The dizzy sixties

WILFRID MELLERS listens again to George Crumb

George Crumb is an American composer who made his considerable mark during the dizzy sixties; and he still seems a sixties, and a quintessentially American, phenomenon. Although he studied in Germany and received a Schönbergian grounding under the American composer Ross Lee Finney, his early fame was attributable to a radicalism that eschewed 'Europe' and most of its accredited musical disciplines. Rejoicing in the polyethnicity of America, he became a composer of renouvellement, inspired by primitive and exotic melodic and rhythmic techniques, favouring percussion ensembles rather than harmonic complexities, and revelling in ritualistic musics for solo voice, especially soprano. Works such as Echoes of Time and the River and Ancient Voices of Children, composed in the sixties and seventies, distil a poetic aura appropriate to their titles.

Star-Child, here recorded, is Crumb's biggest piece in this ritualistic-magical category. Although composed in 1977, it may count as a millenial piece since, using Latin texts and references to sundry Christian, Jewish, and Oriental multiethnic musics, it deals with a Rite of Passage from a world in spiritual, and perhaps physical, declension to a world potentially new-born. As an Ives-like backcloth, muted strings hum a Music of the Spheres derived from God's interval of the perfect fifth; a fierce male speaking-chanting chorus represents negations like the Dies Irae; solo soprano (the brilliant Susan Nurucki) soars and swoops in thrillingly Crumbian arabesques to hint at rejuvenation; while Joseph Alessi, on solo trombone, alarmingly suggests (perhaps) the brute forces of Nature.

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