CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Making Music: George Crumb

Zankel Hall
Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Commentary by George Crumb
Ann Crumb, Vocalist
Randall Scarlata, Baritone
Marcantonio Barone, Piano
Molly Morkoski, Piano
Tara Helen O'Connor, Flute
Priscilla Lee, Cello
Orchestra 2001
James Freeman, Artistic Director and Conductor
Jeremy Geffen, Series Moderator

GEORGE CRUMB The Sleeper
GEORGE CRUMB Vox Balaenae
GEORGE CRUMB Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI) (NY Premiere)

Program Notes:

GEORGE CRUMB
Born October 24, 1929, in Charleston, West Virginia

The concert hall is a place where ritual still lives, perhaps one of the few remaining sacred secular spaces. We file in, we wait, lights dim, sounds cascade, we listen and are penitent, we enthuse, we yearn to be profoundly moved and occasionally are, awash in things greater than ourselves. When it works, the world slips away, corporations and marketers and promoters vanish, and what remains is a thing of beauty, fleeting, a powerful and untenable alchemy. This is why we go to concerts: we want a piece of the magic. We need it. Composer George Crumb, one of our few true national treasures, with his music that is both truly contemporary and yet hearkens to the still-vivid ancient, is banking on it.

Crumb spent the 1950s studying, the early 1960s honing his own sound, and came into his own in the late ‘60s to early 1970s, writing the first of his enduring masterpieces. He gathered up a slew of prestigious awards—Guggenheim Fellowships, Rockefeller Grants, a Fulbright, and, eventually, the Pulitzer Prize—as performances of his works became commonplace. Three works brought Crumb onto the world musical stage: Ancient Voices of the Children, his sequence of madrigals and, most notably, his 1971 work for amplified string quartet, Black Angels. Written at the complicated apex of the Vietnam War, this final piece made crumb an arguable contemporary music analog to Bob Dylan: a healthy and articulate voice of dissent.

All music is, of course, an experience—you have to hear it (preferably live, if that is the composer’s intent) to believe it. But in a way Crumb’s is more so. His music, like the seamless, floating music dramas of Richard Wagner or the ancient incantations of a Hildegard von Bingen, is not just a depiction of a ritual but the ritual itself, requiring focus, a willingness to be not just a passive listener but an active participant. On many levels—from the purely sonic to the deeply mystical, and even on the immediately theatrical—the effort pays off. Each piece he writes is a total work of art, including the document—his scores themselves are gorgeous and painstaking documents, works of visual art unto themselves. To him, no doubt, this is part of the ritual.

His specific sound world is achieved through use of extended techniques, the use of the instruments in the “wrong” way to a desired end. Any noise is fair game: the clicking of the keys on the flute, knocking on the side of a cello, plucking the strings inside of the piano, the buzzing of the lips. Everyone plays percussion instruments, instrumentalists sing, and there’s even a moment in one of his pieces where the page turner chimes in. He was by no means the first to do this, but his very specific methodology and synthesis—the playing of the instruments in such a way is part of the ritual, the theatre, of a performance of any Crumb work—is wholly original.

All of this adds up to an uncompromising and singular artist. Crumb has never cottoned to fads or fashions; he has little need to cave to this or that academic trend, and because of his unflinching individuality his work has earned a place in history. The chance to hear this music, which was, as the saying goes, often imitated but never duplicated, is tantamount to hearing Homer read The Iliad or watching Picasso paint. If the great are those who work within a set and venerated tradition, and yet expand, enlarge, enrich, or even unseat it by stretching existing boundaries, then tonight we are in the presence of greatness.


The Sleeper

The first of tonight’s vocal works is a short setting of a section of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, written in 1984 to be premiered by Jan DeGaitani and Gilbert Kalish here at Carnegie Hall. “The sparse, tenuous textures and extremely soft dynamic of The Sleeper” writes the composer, “ will project a kind of ‘minimalissimo’ character. I have used a range of timbral devices in the piano part to suggest that transcendental feeling which Poe's eerie images of nature invoke—rustling glissandos on the strings of the instrument, delicate muted effects, and bell-like harmonics (which ring in the midnight hour in the first bars of the song). The vocal part, which is quite simple in style and based entirely on a few tiny melodic cells, requires great sensitivity to nuances of pitch and timbre. I have endeavored to compress an intense and even expansive expressivity into a very small frame, which is, I suppose, what writing a little song is all about.”

Composed in 1984, The Sleeper received its first Carnegie Hall performance on December 4, 1984, with Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano and Gilbert Kalish, piano.


Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)

Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) is an instrumental work Crumb wrote 1971 for the New York Camerata. It is scored for flute, cello, and amplified piano, but is no ordinary piece of chamber music. “The work was inspired by the singing of the humpback whale, a tape recording of which I had heard two or three years previously,” writes Crumb. “Each of the three performers is required to wear a black half-mask (or visor-mask). The masks, by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent, symbolically, the powerful impersonal forces of nature (i.e. nature dehumanized). I have also suggested that the work be performed under deep-blue stage lighting.” It is divided into three movements—“Vocalise” (with its closing parody of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra), “Variations on Sea-Time,” and “Sea Nocturne.” Combined, these three panels make “a kind of oceanic equivalent of Olivier Messaien’s birdcalls,” writes music critic Michael Walsh.

Composed in 1971, Vox Balaenae received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 27, 1974, with Da Capo Chamber Players


Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI)

Tonight’s main event is the New York premiere of the sixth (and final) entry into Crumb’s American Songbook sequence Voices from the Morning of the Earth. The entirety of this piece—Crumb affectionately refers to it as his “Ring Cycle”—runs over three hours, uses 52 American Folk Songs, and deploys over150 percussion instruments from five continents. Each of the six sections can be performed separately, but their intent is to be viewed (if not heard) as a whole, a large chunk of Americana from this musical fabulist and magical realist philosopher.

For this sixth and final book, the composer uses songs from a wide range of sources: folk songs like “Put My Little Shoes Away”, “A Mountaineer’s Sad Song” (originally titled “East Virginia,” but here Crumb substitutes his own home state of West Virginia), spirituals like “Dem Bones,” and African American songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “O Peter, Go Ring-a dem Bells.” Crumb uses cowboy songs for the first time in the entire American Songbook (“Weep, All Ye Little Rains” and “Goodbye Old Paint”) and recognizable tunes like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (In this piece, for the first time in the whole of the American Songbook, Crumb even composes his own “folk song” melody: “My Lord, What a Beautiful Morning!”) From these pieces—some familiar, some ancient or indigenous—Crumb uses the melodies of the past to weave his own phantasmagoric musical tapestry making a case for both the present (with its immediacy) and the future (with its questioning and ironic subtext). And like the best music from the composers who chose to work with folk material, Crumb succeeds in not only adding his own running commentary on the meaning of these songs, but also in helping us redefine our own understanding. By hearing them this way, we are, in a way, able to re-hear them for the first time. After all, the questioning lyric that concludes the entire Ameircan Songbook cycle remains a damn good one: “When will they ever learn?” Crumb removes that trope from the campfire around which we all first sang it and causes us to really hear that lyric. The question fades during the piece, but stays with us into the beyond.

Composed in 2007, Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI) receives its Carnegie Hall and New York premieres this evening.


© 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Commentary by George Crumb
George Crumb's reputation as a composer of hauntingly beautiful scores has made him one of the most frequently performed composers in today's musical world. From Los Angeles to Moscow and Scandinavia to South America, festivals devoted to the music of George Crumb have sprung up like wildflowers. Mr. Crumb, winner of a 2001 Grammy Award and the 1968 Pulitzer Prize in Music, continues to compose new scores that enrich the musical lives of those who come in contact with his profoundly humanistic art.

George Henry Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929. He studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston and received a Bachelor’s degree in 1950. Thereafter he studied for a Master's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under Eugene Weigel. He continued his studies with Boris Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin from 1954 to 1955, and received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1959 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor after studying with Ross Lee Finney.

George Crumb's early compositions include Three Early Songs (1947), for voice and piano; Sonata (1955) for solo violoncello; and Variazioni (1959) for orchestra, the composer's doctoral thesis. In the 1960s and 1970s, George Crumb produced a series of highly influential pieces that were immediately taken up by soloists and ensembles throughout the world. Many of these were vocal works based on the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, including Ancient Voices of Children (1970); Madrigals, Books 1-4 (1965, 1969); Night of the Four Moons (1969); and Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968). Other major works from this period include: Black Angels (1970), for electric string quartet; Vox Balaenae (1971), for electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano; Makrokosmos, Volumes 1 and 2 (1972, 1973) for amplified piano; Music for a Summer Evening (1974) for two amplified pianos and percussion; and Crumb's largest score, Star-Child (1977), for soprano, solo trombone, antiphonal children's voices, male speaking choir, bell ringers, and large orchestra. George Crumb’s most recent works include Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik for solo piano (2001), Otherworldly Resonances for two pianos (2002), and a six-part song cycle, the American Songbook series (The River of Life, A Journey Beyond Time, Unto the Hills, The Winds of Destiny, Voices from the Forgotten World, Voices from the Morning of the Earth; 2001–2007)

George Crumb’s music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles. The references range from music of the western art-music tradition to hymns, folk music, and non-Western styles. Many of Crumb's works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores. A shy yet warmly eloquent personality, Mr. Crumb retired from his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania after more than 30 years of service. Awarded honorary doctorates by numerous universities and the recipient of dozens of awards and prizes, he resides in the same Pennsylvania home where he and his wife of more than 50 years raised their three children. Mr. Crumb's music is published by C.F. Peters and the ongoing series of “Complete Crumb” recordings, supervised by the composer, is being issued on Bridge Records.

Ann Crumb, Vocalist
Ann Crumb, like her father George Crumb, was born in the hills of West Virginia. Ms. Crumb has performed classical and jazz concerts throughout the US and Europe, having recently appeared in Austria at the Salzburg Festival, in Holland at the Nederlandse Programma Stichting, in Germany with the Bochumer Symphoniker, and in Italy with the Lirico Sinfonica Petruzelli e Teatri di Bari. An internationally known actress and singer, she has created numerous leading roles on Broadway and London's West End.

Ms. Crumb starred in Aspects of Love, The Goodbye Girl, Nine, Les Misérables, Chess, and Anna Karenina, for which she received a Best Actress Tony nomination. Currently a Barrymore nominee, she has received a Barrymore Award, an Arts Recognition Award, and a Broadway National Theater Award nomination for Best Actress. Her extensive list of credits includes those from the classics to post-modernist theater, and Shakespeare to Shepard and Ionesco.

Ms. Crumb has appeared on numerous television shows, including Law and Order, One Life to Live, and Criminal Intent. Her first jazz recording Broadway Diva Swings, with Harry Allen and his All Star Jazz Band, was on the national charts, and her recording of her father's Three Early Songs was on the Grammy Award–winning George Crumb's 70th Birthday Album. At Ms. Crumb’s urging, George Crumb wrote the first of his American Songbook series, Unto the Hills, dedicating to his daughter and Orchestra 2001. Subsequently, the third Songbook The River of Life was also dedicated to Ms. Crumb, who recorded both cycles for Bridge Records’ Complete Crumb Edition.

Randall Scarlata, Baritone
Baritone Randall Scarlata enjoys a lively career encompassing opera, recitals, chamber music, and orchestral works. Past highlights include the world premiere of Thea Musgrave’s one-man opera, The Mocking-Bird, in Boston; recitals in the US and Europe with pianist Richard Goode; and solo appearances with the Philadelphia and Minnesota orchestras, and the Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and National symphonies, among others. On Great Performers at Lincoln Center, Mr. Scarlata portrayed Siskov in Janáček’s From the House of the Dead. He has appeared at such festivals as Ravinia, Marlboro, Edinburgh, Vienna, Aspen, and Spoleto (Italy).

During the 2007–2008 season, Mr. Scarlata traveled to Moscow, recording Samuel Barber’s Hand of Bridge and orchestral songs with the Russian Philharmonic; Kneisel Hall in Maine, performing Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Seymour Lipkin; Sarasota, performing Songs of Tin Pan Alley with soprano Jennifer Aylmer and pianist Laura Ward; and Belfast, Northern Ireland, for Handel’s Messiah. In New York, Mr. Scarlata peformed J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with Charles Brink and the Grand Tour Orchestra, songs of Beethoven and Copland with Jeremy Denk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a recital with Hyunah Yu and Ken Noda at Town Hall. In Europe, he toured with Vienna’s Akademie Orchestra, under Martin Haselb, performing J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Other highlights last year included performances of songs by Ravel and Stravinsky with the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, and a critically-acclaimed portrayal of the Celebrant in a CD release of Bernstein’s Mass with Vienna’s Tonkünstler Orchestra.

Mr. Scarlata has recorded for Naxos, CRI, Gasparo, and Albany records. A sought-after interpreter of new music, he has also given the world premieres of new works by Paul Moravec, Ned Rorem, Robert Maggio, Lori Laitman, Samuel Adler, David Ludwig, Robert Cappana, Daron Hagen, and Christopher Theofanidis.

The recipient of the 1998 Alice Tully Vocal Arts Debut Recital Award, Mr. Scarlata has also won first prizes at the 1999 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, the 1997 Das Schubert Lied International Competition in Vienna, and the 1997 Joy in Singing Competition in New York. He received a Fulbright Grant to study at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna and holds a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School. A gifted and committed teacher as well, Mr. Scarlata serves on the faculty of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at West Chester University.

Marcantonio Barone, Piano
A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, pianist Marcantonio Barone has been a soloist with many of the world's major orchestras, including the Philadelphia and Moscow Symphony orchestras. As a chamber musician, he appears often in the Philadelphia area with the Lenape Chamber Ensemble and 1807 & Friends. Mr. Barone teaches at the Bryn Mawr Conservatory of Music and Swarthmore College.

Molly Morkoski, Piano
Pianist Molly Morkoski has performed as a soloist and collaborative artist throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has been a featured soloist on the Making Music series at Carnegie Hall; at such festivals as Tanglewood, Bang-on-a-Can, and Pacific Rim; and with the Raleigh, Asheville, and Tuscaloosa Symphony orchestras.

A member of the Zankel Band and Open End Ensemble, Ms. Morkoski is an avid chamber musician. She has performed at the Aspen, Norfolk, and Tanglewood festivals, and collaborated with the New York Philharmonic Chamber Players, St. Louis Symphony Chamber Players, New World Symphony, Speculum Musicae, Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She has also worked with such leading musicians as Dawn Upshaw.

Ms. Morkosk made her solo debut on Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage in a prelude concert for the Emerson String Quartet’s Perspectives series, performing Beethoven’s Bagatelles, Op. 126.

A proponent of new music, Ms. Morkoski has worked with composers John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Gerald Barry, David Del Tredici, Lukas Foss, John Harbison, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, Oliver Knussen, George Perle, Steve Reich, and Charles Wuorinen. In the fall of 2006, she was invited to work in Vienna with Peter Sellars on John Adams’s newest opera, A Flowering Tree. In May 2008, she gave the world premiere of Martin Kennedy’s Piano Concerto with the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra.

Ms. Morkoski was a Fulbright scholar to Paris, where she was an apprentice with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. She is also a recipient of the Teresa Sterne Career Grant and the Thayer-Ross Award. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Indiana University in Bloomington, Ms. Morkoski holds a doctoral degree from SUNY Stony Brook. Currently residing in New York City, she is an Associate Professor at Lehman College in the Bronx.

Tara Helen O'Connor, Flute
Flutist Tara Helen O'Connor is a 2008–2009 artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A founding member of the Naumburg Award–winning New Millennium Ensemble, she is a member of the virtuoso woodwind group Windscape, the chamber ensemble Andalucian Dogs, and is flute soloist of the Bach Aria Group.

Winner of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, Ms. O’Connor was the first wind player to participate in the Chamber Music Society Two program. She performs regularly at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, the Spoleto Festival USA, Music from Angel Fire, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and in Zankel Halls, Zankel Band. She received two Grammy nominations in 2003 for her recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Yiddishbbuk.

Recent performances include collaborations with Jaime Laredo, Peter Serkin, Dawn Upshaw, Ida Kavafian, Ani Kavafian, David Shifrin, Ransom Wilson, Eugenia Zukerman, the Tokyo String Quartet, and the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. She has appeared on Live From Lincoln Center and A&E's Breakfast with the Arts. A faculty member of the Bard College Conservatory of Music and Manhattan School of Music, Ms. O'Connor is professor of flute and head of the wind department at Purchase College Conservatory of Music.

Priscilla Lee, Cello
Cellist Priscilla Lee, a 2005 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, began studying at age five and made her solo debut in 1998 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A native of California, Ms. Lee studied with Ronald Leonard at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, and later with David Soyer at the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2005 she received a Master of Music degree from the Mannes College The New School For Music, where she studied with Timothy Eddy. Upon moving to New York in 2003, Priscilla participated in the Opening Concert at Zankel Hall with John Adams, and premiered Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre with Dawn Upshaw in New York, Boston, London, and Paris. She has participated in the festivals of Marlboro, Santa Fe, Seattle, Delaware, St. Denis in Paris, Kingston, Lexington, and Taos. Priscilla has been selected as a member of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two for the 2006-2009 seasons. She is a founding member of Trio Cavatina, a piano trio that was in residence at the New England Conservatory, and last year debuted at the New School, on Merkin Hall's Rising Star Series, and at Boston’s Jordan Hall.

Orchestra 2001
James Freeman, Artistic Director and Conductor

The award-winning Orchestra 2001 (O2001) celebrates its 20th anniversary concert season this year. Since the orchestra’s founding in 1988, O2001 has grown into one of America’s most important cultural institutions.

For the second year in a row, the League of American Orchestras and ASCAP recognized O2001 and Artistic Director James Freeman as outstanding leaders in the field of new music with their Awards for Adventurous Programming. The enormous impact on the cultural life of Philadelphia has been unmatched, affecting the lives of composers, young and old.

Maintaining a close relationship with George Crumb, Orchestra 2001 has become the preeminent interpreter of his works, bringing them to audiences worldwide. These performances include, among many others, those at the Salzburg Festival; in St. Petersburg, Russia; and at the Miller Theater in New York City. The first five American Songbooks were written for and premiered by Mr. Freeman and O2001, and all are currently being recorded for Bridge Records.

Orchestra 2001’s dedication to the performance of American contemporary music is unparalleled. The record speaks for itself: over 80 world premieres, 105 Greater Philadelphia premieres, 205 works by 125 American composers, of which more than 135 works were by 60 Philadelphia-area composers.

Founder of O2001, Mr. Freeman is the Daniel Underhill Professor Emeritus of Music at Swarthmore College. He was trained at Harvard University (Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and PhD), Tanglewood, and Vienna’s Akademie füür Musik. Mr. Freeman’s principal teachers were pianists Artur Balsam and Paul Badura-Skoda, and his father, double bassist Henry Freeman.

James Freeman, Artistic Director and Conductor

Jeremy Geffen, Series Moderator