Composers and Conversation

George Crumb, The Sleeper, Vox Balaenae, and Voices from the Morning of the Earth at Carnegie Hall.

Works by Charles Wuorinen at the Guggenheim.

Many people feel intimidated by attending concerts, especially those focusing on new music. They don’t know the scene, they don’t know the music, they don’t know the performers. Sometimes programme notes are helpful, sometimes they’re not. So why not attend a discussion-concert?

Several of the city’s cultural institutions offer concert series in which each performance spotlights a different composer, featuring both performances of some of his or her works and an on-stage discussion with the composer. Earlier this month, I attended concerts that belonged to two of these series: Carnegie Hall’s Making Music, and the Guggenheim’s Works and Process.

The concert at Carnegie Hall featured three works by the composer George Crumb: The Sleeper, Vox Balaenae, and Voices from the Morning of the Earth. At the beginning of the concert and immediately after intermission, Carnegie Hall’s Jeremy Geffen interviewed Crumb onstage.

Seeing any composer in real life is always exciting. Just as in the pop music world, classical musicians tend to mythologize composers—but in some instances it goes much further than in pop music, as most composers are dead. We fantasize about what it would have been like to meet Beethoven in person, to see Liszt play his own devilishly hard compositions on the piano, to meet Brahms for a pint in the local biergarten… but ultimately we can never know.

Before attending this concert, I knew and admired a couple of Crumb’s better-known works: Songs and Ancient Voices of Children and Makrokosmos. However, I knew almost nothing about the man himself. I hadn’t given much thought to his age or even his place of birth, so I was quite surprised to see a white-haired man, with thick glasses, and a white moustache, come out on stage. I was even more surprised when he spoke with a West Virginia drawl. When Crumb speaks about his compositions, they come alive. He recalls in vivid detail the ideas behind each of his compositions, and, what’s more, he’s willing to share these secrets with the audience.

Discussing the first work on the program, his song “The Sleeper,” Crumb pointed out that he had only set certain lines of the Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name because he just didn’t like all of the poem; he found it to be too dark, and chose to set only the lines he found most beautiful to music.

His comments on Vox Balaenae were equally revealing. The piece was composed in 1973, for piano, flute, and cello, and has become one of Crumb’s best-known works. The title is Latin for “voice of the whale.” Crumb was moved to write Vox Balaenae after hearing some of the very first recordings of whale song. While these sounds are readily available today, up to the first forty years of George Crumb’s life, it just was not possible to hear that sound.

Equally surprising were Crumb’s revelations about one of the most striking aspects of a live performance of Vox Balaenae: all three performers are required to wear masks. While Crumb is known for emphasising the dramatic aspect of music-making, and waxed poetic about the “choreography” of Beethoven’s string quartets, he insisted that this was not his intent with the masks. Rather, he had requested that the performers wear masks because his work represents the music of nature; he felt that the performers themselves should intrude as little as possible. Obviously, he remarked, that concept had backfired!

After intermission, Geffen and Crumb discussed Voices from the Morning of the Earth. This group of ten songs marks the final instalment in his American Songbook cycle, a project that has occupied him for the last decade. Crumb talked briefly about the genesis of the cycle: his daughter, Anne, who began her career as a Broadway singer but is now transitioning to the classical world, asked him if he would compose concert settings of some of her favourite Appalachian songs. He has since expanded beyond Appalachian folk songs; this final volume contains African-American tunes, such as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” cowboy songs such as “Goodbye Old Paint” (also used in Aaron Copland’s cowboy-themed ballet, Billy the Kid), and some more recent folk tunes by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger (“Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” respectively).

Crumb sets these familiar tunes for two singers, four percussionists (who together play over 150 different instruments in the work), and piano. Just as Ives, Bartok, and Mahler would situate the folk and popular music of their time into their own, often dissonant, sound-world, so too does Crumb. For example, one of the original tunes was based on the pentatonic scale, which has been used in folk music around the world. It became associated in the early twentieth century with Asian music in particular, though, and here Crumb plays with this association by accompanying this very American folk tune with Asian percussion instruments and idioms. And in his raucous setting of “When the Saints Come Marching In,” Crumb adds to the original tune the cacophony of six marching bands playing at once in a parade—creating an effect not so different from his predecessor, Charles Ives.

The performances of all three works were inspiring, particularly the performance of the flautist in Vox Balaenae, who, among other extended techniques, must at times play the flute while singing. As you can imagine, this is no mean feat, but not only did she pull it off, she had a beautiful singing voice to compliment her excellent tone on the flute. All three instrumentalists together created a captivating performance that left me spellbound. Even without hearing Crumb speak, this concert would have been a highlight for hearing them play this challenging work.

The standout on the rest of the program was Anne Crumb, who sang in both The Sleeper and Voices from the Morning of the Earth. Her American accent perfectly suited her father’s works. Her acting experience helped her to convey the varied emotions of the songs, without quite falling into the realm of overacting. Her fellow soloist in Voices from the Morning of the Earth, baritone Randall Scarlata, and the instrumentalists were quite competent too, but Ms. Crumb clearly stole the show.

The Guggenheim’s Works and Process series is more far-ranging than Carnegie’s Making Music. Not only does it cover a wider range of performance arts, from classical music to jazz to ballet to spoken-word, but it offers many more programs—twenty-five total in 2008 alone!

The concert I attended honoured the composer Charles Wuorinen’s 70th birthday. It began with a short work—Praegustatum for James Levine, for solo piano, performed by Wuorinen himself. Then came The Mission of Virgil, a work for two pianos dating from 1993. This performance marked the premiere of the piece as a ballet, fulfilling Wuorinen’s original intention for the work. After the intermission was Wuorinen’s song cycle Ashberyana, composed in 2004.

In this instance, I had mixed feelings about the discussions. Wuorinen’s music is notoriously difficult both to perform and to listen to, as it comes directly out of the harsh, dissonant atonal tradition of Arnold Schoenberg. Wuorinen would seem to be a perfect candidate for this type of event; his music needs explaining in a way that the music of more accessible contemporary composers might not. Yet he seemed reticent to talk about his own music, stating repeatedly that he just “didn’t remember” all that much about this or that aspect of a piece, because he had composed it awhile ago and simply didn’t think about it anymore. However, each discussion featured other personalities who were integral to the two big works on the program, the choreographer Sean Curran and conductor James Levine, and they both had many interesting things to say.

The Mission of Virgil was inspired by the British poet/painter William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Curran outlined the general narrative of each movement, pointing out along the way things that the audience should watch for in his production. He also discussed the process by which he came up with the choreography: studying Wuorinen’s music and consulting with the composer, and studying many different depictions of Dante’s masterwork, including those of Salvador Dali.

As in the Crumb concert, the second half of Wuorinen’s concert featured a song cycle, Ashberyana. Scored for baritone, trombone, two violins, viola, cello, and piano, in this cycle Wuorinen set poems by the American poet John Ashbery. Maestro Levine, in discussing the work, found the pairing to be quite appropriate: he sees Ashbery’s poetry as being primarily about language, and Wuorinen’s music as being primarily about music; in other words, art for art’s sake. Levine also made some interesting comments about performing Wuorinen’s music. He praised Wuorinen for the clarity of his performance indications, something not readily apparent to the audience but that has a big impact on the quality of a performance nonetheless. In relation to Ashberyana, Levine praised the clarity of line, despite Wuorinen’s potentially heavy orchestration, as well as his naturalistic text-setting.

The outstanding performance of the evening belonged to the Sean Curran Dance Company. Their movement throughout the ballet was fluid and beautiful, and provided an elegant visual counterpoint to Wuorinen’s score. “Flight from the Three Beasts,” featured one dancer alone on stage; the three beasts were a triple projection of the dancer’s shadow onto the rear wall of the stage—the dancer was being chased by himself. “Monsters of the Prime” also featured some interesting lighting: one could only see the silhouettes of the dancers, who stood on each other’s shoulders to create writhing, ten-foot-tall, many-limbed creatures.

I wouldn’t want to say that either series, the Guggenheim’s or Carnegie’s, is better than the other. I enjoyed both concerts a great deal, and the performance level at each was very high. I gained more from the discussion with George Crumb than that with Wuorinen, but that’s something that will vary with each personality that these series choose to feature. These are by no means your only options for hearing composers speak in New York.

Besides those that live in the area and are regularly featured at various concert series, composers from across the country and around the world frequently stop by in New York. The city’s many music schools also offer a number of cheap or free programs featuring composers, ranging from concerts to masterclasses.

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Upcoming performances in Carnegie Hall’s Making Music include: Elliot Carter on Dec. 12, and Peter Eötvös on Jan. 29. Upcoming Works in Process performances at the Guggenheim include a discussion of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf Dec. 13-21.

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