A Crumb Crumb for Sunday

For as much as George Crumb has become a symbol of the audience-pleasing end of the post-60's Avant-Garde in musical America it's easy to forget that he started out writing more conventional music in the 50's, dark Bartokian fantasies such as the Sonata for Solo Cello.  It wasn't until the early 60's rolled around when Crumb's music started to turn towards the outlandish-yet-accessible, extended-technique-rife marvels we perform frequently, and while most (including me) point to his Lorca settings as the great works of this period we can't overlook the Five Pieces for Piano (1962).  Those familiar with the piano parts in works like Vox Balanae (which I had the privilege of performing in Boston) know to expect lots of harmonics, pizzicatos, and simple preparation such as placing sheets of paper or glass rods on the strings or holding a paperclip to a vibrating low string to create a steady metallic buzz.  The Five Pieces is where all those techniques started to crop up, and a leaf in the middle might be the most subtle and elegant of them all.

(Click to enlarge)

As indicated in Crumb's gorgeously hand-engraved score, every sound in this "Notturno" is produced from inside the piano, plucking the strings either by fingertips or fingernails and adding various effects when most effective.  Right away we see the paperclip trick, a very simple yet unique effect that I've never seen done by another composer for reasons I don't understand.  Plucking strings on the inside of the piano is tricky because strings are very close together and unmarked, often requiring the pianist to label each string to be plucked with bits of labeled tape, and man alive, are there a lot of plucked notes in this piece, and the rhythms and dynamics indicated are very subtle indeed.  The most elaborate rhythm-'n'-technique package challenge comes in the third bar of the second stave, wherein a dense cluster of plucked notes has to be stopped without sounding in a specific order and in time, and while it might not be obvious there's a lot of risk of accidentally resounding strings simply by taking your finger off them and drawing the skin across the metal.  All of this is written in a luminously acidic language that has all of the economy of Crumb without his allusions to tonality or poetic word-painting.  As most of the US is encased in ice the static drama of this piece seems as apt as anything, and this newer recording I've included below might be the best I've heard yet of the piece.  You'll have to produce your own night conditions, though; there's no embed option for the sun going away.

~PNK