BY CUTCOMMON
If you could plan a festival around the music of one composer, who would you choose?
Paavali Jumppanen’s top pick was George Crumb — and he has curated a series of concert programs that feature not only Crumb’s works, but the works of other composers whose music feels complementary, from Thelonious Monk to Ross Edwards.
The Australian National Academy of Music artistic director tells CutCommon why he’s excited for a new generation of instrumentalists to learn and present the music of America’s contemporary classical composer George Crumb.
So Paavali, you’ve curated The Innovative Spirit of George Crumb; what is it you absolutely love about the music of this composer?
Crumb’s music is very close to me; I love both listening to it and performing it. And curating Crumb is thrilling. His music is extremely original but also something I’ve time and again learnt the audience just loves.
There is a particularly vivid sense of mystery in his music, as well as a great display of enthralling sounds. In some ways, Crumb encapsulates what music itself does best: it takes the listener on this amazing, meaningful, and magical ride.
Why do you think ANAM musicians may find Crumb’s music worth performing?
You know, pretty often when famous musicians are asked about their greatest early concert experiences, they would mention hearing a performance of the Voice of the Whale or Black Angels. And the same with audience members. There is relevance simply in that musicians and audiences love his music.
Another aspect that makes his music relevant is that he actually was very sensitively referring to important issues present in the society, in the time of writing his most famous works in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — like war, the environmental crisis, and a clash between religion and individuality. Sound familiar? Aren’t those in some way the three most pressing issues in today’s world as well?
The Voice of a Whale is a classic of the environmental awakening, the Black Angels is a lament on the moral low of the human kind at the time of the Vietnam War, and the Makrokosmos is almost like a piece of new age gospel. It’s hard to think of more contemporary relevance than through those issues, and that Crumb’s music does it in such touching and just powerful ways makes including them just an obvious choice.
What practical skills can ANAM musicians learn from performing Crumb?
Crumb is fantastic advertisement for modernist music. He uses instruments in novel ways and applies numerous extended techniques. But his music is never impossibly hard to play. In fact, it sits very well under the fingers for all the instruments. Sure enough, there is complexity and a lot of stuff to rehearse, but he never writes against the instruments.
I think that it would be good if more contemporary composers studied Crumb, and also it’ll be good to educate the future musicians, which is what we do at ANAM, to ask for such writing principles from contemporary composers.
So how did you choose the Crumb pieces you wanted to include in the festival?
ANAM has a very active chamber music program, and many of Crumb’s most famous pieces are chamber music. So, it was a bit like going to candy store, to be honest.
As we have four concerts at the festival, we picked a landmark piece by Crumb for each one, and included music from other composers that build up those programs in an interesting but logical way.
How did you work to build that sort of complementary program?
We followed Crumb’s spirit — as we understood it — and included composers whose musical world is sympathetic to Crumb’s. That means that attributes like ‘melodic’, ‘sincere’, ‘novel’, ‘interested in the physical and the metaphysical world’, and ‘hypnotic’ would be the kind of things we were after, as opposed to ‘autonomous’, ‘vortex’, ‘complex’.
How have the musicians responded to the music of Crumb so far?
The entire ANAM is filled with tremendous excitement!
Crumb’s music is not too difficult to play, but it requires real commitment and ample time to prepare. There is quite a lot of extra stuff, like various extra instruments that musicians are required to play in addition to their own ones; there’s some amplification required, etc. And these are the kind of things that are natural for ANAM.
But I do hope we can also convert some conservative young musicians — believe it or not, those do exist — as well as audience members to become more open-minded in the face of new music. I’ve seen Crumb do that often, so I do have a pretty good feeling about this.
We’ve talked plenty about your insider perspective — but we’d love to know what’s in it for audiences, too! Why do you reckon this is an exciting festival to check out? What might people in the audience feel or learn?
I’d say, come ready to be taken on an amazing musical ride. Voice of a Whale, Black Angels, or the Makrokosmos amount to some of the most riveting concert experiences — and now, within a couple days, you can experience a number of these here at ANAM.
Parting words before the big festival?
It’s always great to experience Crumb’s magic. But to have the opportunity to do it in the hands of the ANAM musicians at the Abbotsford Convent, which to me provides the best possible vibe for Crumb’s masterworks, simply is not to be missed.
Full program details and bookings to experience The Innovative Spirit of George Crumb, 23-25 November in Abbotsfield Convent, are available on the ANAM website.
Images supplied. Paavali captured by Pia Johnston. Featured image by Abdul Min Muhaimin. George Crumb Peter Matthews from New York City, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
