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New York
George Crumb Concert
Know-it-alls discussing George Crumb (something the general music-loving public does not do) compare his sonorities and style to Schoenberg, Berg, Dallapiccola, Bartok, and even Mahler. Before an all- Crumb concert by the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in April, Music Director Leon Botstein mentioned the influence on Crumb of Charles Ives - and that strikes a chord, as it were.
Crumb, who attended the concert and seemed embarrassed by the accolades, was born in 1929, two generations after Ives. A homegrown maverick (from West Virginia), he fiddles with European orchestral tradition any way he can, pulling snatches of everyday tunes and texts out of forbidding modernist cacophony and sensual color displays. In Botstein's pre-concert talk he likened Crumb's effects - water gong, mallets on harp, players walking and shouting - to Rube Goldberg's, rightly describing his music as hard in both unfamiliarity and difficulty.
Listening to Crumb...