Black Angels, for electric string quartet

One of America’s most acclaimed composers, George Crumb (b. 1929) has been a leading voice in recent avant-garde music. His spiritual and esoteric projects—Crumb delves deeply into mystical philosophy—help keep him among the most frequently programmed living composers. Crumb taught two generations of young musicians while professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many awards are a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy. In the late 1960s Crumb began experimenting with electrified instruments, which came to fruition in Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land (1969-70). In addition to electrification, the string quartet texture is altered by Crumb’s inclusion of certain percussive instruments or objects, which the musicians periodically employ.
Broadly organized as a triptych, the thirteen individual sections of Black Angels last about one minute apiece and carry evocative designations, including “Night of the Electric Insects,” “Devil Music,” and “Ancient Voices.” It is rife with numerology: each section features some combination of 7 and 13 in terms of pitch content, rhythm, total number of measures, etc. Toward the end of his work, such technicalities became less significant to Crumb than the work’s overall emotional impact. At a deeper level, Black Angels symbolizes opposing forces of good (the cello, referred to as “the voice of God”) and evil (the violin representing the devil’s music). The piece seemed to resonate with social upheavals surrounding the escalated Vietnam conflict, the ways that war was reshaping America at home, and the sheer catastrophe of lives lost. These feelings prompted an additional subtitle, “Music in a time of war.” Black Angels opens with an intense burst of dissonance but quickly becomes more withdrawn. Listeners will note quotations from the plainchant Dies Irae and Schubert. This is music that vacillates between the tortuous and the angelic, opposing poles that aptly captured Crumb’s view of the world in 1969.

(c) Jason Stell