Composer George Crumb
A Tribute to George Crumb by NMC Founding Artistic Director Robert Aitken
The music of George Crumb has the quality of an elixir, which keeps drawing you back through intricacies in time to a world you feel you know and look forward to enjoying but as many times as you have experienced it, the slightest change takes you to a different place, somewhere you have never been before and never thought of, but will never forget. About music, George says in his own words, “I have always considered music to be a very strange substance, a substance endowed with magical properties. Music is tangible, almost palpable, and yet unreal, illusive. Music is analyzable only on the most mechanistic level: the most important elements - the spiritual impulse, the psychological curve, the metaphysical implications - are understandable only in terms of the music itself. I feel intuitively that music must have been the primitive cell from which language, science, and religion originated.
Since our first concert featuring Black Angels, Vox Balanae, Ancient Voices of Children, and Lux Aeterna on March 30, 1974, we have attempted to perform every new work of George Crumb as soon as it was allowed, that meant second performances of 11 of his chamber works with 28 performances in total. He visited us four times in Toronto as well as Niagara-on-the-Lake and a week’s residency at the Banff Centre.
Crumb’s extraordinary sense of colour led to a need for the exotic sounds of non-Western instruments and novel unrecognizable sounds produced on Western instruments. In Ancient Voices of Children, a musical saw was required so our bass player Bill Kuinka went down the street to Eaton‘s department store and bought a normal crosscut saw which he learned to play wonderfully.
Lux Aeterna required a sitar, not a usual double for western musicians, so we hired an authentic North Indian sitarist of some reputation, but he didn't read Western music notation. George collaborated with this incredible musician to prepare the music for performance.
His music is richly packed with memories, but my most memorable is the phone call I received one evening at home. It was George. In his inimitable slow melodious drawl, he said “Bob, ah been thinking of writing a piece for you.” My heart leaped with joy as I had so much love and respect for him! I would never have asked for a piece or dreamt that he would ever write one! And then he composed An Idyll for the Misbegotten for flute and drums, “to be heard from afar, over a lake on a moonlit evening in August.”
Dear George,
Thank you for introducing us to the mystical sounds of your magical world and enriching our lives with such beautiful music.
Robert Aitken
NMC Founding Artistic Director
You can read George Crumb's obituary here
Click here to peruse our 1973-1974 concert season as part of our Memory Box archive.
