George Crumb

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昨日は歌手のエリーとリハーサルでした。

George Crumb作曲のソプラノとアンプリファイピアノのためのApparitionに取り組んでいます。ピアノの内部奏法があるのでピアノの弦の中がシールだらけ、そして指で弦をスリスリするのでだんだん指先が痛くなってきます。内部奏法、特殊奏法がよく研究されていて、彼のとってもファンタジーな曲に素晴らしい効果をもたらすのです。

Apparition Elegiac Songs and Vocalises on texts from Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'dWritten in 1979 for Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish, Apparition is George Crumb's first work for solo voice and piano, and his first setting in English (apart from a number of songs composed in his early years). The text ofApparition is extracted from Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", part of a set of poems grouped under the title Memories of President Lincoln. Whitman wrote "When Lilacs ..." during the weeks following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, April 14, 1865. Although Whitman's poem is specifically an elegy to Lincoln, Crumb has chosen most of his text from a section sub-titled "Death Carol". This is a pause in the direct reference to Lincoln, and contains some of Whitman's most imaginative writing on the experience of death. In Apparition, each song and vocalise form a piece of a larger vision, eventually coalescing as a tableau. The literary and musical materials focus on concise, highly contrasting metaphors for existence and death. Yet Crumb's cycle offers the listener reassurance. For just as in Whitman's verse, death is never depicted as an ending of life. Instead, it is circular, always a beginning or an enriched return to a universal life-force. I. The Night in Silence under Many a Star The piano opens the cycle with a pulsating evocation of Nature, accompanying the soprano who sings of symbols of eternity: "the night", symbolic of the physical universe; "The ocean shore", symbolic of motion and time; "the soul", representative of consciousness; and "the body turning to thee", illustrative of the cycle of life and death. With the presentation of this symbology a stage is set, upon which more personal visions of death will appear. Vocalise 1: Summer Sounds Vocalise 1 sharpens the focus from the vastness of the first song to a more specific time and location -- further preparation for the more personal elegies which follow. II. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd This brief, delicate song contains the only text not from the "Death Carol". Whitman's memory of the fragrance of blooming lilacs became his symbol for the time-period following Lincoln's assassination. Crumb's setting conjures an elusive scent -- gently drifting, intermixing, and separating ... an expression of an ineffably sad memory. III. Dark Mother Always Gliding Near with Soft Feet This reverential elegy combines an intense personal plea with an instinctively religious hope for death as release. Crumb's religiously allusive use of chant and imitative counterpoint further define this song as a prayer. Vocalise 2: Invocation Crumb has often balanced his quiet and ecstatic visions with representations of the evil aspects of nature. This vocalise is a harsh, primal invocation. It leads without pause into the fourth song. IV. Approach Strong Deliveress! Death as emancipation is one of the most ancient human desires. In Whitman's metaphor of death as feminine and life-resurrecting, the concept of a deliveress is forceful and redemptive. Crumb reflects this in a relentlessly driving march. Propelled by implacable energy, this song is joyous in its hope for and embracement of death. Vocalise 3: Death Carol ("Song of the Nightbird") The singer of Whitman's "Death Carol" was a solitary hermit thrush: 'the grey-brown bird I know receiv'd us And he sang the carol of death ... From deep secluded recesses, Came the carol of the bird.' V. Come Lovely and Soothing Death Constructed as the culminant song of the cycle, this intensely personal summoning and welcoming of death transforms and extends the musical imagery of the preceding songs and vocalises into a final transcendent statement of the inevitability of death's arrival, "to all, to each". VI. The Night in Silence under Many a Star After death, the forces of Nature remain: physicality, motion, consciousness, and life. Recapitulating the opening of the cycle, with no textual changes and only minor musical adjustments, Crumb re-affirms Whitman's view of the circularity of life and death.