The American composer George Crumb studied at Mason College of Music in Charleston and received his Master’s degree at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana under Eugene Weigel. He continued studying under Boris Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin from 1954-1955 as a Fulbright scholar, and received a DMA in 1959 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor after studying with Ross Lee Finney. He first taught theory and analysis at Hollins College, Virginia before being appointed to teach piano and composition at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1958. In 1965, he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the Annenberg Professor of Humanities in 1983. Although he retired in 1997, in 2002, he took on a joint residency at Arizona State with David Burge. Among Crumb’s most prominent students are Margaret Brouwer, Osvaldo Golijov and Jennifer Higdon. He has received a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 and a Grammy Award in 2001.

Crumb’s music is distinguished by its emphasis on musical allusion and often involves aspects of theater. His works frequently call for unusual instrumental combinations and often require musicians to produce sounds in innovative ways. His vocal music adds new tonal colors to the traditional musical palette by requiring singers to click, sigh, laugh, and yell to create dramatic effects; his instrumental music often requires speaking, singing or shouting as a part of the performance. Crumb’s theatrical effects sometimes even require the musicians to wear specific clothing like masks, to leave and reenter the stage or to play from offstage.

Initially influenced by the music of Anton Webern, Crumb soon became interested in exploring unusual timbres and extended instrumental techniques. His varied works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, or theatrical elements and are frequently introspective. With musical quotation or allusion, he gives some pieces a sense of history or place for example, by quoting music from Bach to 19th century hymns, folk music, and even non-Western music. One of his most characteristic sound worlds, however, is the static one of sound events; his works in that category include pieces titled Nocturnes, Night-Music, Sleep, and Apparitions.

Crumb composed Vox Balaenae (“Voice of the Whale”), in 1971 for the New York Camerata. Crumb explains, “The work was inspired by the singing of the humpback whale, a tape recording of which I had heard two or three years previously. Each of the three performers is required to wear a black half-mask (or visor-mask). The masks, by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent, symbolically, the powerful impersonal forces of nature (i.e. nature dehumanized). I have also suggested that the work be performed under deep-blue stage lighting.” Vox Balaenae, scored for electric flute, electric cello, crotales, and electric piano, was finished two years later.

He continues, “The form of Voice of the Whale is a simple three-part design, consisting of a prologue, a set of variations named after the geological eras and an epilogue.

“The opening Vocalise (marked in the score: ‘wildly fantastic, grotesque’) is a kind of cadenza for the flutist, who simultaneously plays his instrument and sings into it. This combination of instrumental and vocal sound produces an eerie, surreal timbre, not unlike the sounds of the humpback whale. The conclusion of the cadenza is announced by a parody of the opening measures of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra.

“The Sea-Theme (‘solemn, with calm majesty’) is presented by the cello (in harmonics), accompanied by dark, fateful chords of strummed piano strings. The following sequence of variations begins with the haunting sea-gull cries of the Archezoic (‘timeless, inchoate’) and, gradually increasing in intensity, reaches a strident climax in the Cenozoic (‘dramatic, with a feeling of destiny’). The emergence of man in the Cenozoic era is symbolized by a partial restatement of the Zarathustra reference.

“The concluding Sea-Nocturne (‘serene, pure, transfigured’) is an elaboration of the Sea-Theme. The piece is couched in the ‘luminous’ tonality of B Major and there are shimmering sounds of antique cymbals (played alternately by the cellist and flutist). In composing the Sea-Nocturne, I wanted to suggest ‘a larger rhythm of nature’ and a sense of suspension in time. The concluding gesture of the work is a gradually dying series of repetitions of a 10-note figure. In concert performance, the last figure is to be played ‘in pantomime’ (to suggest a diminuendo beyond the threshold of hearing!); for recorded performances, the figure is played as a ‘fade-out.’”

The work reflects the tradition of composers evoking the sounds of the nature. In the Renaissance, Josquin imitated the chirping of a cricket in his motet El Grillo. Beethoven included the sounds of nature in his Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral, Mendelssohn included donkeys braying in his Overture to the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Strauss included bleating sheep in Don Quixote. In the 20th century, Messaien, who much influenced Crumb, studied the sounds of birds to reproduce in his own music. The selections in this concert illustrate the continuity of this theme

Franz Schubert (1797—1828)
Quintet for Piano and Strings, in A Major, Op. 114, D. 667
Die Forelle  (“Trout”)

The optimism of Schubert’s early adulthood is reflected in this work, one of the most popular of his chamber compositions, composed when he was only twenty-two years old.

Schubert had spent the summer before in Hungary and Austria, and the landscape of those two countries, many historians say, pervades this work. During the course of his journey, Schubert was asked to make his song, Die Forelle (“The Trout”), available to chamber music enthusiasts, and he responded with this work, in which he made the fourth movement a set of variations on the melody of the song.

Schubert and most of his friends were on the fringes of the great musical community of Vienna, but one of them, Johann Michael Vogl, was slightly different. Thirty years older than the composer (and destined to outlive him by twelve years), he had been educated in the law at the University of Vienna and acclaimed as one of the leading singers in the city’s opera theaters. The two met around 1816, and Vogl immediately began to sing Schubert’s songs in his programs. For a long time Vogl could be counted as Schubert’s only friend in “the establishment,” but influential as he was, all his efforts did little to advance the young composer’s public career. Their friendship was as warm and close as if they were contemporaries and equals. In the summer of 1819, Vogl joined Schubert on his walking tour of Upper Austria. In Vogl’s hometown, they spent a great deal of time making music with Vogl’s friends, among whom was an amateur cellist, Sylvester Paumgartner, who asked Schubert to write a quintet for piano and strings like the one by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) whose music was then popular. Legend, or perhaps myth, has it that Schubert conceived the work as a whole and then, instead of writing out the music for all five instruments in a score from which they would be copied for the individual players, he simply wrote out each of the four string parts, one after another, and played the piano part by heart. Another account says he created a score that he kept for himself and from which he had another set of parts copied after his return to Vienna at summer’s end. In truth, he probably began the composition in Steyr, finished it in Vienna after his return in September, and then sent it to Paumgartner.

In the piano quintets written later in the 19th century (those by Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák, and Franck are the principal survivors), the four stringed instruments are almost always the conventional string quartet of two violins, viola and cello. The Hummel model required Schubert to use only one violin and to add a double bass, which can give a wonderfully rich, solid, strong foundation to the ensemble and sometimes makes it sound almost orchestral.

The Trout Quintet opens with a vigorous Allegro vivace, a cheerful movement in which the instrumental voices interweave with great felicity. The difficult, independent parts for the strings say much about the skills of provincial, amateur Austrian musicians in those days. The second movement, a noble Andante, looks backward to the quiet of the 18th century slow movements, but is marked by the more striking changes of key Schubert employed. The third movement, a powerful Scherzo, Presto, has surging rhythms Schubert conjured up from the dance.

The fourth movement, Andantino, gives the quintet its name, and is the most well known and popular movement of the work. A set of variations on one of Schubert’s best-known songs, Die Forelle (“The Trout”), a poem on the unlikely subject of trout fishing, forms its base. A Romantic reading would interpret this work as one centered on the subject of nature deceived by art. First, the violin makes a straightforward announcement of the melody against a background of the other strings. The piano leads the first variation played against arpeggios in the strings, the second goes to the cello against exciting arabesques in the upper register of the violin. The third variation is allotted to the double bass against running passages, greatly elaborated on the piano. The melody, until this point, has not changed, but the next two richly inventive variations wander further from the original and present it with changes of register, dynamics, harmony, melodic outline, rhythm and even the type of accompaniment. The penultimate variation has a minor tonality, and the last shows Schubert at his grandest. Then he returns to the original mood of the song, having the melody accompanied by the rippling figure of the original lively, rhythmic piano accompaniment at a slightly faster tempo, Allegretto.

The Finale, Allegro giusto, All’ Ongarese, in which Schubert seems to recall his summer in Hungary the year before, brings the quintet to a cheerful close with another theme and variations. The subject of the melody has utmost simplicity yet aristocratic refinement. The variations include an embellishment of the melody, a change to triplet rhythm in the accompaniment, a new subject placed over the harmonies of the first melody, and then the original theme this time placed against florid arabesques.

Notes are copyrighted by Susan Halpern, 2008.