Listening Through the Life of George Crumb

It’s rare for a composer to quickly find a broad audience. It usually takes years, or even decades, and sometimes doesn’t happen at all.

The American composer George Crumb, though, who was born in 1929 and died two years ago, reached wide prominence within a decade. He found his musical voice in the early 1960s, and by 1968 had won the Pulitzer Prize, not to mention a bevy of grants and fellowships. Perhaps most important, his premieres were seen as genuine events, such as the pandemonium that was said to have greeted “Ancient Voices of Children,” his 1970 setting of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca for soprano, boy soprano and chamber ensemble.

What explains Crumb’s near-immediate assimilation to the musical mainstream?

There was, first and foremost, his dizzying sonic imagination. Crumb took the extended techniques that originated with Henry Cowell and John Cage and exploded them, plying instruments for virtually any sound they would yield and creating a vast new timbral universe.

His scores — created by hand and themselves works of art — are rife with exacting instructions to performers: how to thread paper between the strings of a harp, or how string players should use the thimbles on their fingers. In “Ancient Voices,” there is an 86-word note instructing the pianist how to use a chisel (Crumb specifies the size) to create a glissandos on the piano strings that last well under a minute. He insisted that his extended techniques were not mere sound effects, as some listeners believed, but essential elements of musical expression.

In addition, Crumb was largely untouched by the rift between serialists and tonal composers that split the music world in the 1960s and ’70s. His writing was so original, it seemed to sidestep that whole fiasco. Indeed, there was something both timely and timeless about Crumb’s music. His pieces had titles that evoked distant worlds and had deep, primordial resonances, but they were unmistakably of their day. In “Black Angels,” one of his most famous works, symmetries, numerology and religious allusions in the score were accompanied, Crumb said, by “vibrations from the surrounding world, which was the world of the Vietnam time.” The score is inscribed as having been completed on “Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli),” or “in time of war.”