![]() ![]() Today is Crumb’s 90th birthday! Above, an excerpt from Crumb’s score below, a performance by Ensemble InterContemporain. This according to “George Crumb and Black angels: A quartet in time of war”, an entry in Music in the USA: A documentary companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 pp. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption).” The image of the ‘black angel’ was a conventional device used by early painters to symbolize the fallen angel.” The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity-God versus Devil-implies more than a purely metaphysical reality. Black Angels is probably the only quartet to have been inspired by the Vietnam War. There were terifying things in the air they found their way into Black Angels. “ Black angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. Program Notes (from the author’s site) Black Angels (Images I) Thirteen images from the dark land. In the spring prior to its premiere, the nation had witnessed several devastating events surrounding the Vietnam War, which led to his inscription “finished on Friday the thirteenth, March 1970 ( in tempore belli).” Crumb’s liner notes for the work’s first recording provided further context: These techniques, along with his use of the concert stage as theater, come together in one of his best-known works-the string quartet Black angels, initially titled A quartet in time of war. In the 1960s and early 1970s George Crumb explored new sonorities on conventional instruments and embedded quotations from historical Western classical music into new compositions. ![]()
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