George Crumb. West Virginia Music Hall of Fame – Class of 2007
David Bowie wrote an article for Vanity Fair magazine in 2003 entitled “Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie”. In it he selected 25 albums from his collection of 2,500 LPs, focusing on his “greatest discoveries” and “record buying memories”. He claimed listening to any of his selections “could change your reputation”, and “bring you a new high-minded circle of friends”. The eclectic list includes records by James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Syd Barrett, and Toots & The Maytals. Also on the list is a recording by West Virginia, born and bred, contemporary composer, George Crumb. The album is Black Angels, from 1972.
According to Bowie:
“I bought this in New York in the mid-70s. Probably one of the only concert pieces inspired by the Vietnam War. But it is also a study in spiritual annihilation. I heard this at a dark time in my life. It scared the bejeebers out of me. At the time, Crumb was one of the new voices in composition, and Black Angels one of his most chaotic works. It’s still hard for me to hear this piece without a sense of foreboding. Truly, at times, it sounds like the devil’s own work.”
On a spring night in 1947, three members of the Crumb family, of 212 Greenbrier Street, Charleston, WV drove a short distance to the Charleston Municipal Auditorium, the home of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra (CSO), for an evening of musical entertainment.
But the Crumbs were not to be spectators on this night. Father George, Sr. and mother Vivian were professional musicians with the CSO, and tonight they would be giving the premiere performance of a piece called “Poem for Orchestra”, written by a talented 17-year old composer, who happened to be riding with them to the auditorium. George Jr. was about to hear his music played by the CSO with his father playing clarinet and his mother in the cello section.
Crumb has pointed to this evening as a pivotal moment in his career. He now had confidence in his abilities and decided to pursue music as a livelihood. After graduating from Charleston High School in 1947 he enrolled in the nearby Mason College of Music and Fine Arts.
If we revisit this 1947 scene in Charleston from today’s historical perspective, it’s interesting to note what has transpired since that time and how it has impacted “the arts” in West Virginia.
The Charleston Symphony Orchestra playing at the Municipal Auditorium has evolved into the West Virginia Symphony playing at the Clay Center.
The Mason College of Music and Fine Arts was later absorbed by Charleston’s Morris Harvey College which has now become The University of Charleston.
And young George Crumb would go on to become one of a select few to win both a Pulitzer Prize for Music (1968) and a Grammy (2001). Not to mention creating music that could scare the “bejeebers” out of Pop Music legend David Bowie.
Oh, and the Crumb family home site at 212 Greenbrier Street? It is now the location of the West Virginia Cultural Center. The site was chosen for its connection to George Crumb. In 2007 he returned to Charleston to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. The ceremony was held at the Cultural Center on the site of his boyhood home.
When George Crumb returned to West Virginia in 2007, he gave an interview to West Virginia Public Television that was conducted at the WV Cultural Center, built on the site of Crumb’s boyhood home.. He was asked an interesting question. “There’s so many influences that get fused into your work, when you think about sounds that connect you back to West Virginia, what are those sounds?”
His well thought out answer was even more interesting. “I used to express it that every composer inherits an ‘acoustic’, and that acoustic is natural, and it comes from the place the composer grew up. I always thought the Kanawha River Valley represented a kind of echoing reverberant acoustic, and that, in fact, describes my music pretty well. For example, a desert upbringing, or a New York City acoustic would be quite different than what I heard lying in my bed at night as a child in Charleston, West Virginia, in a home located on this very site.”
He went on to remember the haunting sounds of the Kanawha River at night, bouncing back and forth between the hills. Tugboats would blow their horns and the sounds would hover, linger and dissipate. This fired his imagination and when he became a composer, he was interested in incorporating these kinds of sounds into his music. He said. “I guess that would be the stamp of West Virginia in my music. I feel that this acoustic was structured into my hearing, so to speak, and thus became the basic acoustic of my music. That peculiar echoing was something my ear was attuned to, and it informs all of my work.”
It seems that as a child, these sounds of the Kanawha River Valley were hardwired into him as a composer, and he had no choice but to return to the sound world of his West Virginia youth.
The birth of George Henry Crumb, Jr. on October 24, 1929, was not exactly front-page news in Charleston, West Virginia. The main headline in the Charleston Gazette regarding that ‘Black Thursday’ was “Stock Values Tumble $50,000,000 a Minute as Market Collapses”.
As we have established, Crumb’s father, George Crumb, Sr. was a professional clarinetist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra (CSO). He also was a music copyist, arranger and occasional conductor of the pit orchestra for silent films. His mother Vivian, was a musician as well, playing cello with the CSO. There was no dearth of music in the Crumb household. George and his younger brother William, who played flute, would join their parents and the entire family would often play chamber music in the house.
In addition to playing music, Crumb was introduced to scores and reading music at an early age. As a music copyist and arranger Crumb, Sr. often had scores that he was working on around the house and Crumb, Jr. would later credit his interest in the visual aspect and his precise hand in part to viewing the careful work his father did on scores. He started composing very early, at around the age of 10 or 11. He has described those pieces as “somewhat in the style of Mozart”.
Crumb attended Charleston High School from 1944 to 1947. After graduating he stayed in Charleston and enrolled at the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts from 1948-1950, earning a Bachelor of Music degree. Next it was a Master of Music degree from the University of Illinois, followed by a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan. From 1965 to 1997, he served as a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1968, Crumb was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Echoes of Time and the River: Four Processionals for Orchestra, commissioned by the University of Chicago for its 75th anniversary and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Among the unusual sonic devices used in this piece is the rhythmic intoning of the West Virginia motto ‘‘Montani semper Liberi.’’
“Black Angels” (1970), one of Crumb’s best-known works (This is the David Bowie selection), and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his “imaginative eclecticism”. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles.
Crumb’s many settings of poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca include Ancient Voices of Children, which won the Koussevitzky and UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers awards in 1971.
His Star Child received a 2001 Grammy Award for best classical contemporary composition.
Although Crumb’s music abounds in its use of exotic sounds and instruments, such as Tibetan prayer stones, African mbira, and Japanese temple bells, his West Virginia roots are evident in his frequent use of the mandolin, sometimes with bottle-neck technique, as well as musical saw, banjo, and hammered dulcimer. Crumb’s imaginative musical scores are characterized by meticulous notation, incongruous juxtapositions, new performance techniques, and highly refined timbral nuances.
This was acknowledged in his New York Times obituary of February 6, 2022, which opened with: “George Crumb, a composer who filled his works with a magpie array of instrumental and human sounds and drew on the traditions of Asia and his native Appalachia to create music of startling effect, died on Sunday at his home in Media, Pa. He was 92.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING – by the author.
There is a vast amount of George Crumb’s music available on Spotify, Youtube and other streaming sources. This author finds his music extremely challenging, but ultimately rewarding.
Here’s a link to “The Best Works of George Crumb” from the BBC. I encourage you to explore the amazing music of George Crumb. George Crumb’s best works: explore the experimental composer through the finest recordings of his music – Classical Music (classical-music.com)
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