William Friedkin used “Electric Insects” in his film “The Exorcist.” David Bowie hailed it. Crumb’s catalog of sounds conveys places farther away than Vietnam and as close as our distorted consciousness. Hints of Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden” are summoned from the deep recesses of history. The string players add bells and gongs and other percussion to the atmosphere. Old music is quoted, and a sad Baroque sarabande imagined. The quartet has high-pitched quiet, as well, which is even more intense as you strain to hear it. The high-pitched sonic torture represents the menace of helicopters over the Vietnam killing fields. Either way, the quartet begins with “Night of the Electric Insects” and a shock, the aural equivalent of putting your finger in a live socket. But he also allowed for an amplified quartet that, with enough imaginative virtuosity, might even prove more astounding, as had been the common case. He asked for the then-new electric string instruments capable of equaling the kinds of galvanizing sparks better associated with Jimi Hendrix. One was the string quartet “Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land,” written, as Crumb indicated on his graphically arresting score, “ in tempore belli (in time of war)” and “Finished Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970.” The Vietnam War raged, and the composer, for the first time in any major string quartet, invoked the horror of modern warfare, exposed the precipitous fall from grace inherent in battle and proposed a path for spiritual redemption. In 1970 alone, he composed two new pieces that had sweeping implications, continue to resonate and challenge, and sound maybe even more radical and rational now than they did a half-century ago. He embraced multiple sides of our contradictory national character through music ethereal yet startling, otherworldly yet stylistically wide-ranging, mysteriously impenetrable yet politically uncompromising, darkly death-obsessed yet marvelously life-affirming.Ĭrumb may not have been well known outside of new-music circles, but he mattered beyond those perimeters. 24, 1929, the day of the great Wall Street crash. He was as American as apple pie, this shy, unpretentious West Virginian born in Charleston on Black Thursday, Oct. George Crumb, who died Sunday at 92, was an all-American composer - one of our best, most original and most important.

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