Truly, at times, it sounds like the devil’s own work. In each of the ten (and counting) Lorca cycles, Crumb’s primary goal is to serve the text with his music. “It’s still hard for me to hear this piece without a sense of foreboding. George Crumb has spent nearly half a century setting the texts of Federico García Lorca. “I heard this piece for the first time in the darkest time of my own 70s, and it scared the bejabbers out of me,” Bowie said of Black Angels in an article for Vanity Fair. In 2003, Bowie listed Crumb’s 1972 LP Black Angels, composed during the bleak days of the Vietnam War, as one of his favorite albums of all time. Find a full list of his recordings here.ĭespite its avant-garde nature, Crumb’s work was influential to a number of artists such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and David Bowie. Recordings of his music have been released in Bridge Records’ series Complete George Crumb Edition. “I once many years ago had a letter from Lorca’s brother who said he liked my settings of Lorca’s poetry,” he said.Ī busy composer during the 1960s and ’70s, Crumb became less prolific in the subsequent two decades, but he returned with a series of American Songbooks beginning in the 2000s. In a 1992 interview at the George Crumb Festival in Boulder, Colorado, the composer admitted he was never sure how those specific pieces would be received. He based several of his compositions and other projects on the writing of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, including his 1970 song cycle Ancient Voices of Children.
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