Crumb is very interested in numerology and numerically structured the piece around 13 and 7. It was composed over the course of a year and is dated "Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)" as written on the score. 66304, copyright 1971), subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land", is a work for "electric string quartet" by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb. It is a dance with the dark expanse of the universe, but we are given no time to learn the steps.Black Angels (Edition Peters, New York, no. It provokes fear of the unknowable, of humankind’s inability to comprehend its own existence. The piece deals only in contradiction, disjuncture, and enormity, tearing apart the ensemble into a series of vast, irreconcilable tensions. Black Angels is, appropriately, both uplifting and crushingly morbid.
Enigmatic movement titles and allusions to the music of Schubert and Beethoven form an interpretative mesh, one so dense that it threatens to destroy all sense of meaning.īut perhaps this is precisely the point. The work makes use of numerical symbolism, in particular the sacred seven and demonic thirteen.
George Crumb has cryptically related the piece to fallen angels, mortality, and the Vietnam War. We are left uncertain how to interpret the composition that results. There, they must recite streams of syllables and bash tam-tams. Here, they are called to play crystal glasses. The musicians, too, are pushed to their limits at times, they seem to be attacking or ignoring their instruments. The viola, cello, and pair of violins are amplified and subjected to electronic distortion, their timbre radically transformed. With Black Angels, the string quartet, a form often associated with cool detachment, gives way to a visceral experience. As we fail to impose a sense of reason upon the sequence of events in which it is lodged, it glimmers just out of reach, revelling in our inability to order this chaos. A macabre tango strikes up, as if played on Death’s own fiddle. Shouts, moans, and all manner of strange, unclassifiable sounds ricochet about in the void. Percussive, plucked string patterns race through the darkness.
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