Composer George Crumb has Died, Aged 92

Influential American composer George Crumb has died aged 92, at home with his family by his side. Crumb's music often juxtaposed musical fragments from many different styles, and was heavily influenced by the folk songs of his native Appalachia alongside various Asian styles. He was fascinated by timbre and often used a range of extended techniques, both vocal and instrumental, to create specific — and frequently programmatic — effects.

Born in 1929 in Charleston, both his parents were professional musicians, and his first music lessons on the clarinet came from his father, George Sr.

Much like the music of Charles Ives, Crumb's work exhibited the eclectic range of influences he heard in early childhood, including those of popular, gospel, and folk music.

One of Crumb's most well-known works was the Black Angels (1970). Scored for electric string instruments, crystal glasses, and two suspended tam-tam gongs, it reflects on the horrors of the Vietnam War, and quotes the second movement of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" string quartet in service of this aim. The work was made famous by the Kronos Quartet and David Bowie once described it as a "study in spiritual annihilation."

Crumb was intensely interested in the poetry of Federico García Lorca and set much of his work to music. By the time of his death, Crumb had completed four books of madrigals and several song cycles which employed Lorca's texts, including the 1970 song cycle Ancient Voices of Children.

Over the course of the 1970s, Crumb composed four volumes of piano music titled Makrokosmos, in response to Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos. The works were dedicated to his friend David Burge, a pianist and conductor who had also commissioned Crumb's earlier Five Pieces for Piano of 1962.

Crumb also taught for three decades at the University of Colorado and the University of Pennsylvania, with composers Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, and Christopher Rouse numbering among his students.

Crumb is survived by his wife, pianist Elizabeth May Crumb (née Brown), as well as their sons David and Peter. Their daughter Ann died of cancer in 2019. Our condolences to Crumb's family, friends, and colleagues.