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May 11, 1975, Page 5 The New York Times Archives Although there are dissenting voices, leading music critics as well as ordinary music listeners have been lining up behind George Crumb with rare show of agreement during the last few years. The American composer's recent works, such as “Ancient Voices of Children” and the “Makrokosmos” series for amplified piano, have been greeted in rhapsodic terms not often applied to modern music. To Eric Salzman, writing in Stereo Review.

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Crumb's works add up to “some of the most poetic and atmospheric music written in this century.” The New Yorker's Andrew Porter was “bowled over, like just about everyone else.” Alan Rich confessed in New York magazine, after hearing Pierre Boulez lead the New York Philharmonic “Ancient Voices”: “I'm not sure mere words on paper can explain why Crumb's music makes sense; but it remains for me as powerful and moving contemporary creation as I know.” Over and over, in comments on the music, a few significant words keep turning up: poetic, atmospheric, mysterious, evocative. Schonberg summed it up The Times: “In recent years George Crumb has been talked about, and praised, more than any other composer of the American avant‐garde.” Although Crumb takes the stance of mystical poet rather than scientist, he has become a pivotal influence in American musical development during a period when science—or at least the apparatus of science—has lorded it over art and intimidated many artists. What is this singular music that can draw to ardent support both from sophisticated observers of the avant‐garde and from concertgoers to whom modern music is usually a closed book? And who this strange musician? George Crumb himself seems on casual acquaintance an unlikely fellow to have entertained such darkling fantasies, or to have stirred up the avantgarde musical community. A 45‐year‐old professor of composition at the University of Pennsylvania, he lives in the Philadelphia suburb of Media with his three children and his wife Elizabeth (he met her when they were students at Mason College in Charleston, W.

Va., their home state). He is almost desperately reticent about himself and his work. When praised or even when required to take bows after a premiere of one of his works, he reddens and takes on the look of a hunted animal. Usually he sits near the rear of the hall and accepts applause by bobbing up and down a couple of times while holding up a hand as if to plead for clemency. Advertisement The mezzo‐soprano Jan DeGaetani, for whose rare combination of vocal and dramatic talents Crumb has composed several of his best works, one of his warmest admirers, both professionally and personally.

“He is one of those people you meet so seldom, people with something real beneath the surface,” she said not long ago. “My husband [Philip West, an oboeist] was born in Tennessee and raised in North Carolina, and he gets along well with George. They're both mountain people, and there's something solid about them.”.

Crumb's West Virginia origins are drawn upon heavily in his music and he often seems to make point of dropping in references to his native state. In the Pulitzer‐winning “Echoes of Time and the River” (he says he wasn't thinking of the Thomas Wolfe novel when he named the work) there a disturbingly enigmatic phrase that turns up again and again, croaked and whispered by the players: “Montani semper liberi.” It turns out to be the state motto of West Virginia, no more—or, one might say, no less, for it (Continued on Page 50) means “mountain men will always be free.” In “Ancient Voices,” keening sounds are produced by a musical saw, bowed in standard mountaineer fashion.

In “Makrokosmos III” a percussionist blows foggy, hooting tones on a stone jug. There is a banjo in “Night of the Four Moons,” and in “Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death” an electric guitar is played “bottle‐neck style,” by sliding a glass rod over frets in the manner of hill‐country musicians. The same work calls for “a small, high‐pitched jew's‐harp” and “five water‐tuned crystal glasses.” Crumb likes to take the banjo part in performances, though he denies he can “actually play” the instrument (he was trained as a pianist). He sometimes fills in as a percussionist, too, chiefly because “I've always wanted to play percussion. They seem to themselves much.” But the ramifications expand beyond the boundaries of West Virginia, the Appalachians and the suburban, professorial life. Crumb delights in quoting or otherwise calling up the past, as if he were the Marcel Proust of Western music, He creates an unforgettable effect in “Night of the Four Moons,” which ends with an alto voice singing distantly offstage “in stilo Mahleriano,” that is, in the style of Mahler. Other scores quote snatches of Chopin's “Fantasie Impromptu,” a Bach fugue, Beethoven's “Hammerklavier” Sonata, the “Dies Irae.” Schubert's “Death and the Maiden” and Ravel's “Bolero.” Again, nothing very revolutionary about this: Quotation has been one of the composer's standard tools for centuries.

But Crumb uses the technique so deftly and with such sure instinct for dramatic impact that one can experience not only a twinge of nostalgia but something like the sense of irretrievable loss that arises when one leafs through an album of family pictures or yellowing snapshots of halfforgotten friends in half forgotten wars. Though anything but a blusterer, Crumb is at the same time unusually confident about his work and displays little doubt about where he Is headed artistically. Few composers suffer from lockjaw in respect to their own music (often their program notes are the most exciting things they produce). Crumb, however, with a kind of down‐home practicality, chooses to stay close to bare musical facts.

Certainly he is reluctant to admit his extramusical fantasies into public discussion. Advertisement Most artistic paradoxes, however, are more apparent than real. The science of modern composers is based to a greater extent than some of them would admit on numerology and magic. Intuition is still the real composer's truest guide, and whatever their convictions about rationality, one can discern in the closely calculated scores of Milton Babbitt, say, or Elliott Carter the same reverence for number and form that inspired Pythagoras and his mystical “music of the spheres.” And similarly, the music of Crumb, while avoiding certain conventional tools such as counterpoint, is as tightly organized and internally consistent as any Pythagorean theorem. The best music always results, as Alban Berg put it, from “ecstasies of logic.” Crumb may protest, and does, that “I don't know anything about mathematics or physics—I just let my ear be my guide.” But like any composer, he has been speaking physics all his life without knowing it, as M. Jourda in discovered about his prose. Thus, in “Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965,” the first section, for piano, is based entirely on the fifth note in the harmonic series.

(Musical notes are complex sounds, composed not only of the fundamental tone but a series of harmonic overtones that, while faint and possibly not immediately apparent to the casual ear, can be detected by a careful listener. If you strike any C natural on a piano, for instance, the overtones that result are the octave C above and then, ascending, G, C, E, G, B flat, C, D, E, etc.) The second section is made up of violin harmonics combined with the sixth overtone, produced by rubbing the piano strings with a piece.of hard rubber. Music is one of the physical sciences as well as one of the metaphysical ones. Crumb's use of simple musical forms, which so bothers some of his colleagues, is an expression of his belief that “the sophisticated forms, the forms that grew out of tonality [sonata, symphony and so on) no longer work. But the primitive forms such as song form or variations are still useful.” In his own teaching he encounters great confusion. “Young composers don't seem to know what to do or who are the guides anymore.

When I was in school, it was easyWebern, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Hindemith and off to one side, Stravinsky. Now they think, maybe it's Varese, or maybe not — they really aren't sure.” Crumb himself is strong in his admiration for the work of such different colleagues as Elliott Carter and George Hochberg. He feels Carter does his best work in the traditional forms and with traditional instruments. “I especially love his String Quartet No. 1.” What about Stockhausen, Europe's leading avant‐gardist of the sixties? “I don't know, isn't the Stockhausen thing about played out?” Like any respectable academic, Crumb is cautious about assessing col‐leagues.

As a teacher, Crumb works in a way that students have called “low‐key,” according to Richard Wernick, a fellow composer at the university. Wernick, who is chairman of the music department, adds that by the end of the term, Crumb's students (he ordinarily has in his charge from five to seven would‐be composers) wind up knowing “an incredible amount about music without realizing how it happened.” Some students, inevitably, try to write like Crumb, but he discourages that. Unlike other teachers, such as Schoenberg or Milton Babbitt, Crumb seems antipathetic to the idea of gathering a school of admirers around him. “Some applicants we've had recently,” Wernick says, “submit scores that from arm's length look amazingly like George's — circles and everything. The outward trappings of his style are easy to imitate, but I tell students that George lives in that world and they don't.” Like other composition teachers A the university, Crumb meets privately with each of its students and in addition eads a seminar or teaches one class in, say, 19th‐century har mony each semester.

Crumb himself began composing, he recalls, at “around 10 or 12, because my father was a band conductor who played the clarinet and my brother was a flutist. I wrote my first piece for them.” His teachers later included Benning Dexter and Stanley Fletcher (piano), Ross Lee Finne) and Eugene Weigel (composition), and various forgotten mentors for such instruments as banjo and musical saw. His compositions before 1954, when he produced what he regards as his first mature work (his String Quartet), were solid and work.

Manlike but attracted no attention outside the tight little world of contemporary music. His “Variazioni” for large orchestra, written in 1959, adopts a 12‐tone theme, and now sounds rather like Schoenberg even to Crumb. The 12‐tone method of composing, generally identified with Schoenberg in spite of his insistence that he did not mean to lay it down as a method, is a specific case of what is more generally known as serialism. A serial composition is based on a specific sequence or row of tones (not necessarily 12) which serves as a matrix for controlling the development of the entire work. Advertisement Crumb used to keep some of the stranger and more unwieldy cf his instruments in the basement of his home.

Recently, however, he had an addition built onto his house, and there he works amid his jungle of instruments, homely and exotic. Whatever the milieu, his habits are not likely to change muc.h. David Burge, the pianist who has premiered several of Crumb's works, draws this picture of the homebody magician at work: “With George, the question of time is always there, haunting his deepest thoughts.

And yet when starting a new piece he gives the outward impression of having all the time in the world. He sits in his living room and smokes huge quantities of True cigarettes. He devours the business page of Time magazine. He responds with languid monosyllables, if at all, to questions from Liz Crumb in the kitchen. He wanders distractedly to his study and tries a single sound on the incredibly decrepit hulk of a piano that inhabits the room—an untunable, unplayable piano. He tries the sound, varies it, a dozen times, a hundred times.

Then to the desk to write himself a note or a direction or a musical symbol and leave it in the chaos of letters and manuscript.” And so, agonizing note by agonizing note, an incredibly detailed but powerfully direct work such as the 35‐minute “Makrokosmos I” finds it way onto score paper. Understandably, most discussions of Crumb's work begin to sound like litanies of picturesque instruments, and striking sonorities. But he is no tinkerer for tinkering's sake, and critics are almost always astonished to discover that his odd devices and sounds are integral to his deeper meaning, not experiments in the usual avantgarde sense. His sonorities have been chosen with keen selectivity from the vast repertory of sounds available to the modern composer, always with an car to expressing some personal vision, mood or emotion. At the end of “Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965,” for example, he requires the violinist to play with the bow's hairs slack, to achieve a gray, mournful timbre.

Or consider “Echoes of Time and the River,” the big orchestral piece that won Crumb a 1968 Pulitzer Prize: Wind players whisper and croak into instruments, the violin sections whistle chords, and platoons of musicians march about in solemn processionals so that orchestral sonorities are continually, subtly shifting in perspective and balance. At one point in this piece a percussionist lowers and raises a gong in a bucket of water (the score specifies a depth of 9 inches), altering the pitch rather spookily. In “Lux Aeterna” (“Eternal Light”) and “Vox Balaenae” (“The Voice of the Whale”), all musicians are required to wear black masks, a peculiarly theatrical gesture that helps create and sustain the time‐suspending, infinite mood the composer has in mind. At times in “Black Angels,” a grim shocker for amplified string quartet, the two violin. Fists and the violists play disembodied tunes by drawing bows across the lips of partly filled crystal water glasses.

A light chain is laid across the piano strings in “Makrokosmos I” and allowed to jingle throughout one movement, setting up all sorts of unpredictable (to the listener, not to the composer) overtones and celestial melodies. In the same work the pianist plays on the piano strings with thimble‐capped fingers to evoke the image of a spectral mandolinist —the movement is called “Phantom Gondolier.” Two slide whistles are played directly over the piano strings in “Makrokosmos III producing distant, plaintive congeries of tones and overtones.

“Night of the Four Moons” calls for an international percussion kitchen that includes antique cymbals, Chinese prayer stones, an alto African thumb piano and Japanese Kabuki blocks. Beyond the exotic instruments and peculiar sonorities, Crumb's music is attractive in other ways that make it suspect to some skeptics. Havoc Producer Kit Torrent.

His hand‐drawn, exquisitely calligraphed scores are visually striking in an almost painterly way, for instance. Thus, in several works there appears a phrase drawn from a Lorca poem, “. Y los archos rotos donde sufre el tiempo.” (. And the broken arches where time suffers.), and at these points the music is symbolically notated in the shape of broken circles or arches. The movements called “Magic Circle of Infinity” and “Spiral Galaxy” in “Makrokosmos I” also are written in circles, and “Crucifixus” is notated entirely in the form of a cross. Those who know about the history of such symbolic notation will recognize Crumb's homage here to baroque pictorialism.

Bach loved to write his music in the literal shapes of waves and serpents, or graphically to represent laughter, the ringing of bells, sobbing grief, and so on. (Albert Schweitzer in his biography of Bach describes many of these graphic illustrations of musical effects, such as the writhing serpent in Cantata No, 40, “Dazu ist erschienen der Sohn Galles.” While the bass sings, “Hellish serpent, art thou not afraid? The victor who shall crush thy head is born,” the musical accompaniment not only depicts the serpent's slithering progress on the treble staff but the foot crushing its head in a dotted rhythm below.) Crumb's scores also go somewhat against the modern objectivist grain in their unashamedly poetic directions to players. Although the effects Crumb wants to achieve might seem to be assured by his remarkably precise and detailed use of standard notation—there is little left to chance in his writing—he offers in addition instructions so extravagantly literary that a musical purist could be put off without listening to a note. One is reminded at times of Satie's jocular instruction, “Play like a nightingale with a toothache,” but Crumb is utterly in earnest when he asks a pianist to play “eerily, with a sense of malignant evil” or “musingly, like the gentle caress of a faintly re membered music.” Crumb is a canny artist, however, and upon close examination all his strange devices work toward some larger musical point.

He has been careful, for instance, to have specific interpreters in mind when composing most of his works, people who are not only exceptionally skilled in peiforming difficult modern scores but who are attuned to the deeper meanings in his scores. Jan DeGaetani, the matchless mezzo‐soprano whose name was made internationally by her gripping interpretation in “Ancient Voices,” is the ideal Crumb musician, a virtuoso who is also sensitive enough to be stirred by the penumbra of associations surrounding each of his pieces.

Such a performer responds in ways she hardly could explain to the composer's mood‐setting instructions and expressive suggestions. David Burge, who commissioned one of the earliest of Crumb's mature works (“Five Pieces for Piano,” 1962) and gave the premiere performance of “Makrokosmos I,” is himself a composer, which may help. But when he first received the score of “Makrokosmos I” from Crumb in November of 1972, his first reaction was shock. “Its appearance was staggering,” he recalled recently, “every page demanding the closest scrutiny, each new title calling forth reactions of a supramusical nature from all the senses.” But Burge set doggedly to work, “playing, strumming, singing, plucking, shouting, whispering, scraping, whistling” (anyone who wants to play Crumb must be the total musician), and now, he says, “many, many performances later, I still marvel at this gigantic, personal, incredibly moving piece of music.”. Advertisement Many musicians, however, are puzzled in their first reactions to Crumb's music. Burge heard one student remark after a performance: “Imagine, 35 minutes and not a note of counterpoint.” In traditional academic terms, there seems surprisingly little in Crumb's scores that could be taught or learned.

Some typi cal reservations about them were summarized in a report to the English periodical The Musical Times by the American critic Patrick Smith: “Crumb's recent music has sharply divided listeners into those who see his combination of simple syntax, inflated philosophical titles and extremely fine‐tuned ear for sonority as a drying up into gesture of a once‐promising composer, and others who find in the music a variety of shifting and haunting moments whose sum is out of proportion to the parts: a selfcontained musical language of immediate and lasting emotional power. I am in the latter camp, but it must be said that the final section of ‘Music for a Summer Evening’ [the subtitle of the third in the “Makrokosmos” series] recalls all too uncomfortably sections in his earlier works.” There is, at any rate, little uncommitted comment on Crumb. People take sides, as they should over any possibly significant artist. In the same issue of The Musical Times, the monthly's resident avantgarde critic, Paul Griffiths, assessed the same work rather coolly and added: “Like most of his earlier output, these pieces are formally elementary and predominantly eerie in character.. To derive much enjoyment from them it is probably necessary to share Crumb's nightmares.” But what seems a nightmare to one listener is a lovely dream to another, such as Andrew Porter: “Anyone who walks easily and willingly amid the dream imagery of Western art is likely to be drawn to Crumb's music; anyone who finds reflected and intensified in both ‘Beowulf’ and ‘Pollen’ his own feeling that we move in a small, lit area ringed by unknowable darkness..” Porter goes on to connect Crumb's music to the poetry of Boito, Keats and Shelley. Significant new music takes many guises, of course, and not all of it must be evocative in the manner of Crumb's —just as not all great poetry is lyric poetry.

But as a counterpoise against the obsession with structural intricacy and mathematical clarity, his work over the last decade adds up to a most impressive achievement, comparable to that of Charles Ives, or Aaron Copland, or Elliott Carter, not to go too far from home. Will George Crumb turn, out, in the perspective of music history, to have been a “great composer”? No telling about that—history teaches us only humility there. Yet it may not be too soon to suggest that historians will look back at the third quarter of the 20th century as the highwater mark of musical mandarinism in America, as time when style and form were suffocatingly pervasive as models for a whole generation of composers. The philosopher and esthetic guide of this postwar generation was Theodor W'Adorno, the brilliant German critic and disciple of Walter Benjamin.

It was Adorno's logically unassailable contention that musical composition is determined largely by historical forces and that at any one time history presents the composer with one problem, for which there is one valid solution. The composer's only mission is to solve this problem and anyone who does not recognize that and try can be dismissed as a mere entertainer. The problem of our time, in Adorno's view, was the erection and establishment of the 12‐tone system as expounded by Schoenberg and refined by Berg and Webern, to replace the dying tradition of tonality.

Seen in this light, writing music became a monastic discipline for true believers, and music itself a tool for social and political change. Like most theories, however, Adorno's works best in retrospect; it is a marvelously helpful rear‐view mirror for scholars and critics but hardly any help to a real composer. It is mandarinism carried to ludicrous extremes and it places a heavier burden on human rationality than that thin reed can be expected to sustain. The more pragmatic approach may be to recognize that we never know where music is going until it has gone there, and that the goals of art are defined by artists at work, not by theoreticians. The success of Crumb's music with both sophisticated and untutored listeners suggests that at the very least the problem to be solved by composers today is not how to get in step with some golden future projected by science or history but how to get back in touch with their own artistic instincts. Beethoven, who enjoyed some success at composing, referred to himself as a tondichter, or tone poet.

The best of George Crumb's music suggests that there still is something to be said for that proud attitude.

Pastoral is one of the oldest and most enduring musical topics, yet most scholarship exploring it in music ends with the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper seeks to examine the expression of the pastoral in the musical output of post-modern composer, George Crumb. In doing so, I argue that the concept of post-pastoralism put forth by Terry Gifford may provide a valuable lens through which to understand musical expressions of the pastoral in the post-modern era. The article ends with a close reading of George Crumb’s chamber work, An Idyll for the Misbegotten, examining the ways in which this musical text sonically evokes post-pastoral sentiments.

• 6 Gifford observes that references to an untamed or wild landscape are more common in American expres • 7 Karol Berger discusses the distinction between mythical or ritualistic time and historical time as 20The opening of Idyll is important not only for its establishment of place, in this case, a primitive and wild nature populated with animals, but also for its evocation of time, or more specifically, of timelessness. As alluded to by Marinelli in the quote that began this article, time is an important component in the pastoral, one which has received less attention from musicologists. The desire to escape to a “sanctified past” or an “indistinct, redeeming future” that so commonly characterizes the pastoral urge is underlaid with a desire to remove oneself from the ravages of time and the perils of progress, to a time out of time. Raymond Monelle highlights the idea of a frozen present often associated with the pastoral, noting “in pastoralism, as in music, there is no conceptual ‘real’ [] time is suspended in a lyric present” ( The Musical Topic 189). Rebecca Leydon also mentions the “static temporality [] typical of the pastoral mode” (161) while Thomas Peattie suggests that this added temporal dimension gained emphasis in the nineteenth century, citing Wagner’s use of repetition as a means of suspending time and evoking the pastoral (186). In describing Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of the idyll, Richard Will observes “if time enters the idyll at all it does so only in the form of such renewable cycles as are represented by the generations of the family, the season, or the hours of the day” (317). These quotations suggest a number of signifiers for pastoral notions of time, such as a lost past, a redeeming future, cycles, nature, stasis, and timelessness.

Most of these signifiers involve a relatively static temporality in which events either repeat in endless circles, reflecting a divine or sacred cultural conception of time rather than the linearity of secular and historical time, or are frozen in time, perhaps evoking a space that is removed from the natural flow of time and preserved in a crystalline state. • 8 This viewpoint is best expressed by Monelle, who observes “ we often forget that music can also sign • 9 There are a large number of relevant studies on this topic. Some of the more useful articles relati • 10 The silences in this opening passage are not acoustic silences, meaning that they are not absent of 21This raises an interesting dilemma: how can music, commonly considered one of the most temporal art forms, existing only in and through time, evoke the concepts of timelessness, stasis, or the cycles of sacred time that are associated with the pastoral? After all, as David Epstein suggests, “music actually structures time–and the flow of time–in precise quanta and proportions, controlling this flow, its intensities, its direction, its speed, its goal orientation, to a degree unmatched in other domains of our temporal experience” (182). However, as a number of scholars have observed, there is a difference between the time a piece takes, and the time which a piece evokes perceptually for the listener. The notion that our experience of time is subjective and conditioned by our relationship to and interaction with events around us has a strong history in philosophy and is associated with thinkers such as Kant, Hume, Whitrow and Bergson.

This in turn has influenced psychologists, inspiring research on the notion that “time is not an independent process but a relationship between a person and an experienced event” (Clifton 114). From their research, it is possible to assemble a list of musical elements which may create an experience of temporal expansion, evoking conceptually the notion of timelessness and leading the listener to ascribe their experience of the piece as timeless. These include a sparse texture, a low density of musical events, the absence of meter or any kind of predictive, temporal structure, and the interjection of long spans of silence. The opening of Crumb’s Idyll displays all of these elements; the solo flute melody playing short melodic gestures that fade into silences lasting several seconds. At intervals rapid, at others slow and haunting, the gestures defy any sense of meter or regularity, contributing to the timeless quality of this opening passage. 22The evocation of a primordial natural wilderness removed from (or outside of) the passage of time gradually shifts as the piece progresses. While the opening features the haunting calls of the flute, and the low distant roll of the bass drum, potentially representing the sound of distant thunder, a change is initiated at Rehearsal 2 with a canon between the drums, reminiscent of the kind of call and response patterns seen in African drumming.

Following the entrance of the drums the flute becomes frantic, entering into a series of rapid, shrill gestures, the languid and sliding melody of the opening temporarily forgotten. The entrance of the drum canon at Rehearsal 2 and its subsequent effect on the flute suggests an intrusion into the sanctity of the wilderness, potentially representing the entrance of man. The ensuing dialogue between the drums and flute suggests interaction between man and nature, the even turn-taking implying a harmonious relationship. The middle passage of the piece, however, warns of the risk mankind poses to the previously untouched wilderness.

23Here, Crumb interweaves two quotations, one textual, one musical. The first consists of an excerpt from the eighth century Chinese poet Ssu-K’ung Shu: “The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses” (Crumb Idyll 7). This text, though evoking the spirit of an ancient time, paints a dark picture of the world, implying “an atmosphere of decay and death” (Schmidt 176) which resonates with the lamenting quality of the Idyll. The musical quotation consists of the opening of Debussy’s Syrinx, a well-known solo work for flute that is itself a pastoral piece.

The quotation is indicated in the score with quotation marks, a notational device Crumb uses in other compositions to mark musical quotations, and is an octave lower than the original, with slight modifications to the rhythm. The use of this particular motive from Debussy’s Syrinx is interesting, as Monelle refers to this gesture as a new type of pastoral topic created by Debussy to invoke “an ancient world, pagan, mysterious, sunlit.” He goes on to note “it may, indeed, be a pastoral world. But the image of innocence, of happy love, is rendered crystalline, is slightly colored with risk” ( The Musical Topic 268). The “risk” to which Monelle refers may derive from the story of Pan and the Syrinx, the subject of Debussy’s Syrinx, which Crumb in turn evokes through his quotation of the piece.

Though appearing in many forms, the most familiar version of this story can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While out in the woods, the beautiful nymph Syrinx catches the eye of Pan. Denying his advances, she flees and, upon reaching the river Ladon, begs her sisters to hide her. They oblige, transforming her body into reeds. When he reaches the river, Pan only sees the reeds, which he cuts down into unequal lengths and binds together to form his pan-pipes, the sound of which Debussy seeks to evoke with his Syrinx.

24Crumb’s setting of the Debussy quotation, with its reference to the tragic tale of the nymph, in between recitations of lines from the Chinese poem, encourages a deeper, ecofeminist reading of the story. In cutting the reeds which form the converted body of Syrinx in order to fashion his pan-pipes, Pan enacts two forms of violence; first the exploitation of the body of Syrinx for his own purposes, and second the repossessing of the Syrinx’s voice, which can now only “speak” through Pan when he plays the pipes. The fact that Crumb chose to have the dark and foreboding text spoken by the flautist while also playing, creating a “speak-flute” utterance, creates an inhuman timbre that is part flute, part human, suggesting the disembodied voice of the Syrinx warning of the perils of exploiting the earth. As Tracey Schmidt notes, the traditional representation of Pan as half-man half-goat serves as a representation of our baser, animal instincts, the rape of the nymph resulting in a forced loss of innocence (174).

Having the voice of the Syrinx utter the warning of “shivering birds and withering grasses,” the death and decay of the earth, suggests a parallel between Pan’s rape of the nymph and man’s rape of the environment, which has resulted in the exploitation of its natural resources at the cost of the earth and its animal inhabitants. As Crumb noted in an interview about Idyll: People are almost illegitimate now, upsetting the natural scheme of things. They represent a danger to so many other forms of life.

And in that sense we’ve passed from legitimacy to illegitimacy, occupying a place where, if we continue like this, we jeopardize at last even our own existence. In Strickland 166) 25 The passage following these quotations initiates a regular drum beat, shattering any remaining sense of timelessness and instead suggesting both the progress of time towards modernity and the sound of alternating footfalls, further signifying the intrusion of man into the idyll.

Alternatively, the pulse established by the drums may represent the regularity of machinery, such as the war machines of industry. Though initially soft, the drums become ever louder and more insistent, the flute responding with furious flurries involving flutter tongue and multiphonics, further distorting the previously pure timbre of the flute. The increasing dynamics and ever more frantic gestures of the flute and drums depict “the chaotic din of the modern world,” and any lingering sense of tranquility completely eradicated (Schmidt 188). The frenzied activity reaches a climax around Rehearsal 16, ending with three resounding calls on the drum, seemingly announcing the destruction of our little idyll. 26The pastoral is characterized by a retreat and a return––a removal from the perils and corruption of town life to the tranquility and innocence of the country is inevitably followed by a return to the urban, ideally wiser, having achieved greater insight from the retreat to the pastoral. Crumb adds his own twist to this typical exchange. While he begins his Idyll in the untarnished primitive wilderness, depicting the gradual erosion of this time and space by the appearance of man and industrialization, his propensity for cycles and circular forms leads to a “return” to the opening idyll, first by recalling the dialogue between the flute and drum and then by returning to the opening melody of the Idyll at Rehearsal 21.

However, there are changes that undermine the sense of a true “return” to the time and space evoked by the beginning of the work, implying that rather than a “return,” this passage may be a recollection of the former, untarnished idyll, or perhaps a dream of a potential future. The first change is the “whistle-tone” melody, appearing shortly after Rehearsal 19. The thin, plaintive sounds produced by the harmonics are fragile and haunting, representative of the frail and tenuous state of the idyll.

Though the opening melody of the flute returns, rather than echoing into silence, its gestures are followed by calls on the drum, undermining the tranquility and timeless quality of the earlier idyll with the memory of what had transpired. The continual decrease in dynamics, rendering the sounds of the flute and drums ever more remote and distant, suggests a fading away, a gradual distancing or disappearance of the wilderness evoked by the melody. The dissonant and ever fading tremolos of the “turtle-dove” which end the piece convey a sense of unease and uncertainty. As Schmidt observes, “a sense of resolution is sought but not found” (184). 27 In its concern with man’s relationship to nature and the current state of the environment, Crumb’s Idyll reveals the possibility for new versions of the pastoral in music of the post-modern era.

Crumb’s “flawed idyll” (Strickland 166) may represent the most coherent post-pastoral composition within his oeuvre, yet an interest in and concern for nature permeates his musical output. Nor is Crumb alone in his morally-charged take on the pastoral. Consider the film Koyaanisqatsi, which has been deemed “one of the most coherent responses to the economic disparity and environmental degradation of the Reagan era” (Essid 320). The result of a multi-media collaboration between minimalist composer Philip Glass and film director Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word which can be translated “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a life that calls for another way of living” ( ibid.), juxtaposes images of land formations, natural elements and broad expanses of American wilderness with scenes of industry, urban living and modern life, the rhythmicity of the shots closely matched by the repetitive rhythmic elements of Glass’s music. Part of the intention behind the film is to reveal the artificiality of the environment man has created for him or herself that has, in many ways, effaced an earlier, pre-existing nature.

Different in many ways from Crumb’s Idyll (the least of which being the melding of image and music), Koyaanisqatsi nevertheless expresses a shared concern. Moving forward, music scholars need to expand the typical signifiers of harmony, rhythm, melody, and references to shepherd’s music to explore how post-modern composers signify pastoral concerns of their time. The development of the recent field of ecomusicology speaks to the growing interest in connections between music, culture and nature. The concept of post-pastoralism, with its roots in ecocriticism and environmental concerns, offers one possible lens through which to view these musical texts. Undoubtedly there are many post-modern composers who share Crumb’s fervent hope that “humankind will embrace anew nature’s ‘moral imperative’” ( Idyll 3). Auteur Northwestern University Kristina Knowles is a PhD student at Northwestern University. As a sopranist and pianist, she has won numerous awards and performed with classical, jazz, and popular music groups.

In 2013 she won a Graduate Research Grant from Northwestern University to fund her research. Her primary research interest is the aural perception of post-tonal music, focusing on issues of rhythm, meter, and subjective time in “unmetered” post-tonal music with an emphasis on the works of George Crumb.