How Boulez blanked George Crumb

william osborne says:

A tribute my wife, Abbie Conant, wrote about George. He touched many people. There are a number of tributes on Facebook, many interesting to read.

“We are very sad because William’s teacher and mentor, George Crumb, one of the most original voices in American music, died yesterday at 92. His presence touches almost every measure of music we have created for the last 45 years. A warm, gentle, generous person, he all but took William under his wing, an impoverished student from New Mexico who pretty much just showed up at his door.

“He emanated something magical from his eyes, something silvery that made it clear what was behind them, an inexplicable world of sound, a Lorcian mystery like looking into the eyes of a nocturnal bird. And all the time he was as down home as a person could be, soft-spoken with a pleasant West Virginian accent which somehow didn’t align after performances of hypnotic works like Ancient Voice of Children” or the “Macrocosmos.” His chimeral presence suggested an odd combination of Groucho Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and your favorite grandpa. He was so unique and yet so immersed in the grand European traditions of music like the four Bs: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bartok. One could barely mention a work that he couldn’t start playing by memory on the out of tune piano in his home studio where William took his lessons. He loved the music of Mahler and lived in a similar universe where present world sounds merged with haunting sonic memories to create a kind of timelessness. His music was either hated or loved, summarily dismissed, or enthusiastically received.

“We have so many cherished memories like when we worked with him on the big trombone solo of his orchestral work “Star Child” while he was composing it. Or when he brought his daughter Ann into his studio to sing Colo Porter songs for William. Or showing him how to use aluminum foil pie plates as mutes to create the shimmering antiphonal trumpet sounds used in “Star Child.” Or once when he made us breakfast after we spent the night at his house and he said, ‘The first thing you need to know about frying an egg is that you need a lot of grease.’ It is little known that he loved chemistry. He had a closet full of chemicals and like to make bombs he would explode in the forest.

“He had a way of teaching that seldom told students what to do. Instead, he often spoke in short hints and riddles like oracles that would move William to think more deeply. Music was something for him so ephemeral. He described it as “a system proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse” –almost as if it were something unattainable. He once told a journalist, ‘I haven’t yet written the kind of music I would like to write in my heart of hearts. I sense that maybe that’s the human condition; maybe one never does, in fact.’ Goodbye George. A part of our heart has left the world.”

music lover says:

Boulez premiered Crumb´s Star Child in 1977 with the New York Philharmonic.A recording of the event appeared on the orchestra´s in house label

Anon says:

“He was a shy, soft spoken man with a brush moustache, a whimsical sense of humour and no desire for self-promotion. He shunned Manhattan, preferring to teach two generations of composers in Philadelphia.”

Thank you, Norman, for this captivating description. For those of us who’ve enjoyed playing his music but never knew much about him, these words mean a lot.

The incident with Boulez is telling – a great anecdote which will take its place in the urban legends of music history. I do agree, though, with a previous commenter that the news of Mr. Crumb’s death should have been the focus of the headline.

But then, who knows? George Crumb never did things by the book and might have actually appreciated the offbeat title to his obit here . . .

David K. Nelson says:

It always seemed to me that Boulez was the sort of calculating musical thinker who based every judgement on the conviction that there was one (and only one) inevitable progression involved in the history of composition — just as there is only one way to correctly complete a jigsaw puzzle — that mandated that to be respectably “modern” you had to be at the head of the line and nowhere in the middle of it, much less occupy a back bench. It was a theology and a true believer does not interpret theology, at least not knowingly. It was an either/or litmus test that was applied with rigor to all and everyone.

Even Schoenberg would fail that test.

And when Boulez rendered his blanket judgement about American music I have a feeling he was thinking of the entire wing, or branch, of really American music that adhered to no school and had no location on his all-important line of progress; I’m thinking of composers such as Harry Partch, Henry Brandt, Henry Cowell, Michael Sahl, Lou Harrison. and at least in some of his works that I am most familiar with, George Crumb. They were not engaged in even playing the same game in the opinion of a Boulez, much less playing by the same rules.

And it wasn’t like composing as they did was done to curry favor with the audience.

I would agree that Boulez’s judgements and preconditions have been pretty much set aside in the fullness of time. He’d be bewildered at where we are now. Everything he “knew” to be so told him otherwise.

But as long as there are good musicians who admire his music, and there are, some of it will live on, even if it is “just” the Piano Sonata; I cannot agree with those who say none of it has a chance. You don’t have to buy his central belief structure to respect the craft. So too I think will Crumb’s music live on — as long as there are string quartets who enjoy a challenge Dark Angels will be played and appreciated even without a war to protest.

Japecake says:

LOL, Condescending Gallic contempt is as French as champagne.

Gerald Brennan says:

Boulez was the personification of hubris. And not worthy of tying the shoes of many he criticized. A hundred years from now he’ll be a footnote.