George Crumb, who died Sunday at 92, was an all-American composer — one of our best, most original and most important. He was as American as apple pie, this shy, unpretentious West Virginian born in Charleston on Black Thursday, Oct. 24, 1929, the day of the great Wall Street crash. He embraced multiple sides of our contradictory national character through music ethereal yet startling, otherworldly yet stylistically wide-ranging, mysteriously impenetrable yet politically uncompromising, darkly death-obsessed yet marvelously life-affirming.
Crumb may not have been well known outside of new-music circles, but he mattered beyond those perimeters. In 1970 alone, he composed two new pieces that had sweeping implications, continue to resonate and challenge, and sound maybe even more radical and rational now than they did a half-century ago.
One was the string quartet "Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land," written, as Crumb indicated on his graphically arresting score, "in tempore belli (in time of war)" and "Finished Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970." The Vietnam War raged, and the composer, for the first time in any major string quartet, invoked the horror of modern warfare, exposed the precipitous fall from grace inherent in battle and proposed a path for spiritual redemption.
