The Creative Process of George Crumb's Black Angels

Abstract

Since its premiere in 1970, George Crumb’s Black Angels has remained immensely popular with performers, audiences, and the general public. Crumb believes it is his most performed work, yet there has never been a large-scale study devoted to exploring the quartet. This dissertation presents the history of the work from the commission to the premiere, raises questions of performance practice and the use of technology in live performance, covers analytical issues arising from the combination of formal structures in the work, and discusses the realization of the numerological symbolism in each movement. Throughout, the dissertation uses archival artifacts and first-person accounts, including newly-rediscovered recordings, interviews completed for this research, and sketches, correspondence, and other documents in the George Crumb Papers (Library of Congress), the Gilbert Ross Papers (Bentley Historical Library), and other archives. This dissertation first surveys the documents in Crumb’s archive and presents an analysis of his sketching methods. The first chapter illustrates the types of sketches for Black Angels and explains the layers hidden in the first complete draft of the work. Although Crumb taped together fourteen leaves to make a booklet out of this draft, it began as mostly-blank leaves; the layers reveal a spatially-organized form sketch previously hidden under the draft. The second and third chapters cover the history of the piece from the commission to the premiere. The second chapter uses Crumb’s correspondence and his compositional log — a previously-unpublished personal record of his compositional work in 1969–1970 — to provide a timeline of the compositional process. The third chapter begins with the delivery of the scores to the Stanley Quartet and covers their preparations for the premiere from May-October 1970. Using an oral history gathered for this research in conversation with archival documents and recordings, this chapter presents new findings on the technology used for the premiere and other early performances, from the expensive, custom-built “Crumb Boxes” used by the Stanley Quartet to brightly-colored Barcus Berry electric instruments and cheap contact microphones used by other ensembles. This history concludes with a discussion of the development of performance practice as it relates to the improvement of amplification technology. The fourth and fifth chapters cover, respectively, the development of the form of the work and the changing realization of the numerological mottoes. Using the sketches and interviews with Crumb, the fourth chapter shows how the parable structure — the larger grouping of movements into “Departure,” “Absence,” and “Return” — grew out of the symmetrical organization of movements. These sketches also demonstrate the gradual emergence of movements four and ten as “buttress points,” or key structural moments, in the symmetrical form and the moment Crumb changed them from a symmetrical pair to diametric oppositions (“Devil music” and “God music”). The fourth chapter closes by considering the form of and the temporality in Black Angels in the context of Paul Fussell’s “paradigm war memoir” and its realization in Vietnam War memoirs. The final chapter presents the final realization of each of Crumb’s “magical numerological mottoes,” which he allegedly used as a structural key within each movement, in conversation with the intended realization as seen in the sketches. This comparison demonstrates instances where the original application of the motto was incomplete, but still had a noticeable effect on the internal form of the movement.