Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children

George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, dating from 1970, is a five-movement work for mezzo-soprano, seven instrumental players, and, briefly, a boy soprano. It is a song cycle to poems by Federico García Lorca—dark, with dazzling flashes of emotional intensity.

Introduction

Crumb’s engagement with Lorca started in 1963 and had already yielded five works for solo voice and chamber ensemble before Ancient Voices—four books of Madrigals (1965–69) and Night of the Four Moons (1969). Crumb had perfected the techniques used in this work, including writing for a non-standard ensemble: three percussionists (who also vocalize), three players on string instruments (mandolin, harp, and amplified piano doubling toy piano), and an oboist. Non-standard instruments (harmonica, musical saw, Tibetan prayer stones) appear, along with non-standard ways of playing the instruments or using the voice. Expansions to the realm of sound had become common in contemporary classical music; Crumb’s genius was to realize their expressive potential—especially in terms of creating an eerie and exotic atmosphere. He found in Lorca a fit environment for that potential to exert itself: a world of brilliant, strange, and moving sonic images exploding out of the night.

History

According to Crumb, the “original impulse” to compose Ancient Voices of Children had been the last words sung by the soloist: “and I will go very far… to ask Christ the Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child.” He completed the work for a commission from the Coolidge Foundation at the Library of Congress, where the premiere took place on October 31, 1970. The performers were mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, boy soprano Michael Dash, the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, conductor Arthur Weisberg, and pianist Gilbert Kalish—a longtime artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

DeGaetani had sung earlier works of Crumb’s, and he composed the piece specifically for her: “The vocal style in the cycle,” he wrote, “ranges from the virtuosic to the intimately lyrical, and in my conception of the work I very much had in mind Jan DeGaetani’s enormous technical and timbral flexibility. Perhaps the most characteristic vocal effect in Ancient Voices is produced by the mezzo-soprano singing a kind of fantastic vocalise (based on purely phonetic sounds) into an amplified piano, thereby producing a shimmering aura of echoes.”

Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children for Soprano, Boy Soprano, Oboe, Mandolin, Harp, Piano, and Percussion

In 1971 the same musicians who premiered the work made a recording for Nonesuch that sold tens of thousands of copies—a remarkable degree of success for a new classical composition. They also performed the piece, in 1973, for the CBS television series Camera Three.

Form

The work is a sequence of five songs with two dance interludes—one after the first movement, the other before the last. This palindromic structure (A–interlude 1–B–C–D–interlude 2–E) suggests Crumb’s admiration for Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who used palindromic movement plans in several of his compositions. As with Bartók, the palindrome, with its return to the start, is combined with a strong narrative drive from beginning to end. The story of loss and transformation, of voyaging between life and death, is fleshed out partly through sounds and partly through the movement of performers on and off the stage.

Analysis

The work begins with ululation from the mezzo-soprano on prescribed vowels and consonants. Wordlessly, she summons the “electric piano” (piano with contact microphones attached to its strings) and harp, which together suggest a guitar. When she moves into a Lorca poem about a young boy who has lost his voice to the king of the crickets (“The Little Boy was Looking for his Voice”), the percussionists come in, whispering in imitation of these insects. The second stanza, voiced by the lost voice in the poem, is sung by the boy soprano from offstage.

The second song, “Dances of the Ancient Earth,” is an instrumental section, led at first by the oboe under the marking “raw, primitive, shawm-like.” (The reference is to the oboe’s ancestor, an instrument still used in Western Asia.)

The next song, “I have lost myself in the sea many times” speaks of a loss of self, both in the sea and in the hearts of children. A new instrument (the musical saw, played by dragging a bow across a hand saw) and a newly adapted one (the electric piano, played by sliding a chisel on one of the strings) contribute to the soundscape around the soprano’s whispering, which is almost drowned out.

Beginning again as wordless incantation, the third song becomes a wild “Dance of the Sacred Life-Cycle,” with phrases from the singers and oboe circling over the drumming.

In another contrast, a pianissimo rumble of marimba tone introduces the fourth movement, “Each Afternoon in Granada, a Child Dies Each Afternoon.” A song written by J.S. Bach, “Bist du bei mir,” drifts in on the toy piano, like an echo from the past. After this comes the Ghost Dance, featuring a musical saw and the mandolin played with a glass rod.

Sounds of cracked bells open the finale, “My silk heart has been filled with lights,” in which the soprano is singing to children. The oboe plays out weakened recollections of its role in the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, then goes offstage. The boy comes back, and the two singers end the piece as if changed into birds.

Connections

Apart from Bartók, other composers who influenced Crumb at this time include Olivier Messiaen and members of the new European avant-garde, such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Luciano Berio. Commercial recordings provided access to their works, most likely including Berio’s Circles (1960), which had been released on a US label in 1962. This work is similarly a palindromic sequence of five songs for female voice with an ensemble of percussion and harp.

Crumb must have been aware, too, of the music of George Rochberg, his colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. Rochberg had pioneered the use of quotations in his Contra mortem et tempus for four players (1965).

Legacy

Ancient Voices of Children was a breakthrough piece for Crumb, and was followed very soon by Black Angels for amplified string quartet (1970) and Vox balaenae (Voice of the Whale, 1971) for three masked musicians, with amplified instruments and special lighting. All three works were rapidly performed across the US and Europe. Ancient Voices was reimagined as dance theater in 1975 by the London company Ballet Rambert. 
However, Crumb never tried to repeat the success of this work—one that is of its time but wholly unique.

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Article by Paul Griffiths