科研成果详情

This paper analyzes the intersection of religiosity and music composition in George Crumb's quartet Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land and its implications for its teaching and thus its cultural reproduction. In this quartet, Crumb employed stringed instruments to invoke the sounds of nature along with extended vocal techniques—shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and glass—to powerful and terrifying effects. Crumb's use of archaisms in the composition of the piece— numerology, cyclicality, and repetition—complemented the writer's attempt to make music a repository of nature and of the sounds of primitive man. Its religious character thus resides in the transcendental invocation of nature through the playing of music. We argue, though, that an analysis of Black Angels' performance and reception does not fully do justice to Crumb's piece. One has to look at Crumb's own score with its visual and graphic reenactment of the music's archaic themes to understand the extent of Crumb's vision. Thus we take a look at the forms of transmission of the piece, how it is learned, how it is rehearsed and apprehended by the performers, and the role imagination plays in the mind of the student-performer, to fully comprehend its religious character.