George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound: Essays on His Music.(Book review)

George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound: Essays on His Music. Edited by Steven Bruns and Ofer Ben-Amots. Colorado Springs, CO: Colorado College Music Press, 2005. [vii, 360 p. ISBN-13 978-093595-207-7. $36.] Illustrations, facsimiles, music examples.

This new collection of thirteen essays and an introduction honors George Crumb on his seventy-fifth birthday. This publication is a major contribution to research on Crumb and follows a previous collection of essays (Don Gillespie, George Crumb: Profile of a Composer [New York: C. F. Peters, 1986]), and a bio-bibliography (David Cohen, George Crumb: A Bio-bibliography [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002]). Still lacking is a single analytical monograph on the composer. The present volume comprises writings that range from personal to analytical, including valuable and detailed testimonies and analyses by performers, a flutist (Tracey Schmidt, essay no. 9), and a horn player and transcriber of Crumb's music (Robert Patterson, essay no. 10). The collection is multidisciplinary, with a contribution by a linguist exploring the Crumb-Lorca connection (Linda L. Elman, essay no. 2), and an investigation into the link between music and the visual arts (Michael D. Grace, essay no. 7). Each author is acknowledged with a biographical paragraph at the end of his or her essay.

The refreshingly broad spectrum of approaches chosen in the volume reflects the fact that Crumb's audience is not limited to academia, in contrast to some other contemporary composers. One does not expect a fully referenced bibliographical apparatus from a keynote address by a music critic (James M. Keller, essay no. 1), which does not employ endnotes at all (even with a quotation, p. 9). Along with memoir-like prose containing casual recollections or dithyrambs, the reader will find more formal articles in the vein of music theory (Edward Pearsall, essay no. 4; William E. Lake, essay no. 5; Richard Bass, essay no. 8; and Dave Headlam, essay no. 12), and historical musicology (Andrew Stiller, essay no. 3; Steven Bruns, essay no. 6; Michael D. Grace, essay no. 7; and Don Gillespie, essay no. 13). Russell Steinberg's article even offers what may be called a "guide for listening," a valuable tool for perception of Crumb's music not as a succession of sound events, but as a "meta-counterpoint" (p. 230). Among the contributing authors are several composers and a critically-acclaimed authority on instrumentation.

As a collection, the book achieves a fine balance between various ...