So there I sat.
Alone.
A glass rod clenched in my left hand, talking to myself like an infant: “It’s very good, Aurelien, let’s try it very, very slow now and everything will be fine.” My voice changed to Mr Rogers meets Dorothy DeLay on acid, sweet and honey-like with a hint of resentment and a shadow of #imabouttotearyourheadoffandpainttheroomwithyourbloodifyouscrewthisupagain.
“Just remember, those are quintuplets, not anything else, 1,2,3,4,5….OK! Very, very, very good! let’s take it from the top!“
My other favorite memory of learning George Crumb’s Black Angels is of me, alone (again), in my studio screaming “Ka-to-ko-to-ko-to-ko” while walking like a demented person around the room, hitting myself on the head every time I mess up. It’s safe to say that if anybody walked in the room at the aforementioned times, that person would slowly back out of room with a look of horror and calmly call 911.
This has been frustrating… …frustrating because this is a violin I’m playing, the instrument that has been my friend and worst enemy for the better part of 23 years. I should know this. This shouldn’t be THAT hard. It’s still a violin, still has four strings…yet what Mr Crumb demands of me seems completely foreign and so far removed from my days in the conservatoire that I might as well be learning Spohr’s “Kazoo Concerto”.
My teachers never thought that one day I might have to learn how to bow the violin at the nut, my fingers of the left hand playing where the bow normally rest. Tuning in inverse motion is oodles of fun, let me tell you…makes me miss the Rubik’s Cube days….
Figuring out how to bow a crystal glass the right way and not being offended when someone approaches you with a different bow technique for said movement is harder than having your phrasing in Mozart criticized. You have nothing to grab, no “but this is the way I do it” or “this feels comfortable”…there is no precedent. Once again, this familiar object (the bow) is taken out of reality, out of “my” context, and brought back into a different dimension….Crumb’s.
It’s like there is no net, the familiarity that one relies on is gone. You’re in the desert, it’s night time, here is a pair of glow sticks…go. Best of Luck.
But I guess that’s just the way extended techniques go. I am just not familiar with them. We ventured into their world with “Albumblatt” by Hans Thomalla, but this is different. Crumb went all out, or as far out as one could go in the 60′s. It will take time and a lot of practice but I’ll figure it out. Just another puzzle to solve to the best of my abilities.
Then there is the fun stuff. I get to be part of a swarm of insects, ravaging and pillaging; I get to hit and bow a tam-tam, not that any of the stuff above is not fun, it’s just not mine yet. I don’t own it. It is still foreign.
The lack of “anchor” in technique opens up the discussion. What sound do we want? How do we create it? Is it the right color? Let’s try the tremolo faster, slower, higher in the bow, lower in the bow. Can we get away with this? It goes on and on. This process is exhilarating and reminds all of us how lucky we are that THIS is what we do for a living.
But besides the sole technical interest and difficulties there is the understanding of the piece. That has been the most fun of all. Because understanding a piece like this (and I do not claim by any stretch of the imagination that I fully understand it) is understanding a time, a man, feelings, ideas, quotes, etc. Much like every piece of music stands on the head of another, just like philosophical books, Crumb’s Black Angels is a turning point in string quartet writing. Understanding a piece like this is as important, in my opinion, as understanding Beethoven op.130, Bartok, Carter or Haydn’s late quartets.
I might get a few white hairs because of this project but the pleasure of playing this work at the highest possible level will be our reward. I will certainly come out a better musician and that is something to look forward to.