The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-13)

E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022

classical music

music circles through the middle

of the 20th century, and was

practiced by such composers as

John Cage, Cornelius Cardew,

Iannis Xenakis and Cathy Berbe-

rian.

And while any musical score

makes for a curious document —

part manual of a piece’s inner

workings, part map of its terrain

— Crumb’s were uniquely idio-

syncratic, immediately identifi-

able as his. Not just because their

staves swirl into dizzying spirals,

assume runic shapes and radiate

from the center of the page like

sound itself, but because of their

hand-hewn humanity.

Various movements of the

sprawling “Makrokosmos” take

seemingly impossible shapes —

“Spiral Galaxy” from Book I curls

into a nautilus of notes, and

“Agnus Dei” from Book II fa-

mously takes the form of a peace

sign. “Ancient Voices of Chil-

dren,” a 1970 orchestral work

based on the poetry of Federico

García Lorca, sprawls across the

page like the schematics of a

futurist machine. The opening

pages of “Black Angels” resemble

a row of rooftops spiked with

radio antennae — you half expect

choppers to emerge from the

margins.

“I have to pretend that you live

forever,” Crumb said in a 2020

interview, “because it takes so

much time.”

Crumb recounted his first ex-

posure to a musical score —

Beethoven’s “Egmont Overture”

(Op. 84) — and the impact it had

on his young understanding of

the art of composing. (His clari-

netist father and cellist mother

played in local orchestras when

he was growing up and flooded

his home with music.) But the

unique magic of a well-penned

score is a pleasure anyone can

enjoy.

If you’d ever like to lose an

afternoon listening with your

eyes, the Twitter account Music

Notation is Beautiful (@Nota-

tionIsGreat) assembles scores

from every imaginable era: Scans

of the 16th-century Lambeth

choirbook mingle with the chaot-

ic futurist diagrams of Sylvano

Bussotti. And for reliably Crumb-

ier (and occasionally NSFW)

specimens of experimental scor-

ing, there’s Threatening Music

Notation (@ThreatNotation),

which is precisely what it says on

the tin.

Score Follower also is a de-

lightful time-suck opportunity

for the score-curious, with an

ever-growing archive of digitized

new music notation available on

YouTube, Twitter and TikTok

(where they sometimes post tran-

scription attempts for beloved

TikTok sounds, like a trumpet

submerged in gelatin.

As for Crumb’s scores, it’s diffi-

cult to pinpoint just what it is

about them that speaks so clearly

to me. Like him, I’m a poetry guy,

and have always been fascinated

by the way words on the page are

merely a starting point for the

making of meaning.

When I examine the manu-

scripts of my favorite poets, I

experience a similar thrill, a voy-

euristic peeking-under that can

offer all kinds of unexpected rev-

elations. The handwriting of Em-

ily Dickinson (those overlong

dashes, the words fanning across

the page like the seeds of a

dandelion) is a far different ani-

mal from the prim, tidy poems we

encounter on the printed pages of

anthologies. The strikethroughs

and marginalia of Sylvia Plath’s

manuscripts can deliver multiple

monologues, showing us all that

the finished poem leaves unsaid.

The doodles of Tennyson reveal

the poet’s mind running over the

edges of his poems.

In the same way, Crumb’s

scores offer us a way to access the

composer that our headphones

might not. They also recast him

not just as a composer, but also as

an artist — and maybe even a

poet. (It’s hard for me to scan

passages of “Echoes of Time and

the River” and not see stanzas

strewn across the page.)

For those listeners wary of

“new music,” averse to the un-

hummable or otherwise uneager

to subject themselves to the ex-

periments of others, Crumb’s

scores can provide not just a lie of

the musical land, but also the

reassuring presence of the com-

poser’s hand, there to lead you

forward.

I like to think of Crumb’s

scores as directions to the impos-

sible — his staves stretching like

tethers between two worlds.

In George

Crumb’s

scores,

composition

and poetry

BY MICHAEL ANDOR

BRODEUR

I

would love to tell you what

the music of George Crumb

sounds like, but you’d save

some time just by opening a

window.

Crumb, a native of Charleston,

W.Va., who died Feb. 6 at his

home in Media, Pa., at age 92, was

a celebrated composer who spe-

cialized in conjuring unexpected

yet strangely familiar sonorities:

the clang of a hammer, the creep

of a mosquito, the ting of a crystal

tumbler, the hover of helicopters.

The music of Crumb, a true

avant-gardist in an era with

scarcely any avant left to garde,

dispensed with classical conven-

tions but also embraced beauty,

the natural world and the un-

reachable realms beyond it.

Through amplification and alter-

ation, he transformed the raw

materials of the orchestra — a

piano prepared with paper clips,

a double bass played with a mal-

let — to create music as con-

cerned with the churn of the

cosmos as with the knurling of a

thimble.

I could detail the clangorous

ritualism of “Echoes of Time and

the River,” Crumb’s orchestral

suite that won the Pulitzer Prize

in 1967 and that directs its play-

ers to move about in a choreogra-

phy of slow processionals. I could

pull apart the strands of Debussy

and Bartók that he coiled into

amplified piano wire in his four-

book suite based on the Zodiac,

“Makrokosmos” (1972-1979). I

could try to convey the shadows

of Schubert that barely color

“Black Angels” — Crumb’s 1970

piece (marked in tempore belli,

i.e., in time of war) for amplified

string quartet, tam tam gongs

and bowed crystal goblets. Or I

could try to reduce the sound of

his 1977 “Star-Child” (orchestrat-

ed for 47 players and two choirs

and requiring four conductors) to

little marks on paper, which can

do only so much.

But when I learned of his death

— announced by his label, Bridge

Records, now some 20 volumes

into its “Complete Crumb” series

— I found that my memories of

the composer weren’t so much

led by the particular and peculiar

sounds of his music as by his

unique vision of it — his scores,

which I can only describe as

music for the eyes.

Crumb considered the art of

musical notation his sole parallel

talent to composing, referring to

it as “musical calligraphy.”

“I just think music should look

the way it sounds,” he told an

interviewer in 2016.

Crumb’s scores, meticulously

hand-drawn on oversize sheets of

paper, might come off at first as

representative of a wave of ad-

venturous “graphic notation”

that swept through experimental

The late avant-gardist

captured the sound

a nd vision of music

EDITION PETERS GROUP, NEW YORK

ROB STAROBIN

EDITION PETERS GROUP, NEW YORK

FROM TOP: The score to the “Spiral Galaxy” movement of George Crumb’s

four-book suite “ Makrokosmos,” based on the Zodiac; the composer George

Crumb, who died Feb. 6 at his home in Pennsylvania; and the “Agnus Dei”

movement from “Makrokosmos.”