Music of the Starry Night

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.
Between 1972 and 1979 Crumb composed four volumes of piano music titled Makrokosmos (paying debt to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos). The first two volumes take inspiration from zodiacal references; it is here that Crumb created some of his most stunning graphic scores (see example below). By contrast, Makrokosmos III, subtitled Music for a Summer Evening, is ensemble music for two amplified pianos and percussion—a further reference to Bartok, whose Sonata for such forces helped lead the way. Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation, Makrokosmos III premiered at Swarthmore College in 1974. The final work in the set, Music of the Starry Night, opens with an epigraph from Austrian poet Rainer Maria von Rilke’s haunting and ephemeral Book of Images:

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

And in the nights the heavy earth is falling
from all the stars down into loneliness. We are
all falling. And yet there is One who holds this
falling endlessly gentle in His hands.

(c) Jason Stell