Becoming Lost at Sea

A Textural Discussion of Movement II from George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children”

Stuart Beatch

Beatch 1

In the early twentieth century, one can observe a branching out of emphasis in music

composition away from pitch and harmony, and towards the myriad of other musical parameters.

With the music of George Crumb, it is clear that textural elements are of key importance, as no

other composer of his generation possesses the skill to elicit such otherworldly resonances and

timbres from purely acoustic instruments. In this essay, I wish to explore the textural elements

present in his 1970 work, Ancient Voices of Children (specifically the second movement), relate

these elements to the temporal, textual, formal, and harmonic components in the work, and, as a

result, arrive at a deeper understanding of the extremely complex layers evident in Crumb’s

compositional process.

To begin, it seems right to define what is meant in this context by “texture.” Perhaps the

most useful definition comes from David Ott, stating that musical texture is “the arrangement or

disposition of horizontal and vertical elements. Horizontal elements are defined as successive

non-pitched sounds or as successive pitched sounds forming melodies. Vertical elements are

defined as simultaneous sounds which may form harmonies.”1 This does not appear to narrow

the scope of this essay’s search by much; however, he continues to state that in Crumb’s music,

two traits are evident in his use of texture: that the texture is always transparent enough to allow

the numerous individual timbres to be heard, and that the timbral combinations are arranged

carefully to achieve both formal coherence and contrast.2 Further, in the bizarre instrumentation

of this work – soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp, amplified piano, and three

percussionists – Crumb is calling upon a variety of extremely disparate, unique, and delicate

timbres to accomplish this task, and specifically for their “particular timbral potentialities,”3

1 David Lee Ott, “The Role of Texture and Timbre in the Music of George Crumb” (DMA diss., University of Kentucky, 1982), 1.2 Ibid, 4.3 George Crumb, Music of Our Time, Volume 3: George Crumb (New World Records NWCR803, compact disc liner notes), 2.

Beatch 2

which will become evident very soon. With this in mind, let us discuss texture in the second

movement specifically.

The second movement, “Me he perdito muchas veces por el mar” [“I have lost myself in

the sea many times”], Crumb aims to create a hushed musical moment, very distant from the

other movements in instrumentation and dynamics. Whereas the other movements at least reach

a forte or include some form of yelling from the performers, the second movement rarely escapes

piano. To emphasize this dynamic peculiarity, Crumb only utilizes a subset of the ensemble; the

loudest instrument (oboe) is absent, as is the boy soprano and second percussionist. In addition,

the timbres are entirely altered, often towards more metallic sounds, through many instrumental

changes; the mandolinist instead plays a musical saw, the pianist plays with a chisel on the

strings, and in an interesting touch, the soprano sings through a cardboard tube until the end of

the movement to distance herself from the musical action. From a textural standpoint, the

movement is often “multitimbral-monophonic,”4 in the sense that there are multiple contrasting

musical ‘phrases’ (each segmented gesture performed by an instrument, as best illustrated by the

cut-away score format), but these phrases rarely coincide, and instead dovetail from one to the

next as a single musical line. The textural contrast is thus linear, rather than vertical. For

example, at the beginning of this movement, the first pitch played by the antique cymbal,

sounding G#5, is then handed off to the piano, expanded by the interval of a tritone

chromatically outwards by the harp several octaves lower, and echoed by the vibraphone; this

can be observed in Example 1.

Example 1: Timbral trading at the opening of Movement II.5

4 Ott, 236-7. Ott considers the movements to be largely “multitimbral-polyphonic,” due to the moments in which the fragments overlap by one or two pitches. I disagree, as this disregards the more abundant moments in which they are not overlapping, and also disregards the way in which the movement is heard.5 George Crumb, Ancient Voices of Children (New York: C. F. Peters, 1970), 3.

Beatch 3

One other trait in this particular movement is the complete absence of meter; while this is

not new for Crumb’s music, it is peculiar in this movement as, in every other section of the

piece, there are at least one or two measures which require metric alignment. In this way, Crumb

is clearly concerned not with the vertical textures as defined in the opening paragraphs of this

essay, but with the temporal issues of horizontal texture, and specifically manipulating the

possible individual sounds of the instrumental group in a free-flowing series.

From a text-based standpoint, one can clearly observe a sense of text painting in this

movement, though in more of a stylistic and structural way than a literal Schumannian one. The

text translates as follows:

I have lost myself in the sea many timeswith my ear full of freshly cut flowers,with my tongue full of love and agony,many times I have lost myself in the seaas I lose myself in the heart of certain children.6

Each appearance of the text is set the same way, with an accelerating and decelerating figure in a

distant whisper, followed by an “instrumental comment.”7 The texture in this section suggests

that the speaker is not out at sea, but at the seashore; the “chisel-piano” which follows the first

6 Quoted in ibid, ii, from Federico García Lorca, Selected Poems, trans. by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. I have rewritten the fourth line to better match the syntax of the original poem.7 Susan Elaine Jenkins, “Representationalism in Selected Twentieth Century Compositions About the Sea” (DMA diss., Ohio State University, 1984), 14.

Beatch 4

line of text sounds similar to the “seagull” effect in the composer’s later Vox Balanae (1971).

Further, the extremely high sounds of the musical saw with its hollow timbre sound increasingly

foreboding, as the attempt to force a series of musical pitches on the unusual instrument sounds

as if it were a Siren in the distance, welcoming the weary sea traveler with malicious intent. The

fact that the final act in this movement is the appropriation of the “Siren” melody by the soprano

suggests that she has in fact lost herself to the sea. This can be corroborated by examining the

musical form as it relates to the text and timbre. The movement pivots around the central line,

“with my tongue full of love and agony.” With the word “love,” the piece enters into a near-

reflection (a quasi-palindrome) of itself; the mirror is referred to in the poem by the reordering of

the fourth line in opposition to the first.8 Musical fragments appear in symmetrically the same

order as they did in the first half of the movement, until the final line of the poem, “as I lose

myself in the heart of certain children.” At this moment, the texture changes and the moment is

soured; the musical saw does not reappear, and there is a swapping of musical roles between the

harp and piano, so that the harp plays the main melodic line, and the piano expands it

chromatically even further than before by a tritone in the opposite direction. The soprano then

takes on the musical saw melody as mentioned, now without the echo of the cardboard tube – I

imagine this can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways, particularly her subjugation by the sea

through suicide; see Example 2.

8 Victoria Adamenko, “George Crumb’s Channels of Mythification,” American Music 23, no. 3 (2005): 334.

Beatch 5

Example 2: Role swapping with musical saw melody imposed on the soprano.9

Pitch elements are also crucial in this movement when it comes to Crumb’s ability to

construct musical texture. Despite an apparent lack of rigid structural elements (although we

have seen that there is in fact a clear, planned progression of events), Crumb manages to keep

each movement in the work unified through continuous pitch reference. In general, this

movement is built around trichords, tetrachords, and the interval of the tritone. The opening

melodic gesture in the piano, and echoed by the vibraphone, is simply an undulating iteration of

the trichord [014], built from a minor second stacked with a minor third. This is expanded upon

in the musical saw melody, which is the symmetrical semitone tetrachord [0145] stated twice, a

whole tone apart (D-E); the whole tone was important in the first movement as a unifying

element (under the guise of D#-F).10 This tetrachord is further morphed in the chisel-piano part,

as [0146]; at the subsequent musical saw entry, the tetrachord remains in this altered form, but

the second half of the fragment uses [0124] instead. At the next piano entrance, the tetrachord

has morphed once again to [0268], a symmetrical whole-tone tetrachord, which marks the central

9 Crumb, Ancient Voices, 3.10 Thomas R. de Dobay, “The Evolution of Harmonic Style in the Lorca Works of Crumb,” Journal of Music Theory 28, no. 1 (1984): 108.

Beatch 6

point in the movement. In the second half of the movement, the pitch structure immediately

shows a contraction; the piano material utilizes [0136], while the musical saw responds with

[0146] and [0134]. In a striking instance, the next piano entry only uses a semitone trichord

[012]. At the coda which follows the final line of text, the pitch material is identical to that

utilized in the introduction, but the interruptions, now in the piano rather than the harp, are a

minor third higher, and outline a rising tritone C#-G. At this moment, the soprano enters with the

musical saw melody from the opening, unadulterated in intervallic content but transposed down a

perfect fifth. The pitch structure in this movement clearly shows an organic expansion and

contraction throughout in the range of pitches and intervals utilized. This remains an additional

component to the other textural elements discussed; the rhythms and contours of each melodic

fragment remain the same, which allows Crumb to keep the formal structures coherent despite

the subtle alterations in pitch structure.11

Throughout Ancient Voices of Children, George Crumb manages to create stunning

musical textures and elicits bizarre yet extraordinary sounds from ordinary instruments. While I

have only discussed one short movement in this essay, it appears that even at his least complex,

Crumb still has a multiplicity of musical layers and structural elements in place to enhance both

the horizontal and vertical textures in his music. The multitimbral and monophonic style of the

movement, the free-flowing fragments which are seemingly unaffected by each other, the text

which floats around in vague relation to the musical events, and the pitch content which seems to

expand and contract like a living organism, all contribute heavily to the overall musical texture.

11 Ibid, 101.

Beatch 7

Bibliography

Adamenko, Victoria. “George Crumb’s Channels of Mythification.” American Music 23, no. 3 (2005): 324-354.

Crumb, George. Ancient Voices of Children. New York: C. F. Peters, 1970.

———. Music of Our Time, Volume 3: George Crumb. Orchestra 2001. James Freeman. New World Records NWCR803, 2006, compact disc. Recorded 1997-8, originally released 1998. Liner notes.

de Dobay, Thomas R. “The Evolution of Harmonic Style in the Lorca Works of Crumb.” Journal of Music Theory 28, no. 1 (1984): 89-111.

Jenkins, Susan Elaine. “Representationalism in Selected Twentieth Century Compositions About the Sea.” DMA diss., Ohio State University, 1984.

Ott, David Lee. “The Role of Texture and Timbre in the Music of George Crumb.” DMA diss., University of Kentucky, 1982.