George Crumb

This article is about the composer George Crumb. For other people, see George Crum .

George Henry Crumb ( October 24, 1929 in Charleston , West Virginia – February 6, 2022 in Media , Pennsylvania ) was an American composer .

Life

Crumb's mother was a cellist in the city's symphony orchestra . He received his first clarinet lessons at the age of seven from his father, a bandleader and clarinetist. He later switched to the piano. His first attempts at composition in 1939/40 were based on European Romanticism - Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. Crumb was classically trained but was also skilled in light music, playing in jazz combos through high school.

He studied at Mason College of Music and Fine Arts, at the University of Illinois , at the University of Michigan with the American composer Ross Lee Finney and with Boris Blacher in Berlin. He later taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and from 1965 to 1997 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia .

Among his students were u. a. Jennifer Higdon , Uri Caine , Christopher Rouse , Osvaldo Golijov , and Gerald Levinson .

In addition to numerous other awards and grants (such as the BMI Student Composer Awards ), he received the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Echoes of Time and the River . He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, and the Academy of Arts (Berlin) in 1993. He died at his home in Pennsylvania in February 2022 at the age of 92.

plant

Crumb achieved a richness of tonal color through the use of unusual vocal and instrumental techniques. Most of his vocal works - including his four madrigal collections Madrigals (1965 and 1969), Night of the Four Moons (1969) and Ancient Voices of Children (1970) - set verses by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca to music . His string quartet Black Angels, Thirteen images from the dark land (1970) for electrically amplified instruments refers to the Vietnam War with the score entry in tempore belli and can be considered a pinnacle of modern quartet literature. In A Haunted Landscape (1984) for electronically amplified piano and large orchestra , he created unusual moods through the use of instruments such as Chinese temple gongs, steel drums or dulcimers and moments of silence.

He used structural techniques for notation, so his scores are also graphic works of art. “The notation should be a communicating element, as far as that is possible. The pieces, written in a circle, also run in circles musically.”

literature

• Steven Bruns: George Crumb and the alchemy of sound . Colorado College Music Press, Colorado Springs 2005, ISBN 0-935052-07-0 .
• Don Gillespie: George Crumb: profile of a composer . Peters, New York 1986, ISBN 0-938856-02-2 .
• David Cohen: George Crumb: A Bio-Bibliography . Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut 2002, ISBN 0-313-31887-5 .
• Jörg Krämer: George Crumb , in: Composers of the present . Edited by Hanns-Werner Heister and Walter Wolfgang Sparrer, edition text + kritik , Munich 1992 ff., in the Munzinger archive ( start of article freely available)

web links

• Literature by and about George Crumb in the German National Library catalogue
• George Crumb's website
• George Crumb at the Internet Movie Database

itemizations

1. ↑ Vivien Schweitzer, George Crumb, Eclectic Composer Who Searched for Sounds, Dies at 92 , nytimes.com, February 6, 2022, accessed February 7, 2022.
2. ^ ^{a b} Martin Demmler: The Composers of the 20th Century . Reclam, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-15-010447-5 , p. 81-84 .
3. ↑ Paul Terse: George Crumb . In: Hermann Danuser, Dietrich Kämper, Paul Terse (eds.): American music since Charles Ives . Laaber, Laaber 1987, ISBN 3-89007-117-1 , p. 327 f .
4. ↑ Bio, discography, works, audio examples in: Musique - Compositeurs contemporains
5. ↑ Pulitzer Prize 1968
6. ↑ Kronos Quartet , booklet excerpt from the Nonesuch album (1990)
7. ↑ Entry George Crumb at mphil.de