Celebrating an American composer

By Fred Crafts of The Register-Guard.

"Echoes of Time and the River" won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for celebrated American composer George Crumb and "Star-Child" earned him a 2001 Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition, but he believes the piece that stands the best chance for immortality is "Black Angels."

The work is the centerpiece of a three-concert commemorative series during the Composers' Symposium section (Tuesday through July 9) of the Oregon Bach Festival. "Black Angels" was commissioned in 1970 by the University of Michigan, where Crumb had done his doctoral work.

Faced with writing for the school's quartet-in-residence, Crumb admits by phone from his home in Media, Penn., that he "didn't know how to approach that." But he obviously figured it out in producing a masterpiece.

"I ended up with one of the strangest string quartets in the world. It sounded like no other string quartet ever," he says with a laugh. "It was, as far as I know, the first amplified string quartet. It includes extra-instrumental things. In addition to the sounds of the string instruments, they have to play crystal goblets. They vocalize in various ways. They shout and speak numbers."

The work, which will be performed Friday at Beall Concert Hall during a series of concerts in commemoration of Crumb's 75th birthday, has come to be known as the "Vietnam String Quartet." That moniker, says Crumb, was an accident.

"When I was about to finish the piece I noticed that it had pulled in some of the hysteria of that time, which was the Vietnam years," he says. "I superinscribed in there the phrase `In Time of War,' borrowed from Josef Haydn's `In Time of War.' It was just a belated admission that the work was tied to wartime, although that wasn't the original intention."

Long a distinguished composer, Crumb has balanced his composing with teaching - he has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1997. He has received numerous honors, including a Cannes Classical Award in 1998 for best CD of a living composer (for "Echoes of Times and the River'')..

"For me, George Crumb is one of America's greatest composers," says Robert Kyr, composers symposium director and University of Oregon music professor. "He is a visionary whose music is always alive with color, poetry and boundless imagination."

To celebrate Crumb's life and work, Kyr commissioned 13 composers to create music for his 75th birthday.

The composers whose works will be performed during the Friday and Saturday concerts along with Crumb (and his son David Crumb, a member of the UO faculty) are Carol Barnett, Greg Bartholomew, Benedikt Brydern, Anne Guzzo, Kyle Kindred, Mei-ling Lee (of the UO), Paul Lombard, John McKinnon, Seung-Ah Oh, Rebecca Oswald (of the UO), Suzanne Sorkin, Stefan Weisman and Wang Xi.

As a gauge of Crumb's importance, Kyr offers this assessment: ``During the 1970s, when contemporary music was often criticized by audiences as being inaccessible, George Crumb gave listeners some new music to cheer about.''

But Crumb simply says he composes because he cannot help himself.

"Some people express it as you have to have a little fire in your belly that makes you want to write music. Maybe it amounts to dyspepsia.''