Black Angels (Crumb)
Black Angels, subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land", is a work for "electric string quartet" by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb.
[2] According to Robert Greenberg, the opening threnody is symbolic of the attack helicopters used predominantly during the war in Vietnam as a principal instrument of warfare preferred in American combat operations in the field.
[2] According to Greenberg, 'Electric Insects' was the preferred euphemism which Crumb used to describe the attack helicopters being symbolically referenced by the music being played contra-tonally by high pitched violins to a rapid tempo.
As Crumb states, "There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" quartet (in the Pavana Lachrymae and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work); an original Sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic; the sustained B major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae ("Day of Wrath").
The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the "Devil's trill", after Tartini).
[4] As a general summary of the musical composition, Crumb has stated that, "Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.
The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity – God versus Devil – implied more than a purely metaphysical reality.
[4] Victoria Adamenko has tried to elaborate what Crumb has called "the numerological basis of the entire work," as related to the "axis of symmetry" associated with "7" as the precise halfway point between the integer counting sequence from 1 to 13.
At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili.
Combined with an acoustically contrived impression of distance, this passage acquires an ethereal quality, with the redemption chorale referred to above fading away into nothingness.
[9] The Kronos Quartet, which specializes in new music, was originally formed in 1973 after violinist David Harrington heard "Black Angels" over the radio.
[13] Author Elizabeth Hand drew many of the chapter titles for her dark fantasy novel Waking the Moon from the composition, and credits it in the "Coda" of the book Sources
