Interviews
Benjamin Dwyer interviews renowned American composer George Crumb & guitarist David Starobin
Benjamin Dwyer: I’ll probably just start off by asking George about his early days. You started composing in the early forties and one question that I was interested in…. you started composing in Charleston, West Virginia, what we would call I suppose a bit “off the beaten track”. I am curious to know did your geographical position have any impact on your development as a composer?
George Crumb: Well, my parents were both musicians, classically trained, so actually my very first, my closest environment, was sort of European and the first little pieces I wrote were kind of imitations of Mozart pieces when I was about ten or eleven years old. The pieces had no quality what so ever but that is what I thought music was. I laugh about it when I think later, I was surprised to learn that Mozart at that age was also writing in the Mozart style.
BD: Do you think that because you weren’t influenced by the academic scene on the East coast in America that you developed in a slightly different way than other composers because you have indeed developed in a rather original way?
GC: Well, actually I was exposed to kind of the same ….. after the Second World War in my university studies, later when I left Appalachia, and went to Michigan. We were introduced to all of the things that were happening. The Webern music was making its impact in the States, somehow I was unable to use those. I think I was a little influenced by the timbral side, colouristic, textural side of Webern but not the pitch organisation. I could never make that work in my music. I tried as a student and I was always defeated by the rotational technique in music.
BD: How influential were your teachers in the early days? Have you developed independently of those as well?
GC: My principal teacher was Ross Lee Fenney at this same university and he did not try to impress a certain style on his students. He was an excellent teacher for technical things. I think my care with notation comes from him. He insisted that the notation be as clear as possible. He was good for instrumentation things and of course served as a sounding board for musical things, aesthetic things, but his main thrust I think was technical. All of his students turned out writing in completely different styles, which is always a good sign for a teacher I think.
BD: You mention something about your attraction towards sonorities and textural devices and maybe I can put this to both of you because I suppose David (Starobin) you have been really at the centre of development of American music in the last 30 years, but I am thinking of a quote by the American composer Ned Roram, who tried to at one stage suggest that much contemporary music is still influenced by either a Germanic tradition or a French tradition. The French tradition, I suppose, would be more concerned with sonorities and texture, whereas the Germanic one would be very much about detail and contrapuntal designs. I suppose George comes under some sort of heading of a sonority-influenced composer whereas Carter… is that an oversimplification?
David Starobin: I don’t think it is entirely. I think if you view Bartók as being Debussy-influenced then perhaps there is a line that you could trace from Debussy to Bartók to George’s music, but then that becomes rather ‘de-Frenchified’ as you progress along that line. I certainly don’t believe that in the United States the polarity between the French and the German has been on anybody’s mind really for a long time. Perhaps in the generation when George was a student there were German teachers like Hindemith that came to the United States and exerted a great influence. But by the time someone of George’s generation was really coming into his own, which was really in the late fifties early sixties, I don’t think that that was so much an issue anymore. I think really at that point we had been exposed to Boulez and he was beginning to be a young titan that sort of thrust everyone towards the Schoenberg side or away from it. Certainly the whole Boulez-Stockhausen thing polarised things more than anything else in my experience in the late sixties and early seventies. (to Crumb) I think that was why you certainly moved away from that pretty quickly.
GC: Yes I agree. It made a fusion in a way. France and Germany maybe came together under that post-Webern umbrella so to speak.
BD: How do you respond to criticism though of say being accused of being a surface composer? Or do you respond to criticism?
GC: Surface?
BD: A surface composer
GC: Maybe it's true?
DS: What surface are we talking about here?
GC: I think I have sometimes adverse critiques which call my music a bag of effects or something like that and if the music comes across that way it fails utterly. It doesn’t do what I wanted to do. I am disappointed if it seems like a bag of just sound effects or something like that.
DS: All I can say I remember the first performances of almost all of George’s mature pieces. That is the pieces after 1965 and I remember specifically that audiences were kind of transfixed by the music and responded very enthusiastically. Now my own feeling about that is you can fool some people some of the time, but you can’t really fool an entire audience each time a work goes out there. And they don’t stand up, they don’t cheer, they don’t react the way they reacted for something that is entirely surface. Clearly in addition to the very unusual effects that were in these pieces, I think there is some sort of deeper philosophic quality, spiritual quality if you will, that underlies the works that appeal to people. To this day I think that is what appeals to people. I think everybody at that period was basically using the same resources instrumentally they were all aware of what you could do inside a piano, they were all aware of almost all of the stuff that George uses. I would say, George is certainly an innovator in the use of bringing these effects into an effective musical argument, but I don’t think he is known as an instrumental innovator per se and so the music stands on your ability, his music stands on the ability to reach deeper than merely the musical effect and the music either works or fails on that level.
BD: There is one piece that has very many good effects. I personally feel that it is one of the strongest works written this century. It is the Black Angels that you have written, from 1970. Somebody once said to me that what was happening with serious art composers at this time was also happening in rock music. I don’t know if you would agree with this but there was a comparison made between Jimmy Hendrix and Black Angels in terms of finding unusual abstract sounds or searching for something that was just beyond …... Does that make sense to you?
GC: Well, I am sure that’s a possibility because things where in the air. And I think there are points of contact between various kinds of popular music. I mean obviously jazz was always an important influence in modern music and it goes beyond, incidentally, just the rhythm. People say jazz made the rhythmic development in the new music. But what jazz did beyond that was reinvent instruments. It reinvented the trombone, the trumpet, the clarinet and the drums became soloistic in jazz and this had enormous effects on (modern art music), perhaps more even, than the basic elements of rhythm that everybody talks about as being the primary influence of jazz. Rock music, some of my music involves amplification and maybe that’s a point of contact with rock music.
BD: Keeping on the Black Angel theme. Is it a piece about war or is it an anti-war piece?
GC: It didn’t set out to be a political piece at all. It started by fulfilling a commission by a string quartet that ordered the piece. As I got into the composition I realised it was pulling in more and more of the kind of hysterical….. the hysteria that was reigning in the States in this period. It was a rather dark time. So much so, that at the end there, when I finished, I borrowed the Haydn, ‘In time of war’ and put that in the piece as a subscript. I just became aware of that but the intention wasn’t there from the beginning.
BD: So you are not a consciously political composer?
GC: No, I have never written any other political work. I have written other pieces that can be described as environmental pieces, if that’s a gentle kind of political……
BD: Sort of a green composer.
GC: Yes I suppose…. a sort of Irish Composer?
BD: I suppose another facet of your music is your connection to the Spanish poet Frederico García Lorca. Can you explain why you have such attachment to this poet in particular cause you seem to turn to him again and again?
GC: That came about in student years. I heard the work of a fellow student, whose name you wouldn’t recognise in composition for the reason that he gave up composition after he got his doctorate and went into the theory field. He wrote a beautiful setting of a single Lorca poem and that got me infected with this Lorca bug. And then I had a bilingual edition. I don’t speak Spanish at all and I learned the poems first through English. I can read a little Spanish and when I came to use the poetry I thought I should do that dangerous thing and set a language that’s not your own. I am sure I made some little mistakes along the way, but the sound of the words had to be so important in Lorca....
BD: There is incredible rhythm in the poetry...
GC: There is rhythm and the images ….. I think what attracted me originally was the nature imagery the basic, its earth and sea, insects and birds and love and death. All of these things he uses, the little words, which in Spanish sound so faithful. Death in Spanish is ‘Muerta’ and it cries for music. Lorca’s poetry was outside the normal tradition. Who sets Spanish for vocal music? Of course now composers are using Lorca and it is a beautiful language for singing.
BD: I think to aptly describe you as a composer I would use the word……. a person that brings many different elements together. There are quotes of Schubert and Dowland and many other sources in your music. In a way you synthesise many different facets of music. Do you think really that the time is over for any aesthetic….any governing aesthetic?
GC: Well, in a way we’re…my music was influenced by the last turn of the century and specifically by composers like Debussy, Mahler, Charles Ives and Bella Bartók all of whom straddled the century mark to some extent and all of these composers were combining many things in their music. They were making their music have contradictory elements. If I had to list the elements in Debussy I could easily come up to twenty or thirty separate stylistic things or borrowings and yet the style is beautifully, is organically made into a unique style. The Debussy style is compelling and very original, but it is also a unified style likewise with the other of these composers. So I think this sense is coming back maybe it’s a turn of the century phenomenon. At the end of the century you want to pull all kinds of things together. Maybe the middle of a century (composer) like Webern is the purest development. Particularly in a millennium we have to, the whole world has to come together, bring all types of music together.
BD: Does anyone of the audience want to ask a question?
Audience member (John Buckley): I have always been fascinated amongst other things by the titles that you give to your pieces. There seems to be an extraordinary imaginative and evocative quality to them and I wondered if you start with the title of a piece ..... on that imagery or, on having written a piece you find a title that aptly encapsulates the character of the music?
GC: Both things can happen. Sometimes you have a musical concept in your mind. Some of the titles I have kind of borrowed. I have robbed Lorca not only of texts, but of titles. For example I have a work called Night of the Four Moons and he has a poem called the Four Moons, something like that. I never used any of the poem but I used the title. It’s a tradition again that comes from…I love Debussy titles and of course Mahler, it was Symphony No. 4 and so forth. But interestingly Mahler’s original manuscripts sometimes had very poetic titles for the movements which he then didn’t publish. The 3rd. Symphony – ‘What the rocks tell me’, ‘what the animals tell me’ and these very specific quasi problematic things, but my own titles are in the sense more in the Debussy tradition.
BD: Were you concerned with developing a specifically ‘American’ style of composition, following on from, say, Ives ?
GC: I don’t think I gave it that much thought actually because I didn’t know Ives in my younger years. Even in my student years that was unknown to me because the recordings weren’t out at that time. I doubt if there were any significant recordings that were out in the 1950’s. At least the ones that I ran into. I didn’t know the music at all. If I had known Ives I would have realised that there was something very specially American which goes beyond the American things that occur in other composers in a more muted way maybe. There is certainly American qualities in music before Ives. And incidentally David (Starobin) with his recording company has explored many areas of this very early American pre-Ives music. How many recordings are there?
DS: We have done some of that, but the American music from pre-Ives is essentially European music in much of its intent and execution I think. I think you have to point to Ives as the first significant American composer that wrote music that drew on our heritage in a progressive way. That is to say not a Germanic way.
GC: We were, say, always half a century behind Russia which already had a strong music of its own.
DS: I have to say that George, living in West Virginia, perhaps lived in somewhat of a vacuum. I know in New York, during the period that he was growing up, there was a significant modernist movement afoot through people like Varèse and other both European and native American composers and the generation before George, the Copeland’s and the Sessions’ certainly did create a very significant music in America. Although one would be hard pressed to say that Sessions was particularly American. Copeland, Roy Harris and that generation certainly were American in their use of folk materials and things like that. (To Crumb) But I don’t know what your exposure was to that music?
GC: There were occasional national broadcasts say of the New York Philharmonic and NBC Orchestra the Toscanini, but occasionally we would have contemporary works and that was our contact there. In my town for example Debussy would have been considered a contemporary composer when I grew up there, you know that was as far as they wanted to go. And that was pretty far out stuff.
BD: Have you written any film scores?
GC: I was asked once to write a film score, but I turned it down because I think that is a very special field and I wasn’t sure that I could do a very good job. The film was The Exorcist. My wife killed me she thought we would suddenly become rich and now …. but actually they used about five or six seconds of Black Angels in the film so I came in the back doors as a film composer I suppose.
BD: As a teacher do you believe that it is important for young composers to be grounded in compositional technique in the traditional sense?
GC: I think it is important to have something to bounce off of and I bet that all of the composers that we know about today, Messiaen or Berio or Ligetti, that they all had solid technical backgrounds. I am sure they did. You have to have something you can repel against if we can put it that way or otherwise you are kind of fighting against air - you don’t have anything solid to kind of bounce off of. In Pennsylvania, University Pennsylvania, were I taught, I retired two years ago, we did a lot of forgeries type of stuff. I love to use Chopin for that. I had my regular Chopin forgery class for that. It was good, it sharpened the air and you know Chopin was an elegant melodist and harmonist.
DS: I have a story about that. The first time I ever met George was in 1970 and we were invited up to his house and one of the games that George would play was a transformation game where he would start out with say a piece of Chopin and try to come up with the most clever transformation to go from Chopin to Beethoven to Debussy to Bartók or whatever it was and he would sit at the piano and try to make logical transformations from one style to another and it was a game that he and a couple of his friends would play. But I soon realised that in George’s case it was actually a little bit more than a game. He took it pretty seriously and did it artistically which is even more important I think so. Do you remember that?
GC: Oh yeah. I think I know what you mean, but its for me I guess there is not a lot music that I don’t like. I think all the music of the past is in a way contemporary for me and there is that theory that everything is philosophical contemporaneous in a way for us today. That means a lot to us…..
BD: That’s it! Thank you very much George Crumb, David Starobin and our audience members.