[1] The title of this essay is prepositionally reprehensible, but I mean to play on the title of a recent article by Catherine Losada (2009) in order to highlight a defining feature of George Crumb’s electric string quartet Black Angels (composed in 1970): Crumb’s reimagining, in a stylistically eclectic manner that is similar in cer tain ways to the works Losada discusses, of a.
—Borislav Čičovački, U starini, ime mu bee Haemus (translation mine) 1. Departure Every time I hear George Crumb's string quartet Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, I am fascinated by it. Fascinated, as I'm thrown into an End Page 181 abyss upon hearing its abrupt, surprising beginning. According to the OED, that means that I am deprived of the power of escape or resistance. Perhaps one could say that this music is beyond my control.
Out of control. Beyond thinking (in the ordinary sense). When I listen to the sounds of this music, I am caught in an event in which I cannot not participate. I cannot not respond. An encounter that does not appeal to (my) freedom ('my will') for an alliance.
I am in relation (Buber 1958, 11). 1 That is, I am created (for example as a listener) in this relationship (just as music is created in this relationship) and, simultaneously, I am dissolved in it. Beyond control.
It is the music that encounters me. But it is I who relates to it, who offers it hospitality. So, the relationship entails both choice and being chosen, activity and passivity. Beyond control.
That is, beyond rationality, controllability, measurability. An encounter with music beyond the words that frame, name, and contain it as music. A relationship with music beyond theories, methods, and categories that try to get a grip on it, that seek to suture all contingencies. Beyond (or between) the casualness— sometimes even carelessness— by which music scholars apply language and try to lay bare its structures, secrets, Truth. 2 In short, beyond musical pornography. This is my confession of faith, my credo: it is in the awareness of this fundamental uncontrollability of music that we can come into contact with the spiritual— with a space between listener and music that could be called spiritual. In my opinion, so-called 'spiritual experiences, aspirations, and values' do not refer to a reality beyond the material world (of music), to some otherworldliness, but to a reality beyond its categorical frameworks.
They refer to a space between category and reality, language and being, a space that cannot be filled by definition— an empty space. Music: always more and less than the categories, theories, and methods that name and divide it, beyond and between the knowable and the already known, an always available (re)source of difference and resistance. Music: being-otherwise-than-being.
It is in this excess of being overthought (and vice versa) that I situate or recognize music's spirituality (Finn 1996, 152–65). No emancipation of music. Of music in the margins.
Of this music by George Crumb. No liberation from the chains with which (this) music is reduced to what can be measured, designated, enclosed. No, that is not my aim. Nor do I want to get rid of music theories and categories. I am not dreaming of End Page 182 the pure and simple absence of frames. But neither am I pleading for a reframing, for inventing new categories (Spiritual Music, for example— spirituality as an effect of musical rhetorics), for improving existing theories, or replacing them by new or better ones. (Although, how unavoidable will this be?) What I am alluding to is that 'something' always already seems to withdraw from these theories, methods, and categories.
There seems to be a space between the sounds that.
![Crumb Crumb](http://www.moderncellotechniques.com/images/QT/QT-Crumb.png)
God-music (solo) Ancient Voices (duo) Ancien t Voi ces (Echo) (trio) Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects (tutti) The structure of the work displays the numerological el- ements important to Crumb, that is, thirteen movements, of which the seventh is the centerpiece. Further, the or- ganization of movements displays symmetry and palin- drome: the instrumentation of each movement follows a pal in dro mic st ruc tur e: 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4; the first, central and thirteenth movements are titled Threnody; God-music and Devil-music stand symmetri- cally opposite each other. Is primarily written for (in Crumb’s words) “electri c string quartet.” Though generall y played by am- plified acoustic instruments, the work is occasio nally per- formed on specially constructed electronic string instru- ments. The music uses the extr emes of the instruments’ re gis ter s as we ll as extend ed techniq ues suc h as bo win g on the fingerboard above the fingers and tapping the strings with thimbles. At certain points in the music, the players are even required to make sounds with their mouths and to speak. Each of the string players is also assigned a set of instru- ments to play througho ut the piece.
Some of the equip- ment requir es spec ific prepara tion, suc h as the crys tal glasses, which are tuned with different amounts of wa- ter. Crumb’s score includes a diagram that places the four musicians in a box-like formation. Electric Violin II and Electric Cello are located near upstage right and upstage lef t, res pec tiv el y, with the ir tam-ta ms betw een them.
Electric Violin I and Electric Viola are near downstage right and downstage left, respectively, but are slightly far- ther apart than the other two musicians in order to allow full si ght of the quartet. Violin I, Violin II and Viola have a set of crystal glasses downstage of them, while Violin I and Cel lo have mara cas upsta ge of them.
Eac h of the four musicians has a speaker next to him or her.