George Crumb News
American composer (1929-2022)
- classical music, contemporary classical music
- United States of America
- composer, university teacher
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Last update
2024-04-23
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2024-04-06 08:42:00
Spell Book, Witch & Stone Fruit: composer Freya Waley-Cohen on the power of ritual and spells
[…] her bring along the things that she had written down, and also encourage her to improvise. By her early teenage years, she realised that she liked improvising and composing.She studied music at Cambridge University, doing a general music degree but focusing on composition. She counts her teachers as significant influences, Oliver Knussen and, at the Royal Academy of Music, the late Simon Bainbridge. She names Olivier Messiaen as her favourite composer, but also mentions George Crumb for his celestial vision of the world, though she admits that she is not as impractical or brave as he is. She also admires great melodists like Mozart and Schubert, and she always ends up going back to Bach, doodling through Bach's chorales to get her brain in order.When I ask about heroes, she comments that she is uncomfortable with the idea of a hero and scared of making one. She listens to a […]
2024-03-29 09:54:00
An imaginative and seductive mix of musics: The 48th St Magnus International Festival with Alasdair Nicolson, Lisa Robertson, Erland Cooper, Huw Watkins, George Crumb and more
[…] St Magnus Cathedral with musicians from the Nicolson-founded Assembly Project and video mapping from Illuminos. Roo and Neil also perform in one of two late-night Sound of Local Folk concerts, with young Orcadians pianist Jennifer Austin and fiddler Eric Linklater performing in the other. Austin also plays a concert in-the-round at St Magnus Cathedral, bringing her new compositions to Kirkwall by candlelight.Percussion ensemble O Duo and soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn give the long-awaited UK premiere of George Crumb’s American Songbook III: Unto The Hills. Subtitled, "Songs of Sadness, Yearning, and Innocence: A Cycle of Appalachian Songs", the work dates from 2002 and sets traditional and folk songs for singer, amplified piano, and percussion quartet. O Duo and Llewellyn will be by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire percussion department. Ensemble Hesperi will perform Baroque music with a Scottish flavour, acclaimed mandolin player Alon Sariel performs Plucked Bach and Kathryn Stott gives a recital as part of […]
2024-02-23 18:56:49
[…] were the Aurora Orchestra and Aurora Voices, whose intensity match Kopatchinskaja’s uncompromising vision and the almost dogged commitment of her playing.It’s unsparing stuff. We walk into the venue to the unnerving sound of Giacinto Scelsi’s Okanagon with its rhythmic thuds and clanging gongs. We hear the tramp of marching feet as Kopatchinskaja leads on a small group of players for Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10, written in 1673, its movements interwoven with extracts from George Crumb’s Black Angels for amplified string quartet, composed in protest at the Vietnam war. The effect is unnerving as Biber’s strident dissonance, remarkable for the 17th century, collapse and morph into Crumb’s bitter musical aphorisms.
2023-12-31 16:56:00
Since I am busy at work on my new book project, a two-volume study of the complete operas of Mozart in their eighteenth-century political and intellectual context, it seems fitting to have heard more music by Mozart than by any other composer this year. (For 'rules' on counting, please see my previous post.) Beyond my top four, Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven, and Strauss, I heard a good range of music from Alkan to Zimmermann and beyond.19 Mozart 12 Wagner 8 Beethoven, Strauss 7 Brahms, Schumann 6 Bach 5 Schubert, Byrd 4 Mahler, Prokofiev 3 Benjamin, Chopin, Ligeti, Liszt, Ravel 2 Berg, Bizet, Debussy, Dvořák, Handel, Haydn, Henze, Knussen, Puccini, Schoenberg 1 Alkan, Dieter Ammann, CPE Bach, Johann Christoph Bach, JCF Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Berberian, Berio, Boismortier, Boulez, Busoni, Cage, Chausson, Cherubini, Unsuk Chin, Coleridge-Taylor, Crumb, Duparc, Elgar, Fauré, Francesco Filidei, Grisey, Saed Haddad, Hartmann, Hindemith, Holliger, Humperdinck, Ibert, Janáček, Korngold, […]
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- timeline: Composers (North America). Performers (North America).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): C...