Star-Child: Innocence and Evil

By William Bender

A musician stood up and jangled a heavy iron chain. A trombone player occupied the spotlight and made wheezing sounds that resembled a sick whale mired in primeval mud. Children in bright blue robes played hand bells. Someone rang sleigh bells. Scattered in the balconies, five trumpeters held foil pie plates up like mutes and blew. The string section looked like errant students assigned to the back of the room to repeat the same musical sentence at least 25 times. That was just about the case (see below). High on a ramp, the strings were lined up facing Assistant Conductor David Gilbert in the right rear corner of the stage. He was only one of four conductors at work. At times, James Chambers led the brass and some percussion, Larry Newland the clarinets, flutes and a vibraphone. When all hell broke loose--during an evocation of the Apocalypse--Supreme Maestro Pierre Boulez could be seen beating with the polyrhythmic fury of a sinner trying to drive off an army of snakes.

So it went last week as the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of Star-Child, a 33-minute parable for soprano, solo trombone, boy choristers and large--very large--orchestra by American Composer George Crumb. Gimmickry aside, Star-Child turned out to be a work of immense power, daring and, at times, even horror. A requiem of sorts drawn primarily from two anonymous medieval texts, Dies Irae and Massacre of the Innocents, Star-Child is imbued with the same Blake-like contrast of innocence and evil that characterizes much of Crumb's other work, notably Ancient Voices of Children and Black Angels.

The new piece builds over a slow, droning, continually repeated chordal procession called Musica Mundana (Music of the Spheres). Says Crumb: "I like sounds that never stop." He also likes a good explosion or two. Halfway along comes a percussive cataclysm that shakes the rafters like a latter-day The Rite of Spring. At the end, the glistening harmonics from three solo violins perched high in a rear balcony evoke a paradisiacal kingdom where the chil dren of light will reign.

Musical Saw. Star-Child was composed on a Ford Foundation grant for the Philharmonic and for Irene Gubrud, who sang the soprano part splendidly while supported by crutches (be cause of an old back injury). The score is Crumb's first for full orchestra since Echoes of Time and the River, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Crumb, 47, is a visionary who has shaken orchestration up in recent years with an ingenious knack for producing new sounds with old instruments and homely domestic objects. The grimly surrealistic Black Angels (1970), for example, was written for amplified string quartet and requires the players to trill with thimble-capped fingers and even to bow on crystal glasses tuned with water. Ancient Voices has certain mournful sounds produced by the bowing of a musical saw.

The sources of Crumb's cosmic view of life seem a mystery even to the composer himself. Painfully shy and softspoken, he lives outside Philadelphia in the borough of Media -- composing, reading (nonfiction), playing chamber music with his piano-teacher wife Elizabeth and young sons David and Peter, to both of whom Star-Child is dedicated. Daughter Ann, 26, an aspiring actress in New York, joins during her occasional visits home. Crumb speaks of a composition of music as a process of working out, or giving form to, certain devils inside him. "It is a kind of catharsis, I guess, or purgative," he explains. "I think the composer himself is the audience when he is writing a piece. If it convinces him, then perhaps it will convince someone else." Black Angels was a statement against war in general and Viet Nam in particular. About Star-Child he says: "When I look around at the world today I couldn't prove that things are necessarily taking a turn for the better. But I have always been fascinated by the idea of children some how giving new meaning or regenerating the earth, not only in the physical sense, but in the spiritual sense. That is our hope, and in sharing it I guess I am basically an optimist." William Bender

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