This festival is co-presented by Bowerbird, the University of Pennsylvania department of music, and the Annenberg Center. Crumb’s early music rounds out the picture of this essential American artist’s lengthy career.Ī Little Suite For Christmas, 1979, A. This performance includes a conversation between George Crumb and James Primosch, composer and Penn music department faculty member.īlack Angels ( Saturday, October 12, 8 p.m.) features the Daedalus Quartet and friends performing Crumb’s Vietnam War-haunted Black Angels for amplified string quartet, “a work of frightening intensity, where Jimi Hendrix and Pierrot Lunaire shake hands with the devil.” A selection of Dr. These works celebrate George Crumb’s unfettered imagination as he requires the pianist to be a virtuoso at the keyboard while playing inside the piano and vocalizing as well. Kosmos ( Friday, October 11, 8 p.m.) will feature pianists Margaret Leng Tan and Adam Tendler performing two major works for solo amplified piano, the zodiac-inspired Makrokosmos I and the more recent Metamorphoses. The program features the haunting setting Apparition, with texts drawn from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and all four books of Madrigals with text by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.Įleven Echoes of Autumn (Echoes I) (1965) Out of Darkness ( Thursday, October 10, 8 p.m.) will feature the Arcana New Music Ensemble performing a collection of Dr. He was awarded an honorary doctor of music degree from Penn in May 2009 ( Almanac February 24, 2009).
Annenberg Professor Emeritus in the Humanities after more than 30 years of teaching. He retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 as the Walter H. Crumb received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters) and the Guggenheim Foundation. Many of his works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores. His music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles, ranging from the Western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk, to non-Western music. George Crumb, Annenberg Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, is one of the most frequently performed composers today. Zeitgeist: George Crumb at 90, a three-concert festival celebrating more than 70 years of music by Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer George Crumb, will take place October 10-12 at the Annenberg Center. Zeitgeist: George Crumb at 90: October 10-12 at the Annenberg Center