George Crumb grew up in West Virginia and spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1970 he shot into a wide popularity accorded few modernist composers, as the result of works that became instant avant-garde classics. Foremost among these was Ancient Voices of Children, a song cycle exploring the disturbing, surreal poetry of the Spaniard Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) and calling for amplified voices, amplified piano, and a rich mix of percussion instruments. At one point Crumb calls for a toy piano to play a fragment of a Bach chorale (see page 147), and he often coaxes screams, shouts, and wordless vocal arabesques from performers, as well as more traditional singing. Ancient Voices inhabits a space Crumb preferred at this time, halfway between concert and theatrical ritual, and it does so with a distinctive sensitivity to novel timbres and sound combinations.
George Crumb writes his own scores, often with a distinctive appearance. This picture score for the piano piece “Spiral Galaxy” has become an icon of late modernist music. Copyright © 1974 by C. F. Peters Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Other impressive and much-performed works Crumb composed in the same period include Black Angels for electric string quartet (it calls on the players to chant and click their tongues in addition to playing their instruments in unconventional ways) and Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale), an evocation of humpback whale songs for electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano. In the early 1970s Crumb produced two volumes of piano miniatures that remain staples of the avant-garde piano repertory. He called them Makrokosmos in homage to the Mikrokosmos of Bartók (see page 340).