“Things were turned upside down. There were terrifying things in the air ... they found their way into Black Angels.” —George Crumb
George Crumb’s Black Angels, inspired by the Vietnam War, draws from an arsenal of sounds that include shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. The score bears two inscriptions: “in tempore belli” (“in time of war”) and “Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970.”
Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1929. His principal teacher in composition was Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree.
Crumb’s music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles, ranging from music of the Western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk music, to non-Western musics. Many of Crumb’s works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores.
Crumb was the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and commissions, including the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music; the 1971 International Rostrum of Composers (UNESCO) Award; and Fromm, Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, and Rockefeller foundation awards. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, Crumb became the 36th recipient of the MacDowell Medal, awarded annually to a composer, writer, or visual artist who—in the judgment of his/her peers—has made an outstanding contribution to the nation’s culture.
Crumb retired from his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania after more than 30 years of service. Crumb’s music is published by C.F. Peters, and an ongoing series of “Complete Crumb” recordings, supervised by the composer, is being issued on Bridge Records.
Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption).
The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These “magical” relationships are variously expressed: e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. ... There are several allusions to tonal music: a quotation from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet; an original sarabanda; 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).
—George Crumb
Aleksandra Vrebalov’s 90 works—ranging from concert music and opera to music for modern dance and film—have been performed by Kronos Quartet, Serbian National Theatre, English National Ballet, Rambert Dance Company, Sybarite5, Jorge Caballero, Sausalito Quartet, ETHEL, Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre, Ijsbreker, Moravian Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, and Providence Festival Ballet, among others. Vrebalov’s cross-disciplinary interests led to participation at residencies and fellowships that include MacDowell, Djerassi, The Hermitage, New York’s New Dramatists, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, American Opera Project, Other Minds Music Festival, and Tanglewood. Between 2007 and 2011, Vrebalov created and led Summer in Sombor (Serbia), a weeklong composition workshop with the South Oxford Six composers’ collective that she co-founded in 2002 in New York City. The workshop facilitated the creation of more than 50 new works by young composers from Europe and the US.
Most recently, Vrebalov joined Muzikhane (House of Music), founded by composer Sahba Aminikia in Mardin and Nusaybin—towns on Turkish-Syrian border—and for six weeks made music with young refugees from Syria and Iraq.
Vrebalov received the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hoefer Notable Alum Prize from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Harvard Fromm Commission, and Barlow Endowment Commission, as well as awards from ASCAP, American Music Center, Meet the Composer, MAP Fund, Vienna Modern Masters, and Friends & Enemies of New Music. As the Douglas Moore Fellow (2004), supported by the Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Fund, she spent a season at Glimmerglass Opera, Opera Memphis, and Florida Grand Opera, where she immersed herself in all aspects of opera production. Her opera Mileva (2011) had its world premiere at the 150th anniversary season of the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.
As a Serbian expat Vrebalov is the recipient of the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for lifelong dedication and contribution to her native country’s culture.
ilektrikés rímes (Electric Rhymes) is a plea for health, love, and creativity after times of disease and fear. It celebrates the omnipresent creative spirit expressed in a messy and unceasing life force swirling around and within us. The piece was supposed to mark my 50th birthday, celebrating my long-lasting, productive relationship with Kronos Quartet. Instead, I wrote it at the height of the pandemic, and its premiere coincides with the destruction and loss of life unseen in Europe since the falling apart of my country of origin—the former Yugoslavia—in the 1990s. From a birthday song, ilektrikés rímes evolved into a meditation, a lament, a cry, and—more than anything—a prayer for peace on planet Earth.
Monk Hierotheos and members of the Kovilj Monastery Choir in northern Serbia chant in old Slavonic an excerpt of “The Secret Command,” the Apolytikion of the Saturday of the Akathist (the fifth Saturday of Lent) in plagal fourth mode: “I stand in awe and cry out to You: Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.”
I dedicate this world premiere performance to the memory of George Crumb and of my father, Stevan Vrebalov.
—Aleksandra Vrebalov
Originally from Washington, DC, and now residing in New York City, inti figgis-vizueta focuses on close collaborative relationships with a wide range of ensembles and soloists. Her musical practice is physical and visceral, attempting to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans and indigenous futures. The New York Times speaks of her music as “alternatively smooth and serrated,” The Washington Post as “raw, scraping yet soaring,” and the National Sawdust Log as “all turbulence” and “quietly focused.” figgis-vizueta is the 2020 recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Fred Ho Award for “work that defies boundary and genre.”
Recent commissions include works for the LA Phil, Kronos Quartet, Attacca Quartet, JACK Quartet, and Crash Ensemble, as well as Jennifer Koh, Matt Haimovitz, and Andrew Yee. Her music has been presented in spaces such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Chicago Symphony Center, Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, and the Music Center at Strathmore. She is currently in residency at SŌ Percussion’s Brooklyn studio for the 2021–2022 season.
I love listening to music alone, especially late at night—details feel different, somehow heavier and closer to skin. I love the focus of a dark space, with sounds emerging almost alive (even in earbuds). Memory springs forth too, I have found. In live performance, this dark feels like another material to play through and around. Its presence asks for a trust that there are other people really out there, while giving the intimate gift of music alone: closeness in distance. In forms unfolding from memory and shared motion, music by yourself is about connecting to people who are and aren’t still here.
—inti figgis-vizueta
On March 16, 1968, the United States Army killed more than 500 unarmed civilians in the hamlet of My Lai, Vietnam. The unimaginable brutality of the event impacted all those who witnessed it firsthand, including helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who—against orders—intervened to save Vietnamese lives. Thompson’s story is the basis of the My Lai Suite, which was drawn from the evening-length opera My Lai, with music composed by Jonathan Berger and a libretto by Harriet Scott Chessman for Kronos Quartet, Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist
Vân-Ánh Võ, and vocalist Rinde Eckert. The work captures the visceral, phantasmal depictions of Thompson’s grief, horror, and guilt as he is haunted by persistent memories of that cataclysmic day, half a world and nearly four decades away. “A gripping affair, beginning to end” (The New York Times), the full work is scheduled to be released as a recorded album on Smithsonian Folkways this May.
Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology. Berger’s next projects as part of his Guggenheim Fellowship include a cantata based on folk tales as told by refugees, migrants, and the homeless, and a work based on acoustic models that approximate and recreate the sounds of extinct species and lost habitats. A winner of the Rome Prize, Berger was composer-in-residence at Spoleto Festival USA. His violin concerto, Jiyeh, paired with that of Benjamin Britten, was recorded for Harmonia Mundi’s Eloquentia label by violinist Livia Sohn, who also recorded Berger’s War Reporter Fantasy for Naxos and solo works on Miracles and Mud, his acclaimed Naxos recording of music for solo violin and string quartet. Thrice commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, Berger has also received major commissions from the Mellon and Rockefeller foundations, Chamber Music America, and numerous chamber music societies and ensembles. In addition to composition, Berger is an active researcher with more than 60 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science, and technology.
The massacre of more than 500 innocent civilians by American soldiers in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, was one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War—one that traumatized the nation and swayed the course of history. The events of that day may well have gone unnoticed, save for the actions of a young army helicopter pilot who, by happenstance, witnessed the killing in the course of a routine reconnaissance flight. Appalled by what he saw, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson attempted to intercede, first by reporting the incident, then by landing his helicopter between the civilians and the troops. Aghast at his inability to stop the slaughter, in a moment of enormous passion, Thompson threatened to open fire on his own troops. Failing to stop the carnage, he pulled a wounded child from its dead mother’s grasp and flew him to safety. Thompson’s refusal to remain silent about the massacre forced the military to conduct an inquiry and trial that shook the national conscience, and left Thompson vilified as a disloyal outcast for much of his life.
Scored for tenor, traditional Vietnamese instruments, and string quartet, the work takes place in a hospital room, where Thompson—surrendering to cancer—faces death under hospice care. Feeling neither heroic, nor particularly proud of what he did, the consequences of Thompson’s naïve, idealistic attempt to stop the carnage are pieced together in an effort to seek closure and resolution. My Lai simultaneously represents a continuation of my creative path and an exciting departure into new sound worlds. As was the case in my recent work The War Reporter, My Lai seeks a mode of expression in which the political and societal underpinnings of conflict, and its senseless brutality are set through a character study of an individual who unintentionally becomes inextricably bound up in the fray of war.
—Jonathan Berger
Harriet Scott Chessman is a fiction writer and librettist. She is the author of five acclaimed novels, including The Beauty of Ordinary Things, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. Her fiction has been translated into seven languages, and featured in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR’s All Things Considered, Good Morning America, and The Christian Science Monitor. Having received her PhD in English at Yale University in 1979, Chessman taught at Yale University for 11 years. She has also taught English and creative writing courses at Bread Loaf School of English, Wesleyan University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, and Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program. After living for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in Connecticut, and is at work on new fiction and a new libretto.
It has been a joy and honor to collaborate on My Lai. As soon as Jonathan Berger told me, in June 2013, the story of Hugh Thompson, I sensed the courage and humanity this young officer from rural Georgia must have had that morning in March 1968. I also caught sight of how much Thompson had to face, from that day on, as his actions came under fire by his own country.
Once I started to do research, Hugh Thompson increasingly emerged for me as a compelling, extraordinary figure. I sought first to listen for his voice, and somehow this voice—open, plainspoken, humble, yearning, furious, forthright, baffled, pained, and sorrowful—came to me powerfully. I wrote the first draft of the libretto trusting this voice and following the arc of that terrible morning, involving the three unauthorized landings this 24-year-old pilot made with his reconnaissance helicopter and young two-person crew.
This is my first libretto—I am a fiction writer primarily—and one of the most surprising and fulfilling aspects of this process has been the effort to write musically. I revised the libretto, with Jonathan’s suggestions, over the course of the first year and a half before I heard one note of his composition. Once Jonathan started to compose the music, the libretto changed, gradually gaining the shape it has now, and yet the voice I imagined for Hugh Thompson has held and deepened.
I am grateful for this chance to stretch my musical wings, and to participate in the creation of this piece together with such an inspiring group of artists and musicians.
—Harriet Scott Chessman