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 George Crumb is an enigma, even by the standards set by such musical radicals as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. The sound of his music is unique and instantly identifiable, and his scores look more like architectural schematics than music. Although he is a quiet and unassuming man, his music is capable of evoking demons, the sounds of machines and wild animals, and the spirits of the dead. Only in the 20th century would a composer have the temerity to use such instruments as toy pianos, musical saws, amplified instruments and even a "glass harmonica" in a serious piece of music, and furthermore, make music with them that so reflects nature, that during a performance, one might think they are hearing what it would sound like to pour an ocean or build a blade of grass from scratch. This is the accretion of Crumb's accomplishments.
Both of Crumb's parents were musicians. His father, George Sr., was a trained clarinetist, and had been performing since the days of the "Crumb family orchestra" (a chamber group formed by George Sr.'s parents that occasionally performed at resort hotels at the turn of the century). He was principal clarinetist in the Charleston Symphony, conducted a Shriner's band, and also worked as a music copyist and arranger. Vivian Crumb played the cello in the Charleston Symphony for 25 years, many of them as principal. George Henry, Jr. was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on October 24, 1929, right near the brink of the great stock market crash. He was the first of 2 children: his younger brother William was born a few years later in 1932.
George Jr. was surrounded by music his whole young life: whether it was a concert of Sousa music conducted by his father, a symphony concert, some local country music at a local church with banjos and mandolins, or simply his parents practicing, he was inundated by a universe of diverse musical colors. Music very quickly and easily became the focus of the boy's life. His father gave him clarinet lessons beginning at age seven, and he added piano to his studies two years later. He was thus eligible for family chamber music sessions, playing duets and trios on clarinet with his father and mother, and later accompanying either or both of them on piano. His brother William was also inevitably enlisted on flute.
George Jr.'s father had acquired an expansive catalog of music scores through his sister (who had studied violin in Berlin), and so the boy had access to literally hundreds of masterpieces. As his abilities as a musician developed, he began taking the scores to the piano, where he would diligently work out all the parts. He began modeling "imitations" of some of these works, especially works by Mozart, Brahms and Debussy, as early as age 11, and had accrued quite a portfolio by the time he entered high school in 1944. Crumb had no interest in the regular high school curriculum, but had begun composing seriously, receiving performances of two of his works by the Charleston Symphony. He met a girl there at Charleston High, a fellow pianist named Elizabeth May Brown (Liz), and they fell in love, attending Mason College together after graduation. They got married in 1949, and had their first child, Elizabeth, a year later.
In 1951, the Crumb family relocated to Illinois, so that George could continue his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied composition with Eugene Weigel. Crumb was also very interested in foreign languages, and studied Spanish, French, German and Italian, never learning to speak them, but gaining the ability to read them somewhat. He composed much, but was never quite satisfied with the results, and he would have to wait a decade to find what he was searching for. He completed his masters degree at Urbana-Champaign in 1952.
In 1953, Crumb relocated his family again, this time to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, to do doctoral work. He held teaching fellowships there, and studied composition with Ross Lee Finney. Finney's style of composition, and especially his notation, had a profound influence on Crumb. This is also when Crumb first discovered the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca: a fellow composer had used one of his poems as text for a piece, and Crumb was bewitched by it. An ample percentage of Crumb's eventual output would be on texts by Lorca, or is inspired by the images in Lorca's work.
Two of Crumb's works from his time in Michigan have been published: his Sonata for solo cello, and his dissertation, Variazioni for large orchestra. Though many composers and conductors told him at the time that the Variazioni was unplayable, it has since received numerous successful performances. The Sonata is not representative of Crumb's mature style, but it is valuable to have an example of the kind of work he was doing before he found his niche, especially considering the profoundly singular nature of that niche (the work does not contain the kind of idiomatic notational "quirks" found in Crumb's later scores, nor does it possess a particularly "programmatic" nature; i.e., the work does not necessarily tell a story that could be told without the music).
Crumb began his teaching career at Hollins College in Virginia, where he taught music theory in 1958-59. However, because of his skill as a pianist, he was hired at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught piano until 1964. He and Liz had their second child, David Reed, in 1962. That same year, George met David Burge, a fellow pianist and teacher at Colorado, who asked Crumb to write a piece for him to perform. Unbeknownst to Burge, Crumb was about to achieve his metamorphosis: the resulting work, Five Pieces for Piano, was filled with radical techniques, such as playing inside the piano and using paper clips to pluck the strings, and the score looked like nothing Burge had ever seen. He learned the work nonetheless, and his performance got the gamut of reactions: some laughed, some were shocked, some were insulted, and some could only sit and marvel at the ingenuity being displayed. Crumb followed this composition with Night Music I in 1963, for soprano, piano/celesta and percussion, and Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) for violin and piano in 1964, solidifying his new direction.
After a residency at the Buffalo Center for the Creative and Performing Arts in New York, Crumb began looking for teaching opportunities on the East Coast. When a position on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania opened up in 1965, Crumb applied for it, and was hired. He moved his family to Media, Pennsylvania, where they had their third child, Peter Stanley, that same year. He completed his Madrigals, books I and II (both on texts by Lorca and written for soprano with different instrumental combinations) in the fall, and Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965 the following year. These works achieved reasonable success, especially considering the obscurity of the name of the composer in question, and made the larger musical "population" aware of his output.
In 1968, Crumb received the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral work Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II: Four Processionals for Orchestra), completed in 1967. The performance of this piece calls for such uncharacteristic orchestral events as lowering a vibrating gong into a tub of water (this effect bends the pitch of the instrument), and having selected players of the orchestra move ritualistically about the stage during the performance. Such affectations were not new to Crumb's canon, but had rarely been seen on the symphonic concert stage! Crumb followed the success of this work with several more chamber works on texts by Lorca: Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death in 1968 (which marks Crumb's first use of amplification for the instruments), Madrigals books III and IV, and Night of the Four Moons (written during the Apollo 11 mission), all finished in 1969.
1970 was a very important year for Crumb: 2 of his most important works were completed in that year. The 1st, Black Angels (Images I: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land), for amplified string quartet, was inspired by U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and utilized numerology in the selection of pitch and rhythmic material, and also in the overall organization of the work. His 2nd work of that year, Ancient Voices of Children, is generally considered to be the most important work of Crumb's "Lorca cycle", and is written for soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp, electric piano, and percussion. These two significant works were followed the next year by Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), scored for three amplified instruments (flute, piano and cello), and inspired by recordings of the sound of humpback whales singing to each other in the deep ocean. This work employs a host of preparations for the piano's strings, and also requires the flutist to "sing" into the flute while playing, in an effort to imitate the sound of the singing whales. In addition, the three players are required to wear half-masks, to "impersonalize" the performance, and project the notion of "nature dehumanized".
From 1971-74, Crumb concentrated on works for piano. These works, Makrokosmos Volume I and Volume II (1972 and 1973), make use of imagery found in the zodiac, and also show Crumb's fondness for the piano music of Chopin and Debussy. The name "Makrokosmos" pays homage to the didactic piano works of Bartók, the six books of the Mikrokosmos (1926 and 1932-39). Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III), 1974, is also an homage to Bartók of a sort: the scoring, for two pianos and percussion (two players), mirrors the instrumentation of Bartók's famous Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937). All three of these works hold significant places in modern piano repertoire, utilizing the extended techniques first used by Crumb in his Five Piano Pieces, but embellishing them and taking them to an altogether new level.
After this long period of prolificacy, Crumb's output slowed, producing a new work every one to three years. Among the works he composed in the late 70s and 80s are Star-Child, 1977, his second major orchestral work, Celestial Mechanics (Makrokosmos IV) for amplified piano, four hands (1979), Pastoral Drone (1982), for organ, and An Idyll for the Misbegotten (Images III), for amplified flute and percussion (three players) (1986).
George Crumb completed only 3 works in the 1990s. The last of these, Mundus Canis (A Dog's World, 1998), for guitar and percussion, actually contains an Allegro movement, a scarce occurrence in Crumb's oeuvre; it is interesting that this frenetic excerpt should come so late in the composer's career, so close to possible retirement from composition. He retired from teaching in 1997, at the age of 67.
Hope lingers, among George Crumb's many devotees, that the composer will grace the world with another composition. In the meantime, Crumb continues to receive the appreciation of the music world at large: in 2001, his Star-Child received a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (this recording is available on the Bridge label, and is from the album entitled 70th Birthday Album). For all the contributions he has made to the advancement of the technique of music notation, he is a modern legend. He will also be remembered for his many extended timbral contributions, from his techniques for preparing a piano, to the use of a myriad of new "instruments" for the creation of new sounds. Though Crumb has no immediately identifiable "heirs" musically, his impression is undoubtedly felt throughout the world of music, and will continue to be long after he has left us. It is hoped that this moment will not come for many decades.
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