Contemporary music is often perceived to be imbued with esoteric and abstract meaning, leaving many concert goers thinking, “Well, I suppose that was good, but I didn’t understand it!” As a music student at Swarthmore College, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, there seemed to be a culture of intellectual competition in how obscure musical meaning could be, either intended or interpreted. During my sophomore year, I took a seminar on Contemporary American Composers, where we read all about a particular composer during the week leading up to the seminar meeting, and then the composer in question would attend our seminar to lecture, if they wished, and answer our questions. I remember Milton Babbitt’s visit as the ultimate in the intellectual interpretation exercise. The music we looked at of his was strictly serial, with numerical and mathematical patterns and iterations buried in the score. Someone asked him how he would instruct a trombone player to play a certain section of a piece with feeling, and his response, as I remember it, was that this was an irrelevant question.
Another week, George Crumb came to visit our seminar. I immediately identified with his contrasting approach to composition, as it was refreshingly down to earth, and based on what seem to me to be aesthetic creativity. He told us about all the instruments he had lying around in his home and how he would tinker around and try out different combinations to see what timbres sounded good together. Only then would he sit down to actually compose at the piano.
The following year, I had the opportunity to play in a recording session of George Crumb’s “Dream Sequence (Images II)” with members of Orchestra 2001, the resident contemporary music ensemble at Lang Concert Hall, on the Swarthmore campus. The instrumentation for this piece is prepared piano, violin, cello, percussion, and “off-stage glass harmonica,” a set of pitched wine glasses. The percussion set includes Japanese temple bells, a Thai wooden buffalo bell, crotalés, sleigh bells, maraca, and suspended cymbals. Crumb utilized the piano’s range, colors, and special properties for potential acoustic resonance, such as having the pianist hang paper clips on particular strings, so that those notes had a metallic buzz to them, and reaching into the body of the piano and scraping credit cards along the strings. The instruments alternate, sometimes overlapping, with flickers of movement.
Surrounding these explorations of timbre and resonance are the floating and eerie shimmers of wine glasses, where the players run a wet finger around the rim of the glass causing vibrations in the glass itself to create a crystalline drone. (You can try this at home!) Playing a few together, at different pitches gives the whole piece a hypnotic atmosphere of silvery grays and greens. My role, along with two friends, was to keep one or two wine glasses each resonating with its haunting and space pervading tone for the duration of the piece.
Crumb had specific glasses that he brought, labeled with the particular pitches, and lines indicating the level to which they should be filled with water. Apparently, great care had been taken to find glasses with the right responsiveness, timbre, and clarity, and to find the precise water level that would be in tune with the main instruments. The pitch is determined by the size of the glass and the amount of water it contains, and the loudness depends on the speed of the player’s finger. It is quite difficult to create a completely steady dynamic, and the subtle variations, layered over a few different pitches, creates an amorphous but fluctuating cloud of sound where each pitch floats, as if breathing, in and out of focus.
I was quite intimidated to be in the same concert hall as this great American composer, not to mention to be involved in a session recording his composition. But he proved to be more concerned with getting the right feeling out of the performances of the piece, with each gesture rich with movement, rather than every note in the right place. Crumb is refreshingly straightforward, attentive to aural and visual pleasure and detail, seeming to prioritize personal response and meaning over buried symbolism of esoteric and abstract theories, though his pieces are certainly rich with discoveries that are not heard, such as the beautiful and artistic scores themselves.
My experience of playing with Crumb showed this, but it is also evident in a story told to me by my wonderful flute teacher at the time. She was rehearsing An Idyll for the Misbegotten, his piece for amplified solo flute and a three-person percussion section. She had prepared the piece technically and musically, but there was one passage where she was not sure about the particular interpretation Crumb had in mind. When she asked him about it, he replied in his warm, slow drawl, “Well, Pam, how do you think it should go?”
As a performer used to being at the mercy of composers and conductors, being given interpretive artistic reign like this was a wonderful, though scary, gift of freedom. Fortunately, George Crumb is open to the creative variations of live performance and collaborative aesthetic exploration.
Further Information
George Crumb’s official website: www.georgecrumb.net
Orchestra 2001: www.orchestra2001.org
