George Crumb

Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and began to compose at an early age. In 1947 he studied at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. He majored in music at the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts (subsequently subsumed into the University of Charleston), where he received his bachelor's degree in 1950. He obtained his M.Mus. at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1952 and then briefly studied as a Fulbright fellow at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin before returning to the United States to study at the University of Michigan, from which he received a D.M.A. in 1959.

Crumb has earned his living primarily from teaching. His first teaching job was at a college in Virginia, before he became professor of piano and composition at the University of Colorado in 1958. In 1965 he began a long association with the University of Pennsylvania, becoming Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1983.[5]

In 1995, Crumb was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal.[6]

Crumb retired from teaching in 1997, though in early 2002 he was appointed with David Burge to a joint residency at Arizona State University.[7] He has continued to compose.

Crumb has been the recipient of a number of awards, including a 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his orchestral work Echoes of Time and the River and a 2000 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for his work Star-Child.[8]

Crumb's son, David Crumb, is a successful composer and, since 1997, assistant professor at the University of Oregon. George Crumb's daughter, Ann Crumb, was a successful actress and singer. She recorded his Three Early Songs for the CD George Crumb 70th Birthday Album (1999), and had also performed his Unto the Hills (2001). She died at her parents' home on October 31, 2019.[9]

After initially being influenced by Anton Webern, Crumb became interested in exploring unusual timbres. He often asks for instruments to be played in unusual ways and several of his pieces, although written for standard chamber music ensembles, such as Black Angels (string quartet) or Ancient Voices of Children (mixed ensemble), call for electronic amplification.[10] Crumb defines music as "a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse."[11]

In the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb's music filled a niche for more sophisticated though still conservative concertgoers. His music fell between neoclassicism, which was perceived as outmoded, and the more radical music of the avant garde. Although his music from this period exhibits some novel features, it owes more to traditional techniques than to the more experimental areas of the avant-garde.[12] In this period, Crumb shared with a number of other young composers regarded as being under the umbrella of "new accessibility" a desire to reach out to alienated audiences. In works like Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Crumb employed theatrical ritual, using evocative masks, costumes, and sonorities.[13] In other pieces he asks players to leave and enter the stage during the piece, and has also used unusual layouts of musical notation in a number of his scores. In several pieces, the music is symbolically laid out in a circular or spiral fashion.[14]

Several of Crumb's works, including the four books of madrigals he wrote in the late 1960s and Ancient Voices of Children, a song cycle of 1970 for two singers and small instrumental ensemble (which includes a toy piano), are settings of texts by Federico García Lorca. Many of his vocal works were written for the virtuoso mezzo-soprano singer Jan DeGaetani.

Black Angels (1970) is another piece which displays Crumb's interest in exploring a wide range of timbres. The piece is written for electric string quartet and its players are required to play various percussion instruments and to bow small goblets as well as to play their instruments in both conventional and unconventional ways. It is one of Crumb's best known pieces, and has been recorded by several groups, including the Kronos Quartet.[15]

Crumb's most ambitious work, and among his more famous, is the 24-piece collection Makrokosmos, published in four books.[16][17] The first two books (1972, 1973), for solo piano, make extensive use of string piano techniques and require amplification, as dynamics range from pppp to ffff; the third, known as Music for a Summer Evening (1974), is for two pianos and percussion; the fourth, Celestial Mechanics (1979), is for piano four-hands. The title Makrokosmos alludes to Mikrokosmos, the six books of piano pieces by Béla Bartók; like Bartók's work, Makrokosmos is a series of short character pieces. Apart from Bartók, Claude Debussy is another composer Crumb acknowledged as an influence here; Debussy's Preludes comprise 2 books of 12 character pieces, whose titles appear at the end. Crumb's first two books of Makrokosmos for solo piano contain 12 pieces, each bearing a dedication (a friend's initials, however he also wittily dedicates a piece to himself) at the end. On several occasions the pianist is required to sing, shout, whistle, whisper, and moan, as well as play the instrument conventionally and unconventionally. Makrokosmos was premiered by David Burge, who later recorded the work.[18]

During the 1990s Crumb's musical output was less prolific, but since 2000 Crumb has written several works subtitled American Songbook. Each of these works is a set of arrangements of American hymns, spirituals and popular tunes: Crumb originally planned to produce four such volumes,[19] but in fact he continued to produce additional sets after the fourth (The Winds of Destiny) was written, with the seventh volume of the series (Voices from the Heartland) being completed in 2010. Typically these settings preserve the familiar tunes more-or-less intact,[20] but the accompaniments for amplified piano and percussionists use a very wide range of musical techniques and exotic sounds. In his most recent compositions, which have the subtitle Spanish Songbook, Crumb returns to settings of Lorca.

Crumb's works are published by the C. F. Peters Corporation. Recordings of Crumb's music have appeared on many labels, including several LPs issued by Nonesuch Records in the 1970s. More recently, Bridge Records, Inc. has issued a series of CDs, the "Complete Crumb Edition".

• George Crumb: The Voice of the Whale (1976). Directed and produced by Robert Mugge. Interviewed by Richard Wernick. New York, New York: Rhapsody Films (released 1988).
• Bad Dog!: A Portrait of George Crumb (2009). Directed by David Starobin. Interviews with the composer and performances of Apparition, Three Early Songs and Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik. Released on DVD by Bridge Records (BRIDGE 9312).

• Bass, Richard. 1991. "Sets, Scales and Symmetrics: The Pitch-Structural Basis of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I & II". Music Theory Spectrum 13, no. 1:1–20.
• Kennedy, Michael (2006), The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 985 pages, ISBN 0-19-861459-4
• Steinitz, Richard. 2001. "Crumb, George (Henry)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Steenhuisen, Paul. "Interview with George Crumb". In Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-88864-474-9

• Official home page
• Crumb's bio from Naxos
• George Crumb interview by Bruce Duffie, August 27, 1988
• Art of the States: George Crumb four works by the composer
• George Crumb: Voice of the Whale plays Vox Balaenae with a synchronized display of its score
• An interview with George Crumb in September, 2009 by Marc Medwin
• "George Crumb biography" (in French). IRCAM.
• Recordings of premiere performances of The Yellow Moon of Andalusia and Yesteryear (revised 2015) San Francisco Contemporary Music Players