performed in a trio with his both of his parents, as well as studying music in the library. (Since the Crumbs were professional musicians, Mr. Crumb had a library of almost half a thousand musical scores).

Crumb went on to earn his bachelor's degree at Mason College in his birthplace. He earned his Master's Degree at the Illinois University, studying composition under Eugene Weigel. However, his most influential instructor of composition was Ross Lee Finney, under whom he finished his Doctorate degree in the University at Michigan. . In 1949, at the age of twenty, Crumb married Elizabeth May Brown, and they have had three children together. After a while, at the age of twenty-five, Crumb went to Germany for a year to study on a Fulbright fellowship, this time working with Boris Blacher at the Hochschule fÑŒr Musik in Berlin. A few years after that, he received his first teaching assignment as a music theory instructor at the Hollins College in Virginia. Then, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Crumb taught piano performance. This lasted until Crumb was of thirty-five years of age, in 1964.

At this time, besides his occupation as a teacher, his music started to gain a sense of the identity with which he was to become famous with. Notable among these significant compositions include the "Five Pieces for Piano," dedicated to his fried David Burge, who also a faculty member at the University. Crumb also served as a "composer-in-residence" at the Buffalo Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, in SUNY College. Then, by the age of 37, in 1965, Crumb joined the faculty of the University at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A long span of several years saw him working there, first as an associative professor and later promoted to the title of full professor. From 1983 up until 2002 saw the composer in the title of "Annenberg Professor of Music." In May 1997 he retired from his teaching post.

In the period from 1960 to the early 1970s, Crumb started to gain world recognition as a result of a number of published works that he had composed. This resulted in his music being performed, recorded, and studied all over the western world ever since. He has received numerous international prizes for the works he had composed, including the George Crumb is the recipient of numerous awards, including: the Elizabeth Croft fellowship for study, Berkshire Music Center, 1955; Fulbright Scholarship, 1955-6; BMI student award, 1956; Rockefeller grant, 1964; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1967; Guggenheim grant, 1967, 1973; Pulitzer Prize (for Echoes of Time and the River), 1968; UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers Award, 1971; Koussevitzky Recording Award, 1971; Fromm grant, 1973; Member, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1975; Ford grant, 1976; Prince Pierre de Monaco Gold Medal, 1989; Brandeis University Creative Arts Award; Honorary member, Deutsche Akademie der Kunste; Honorary member, International Cultural Society of Korea; 6 honorary degrees; 1998 Cannes Classical Award: Best CD of a Living Composer (BRIDGE 9069); and 2001 Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition (Star-Child).

Among the ensembles who have performed Crumb's music includes, the Kronos Quartet, the Aeolian Chamber Players, the Philadelphia Chamber Players, Orchestra 2001, Ensemble Modern, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and many others. Nr, Crumb usually travels frequently abroad the United States mainly to lecture at music festivals where his music is performed and studied.

Compositional Process

Crumb believes that although his work is mainly from the period of time after the revolution of tonality in Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone System, he still had much in common with much of the early twentieth century, and has spoken that his greatest influences as to this time period are Debussy, Mahler, Bartok, and Ives. Interestingly enough, Crumb's process of sitting down and writing his own music actually comes from in his earliest years, especially the Appalachian river valley where he grew up. This environment, Crumb remarks, "influenced his particular inner ear or echoing acoustic". This acoustic is a frequently found icon of the music of George Crumb - there are amplification of passages, real imitation of echoes, long silence periods, voice calls among certain animals, and an incredible inventory of seemingly limitless different nuances play an significant role in the way he composes. For example, he recently completed work, Unto the Hills, has their root in the Appalachian folk songs.

Crumb admits that another influence on his development is actually the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, which he first became acquainted with in the 1950's. Crumb felt himself pulled by this dramatic, surrealistic imagery and while at the same time having both optimistic and sad settings. Thus, it is no surprise that Lorca' s have been the influence of many of his (Crumb's) finest and most remarkable works, one of which, the Ancient voices of Children, made Crumb famous after receiving an award for it.

Black Angels

The inspiration of the piece Black Angels came from the Vietnam War. Indeed, the work was written in March of 1970, around the middle of the war and also one year before the release of the classified Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The quartet for electric strings caused up to a year of Crumb's time in writing the music. As George Crumb himself remarked in an interview in 1990, "Things were turned upside down. There were terrifying things in the air ... they found their way into Black Angels."

The work employs a monumental use of shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, the use of gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. Many of these uses have not been unconventional for Crumb, as he regards them as his trademarks in many of his compositions as part of the process of writing his music. When asked, Crumb had remarked that he did not have the interest of writing a textbook work. He had from the beginning to create something different than a "standard" classical string quintet he found his inspiration