Program Notes

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 27 (c. 1944)
Program Note by David B. Levy

Romanian composer and conductor Constantin-Nicolae Silvestri was born in Bucharest on May 31, 1913, and died in London on February 23, 1969. By age 6, he was already starting to play piano and organ, and he gave his first public performance at age 10. His studies led him to the Târgu Mureş and Bucharest Conservatories. Despite any formal training in conducting, he made his debut in this capacity in his teens. In 1930, he made his debut with the Bucharest Radio Symphony Orchestra, and five years later was associated with the Romanian Opera and the “George Enescu” Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1948 to 1956, Silvestri taught at the Bucharest Conservatory, where among his best-known students was Sergiu Comissiona, a conductor who enjoyed considerable success in the United States. As a composer, he produced works for piano, orchestra, and chamber music, including the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 27, composed in the 1940s.

Silvestri’s music is not well-known outside of his native Romania and Eastern Europe. His reputation was built primarily on his activities as a conductor. According to the biographical article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Silvestri’s style blended “neoclassical constructivism, with occasional shades of expressionism.” His String Quartet No. 2, Op. 27, is cast in a chromatically embellished key of a minor, and is in four movements marked “Con passione—agitato e molto espressivo,” “Brillante, giocoso,” “Nostalgico,” and “Con virtuosità, ma leggiero.” Despite its mild level of dissonance and thematic angularity, the work displays elements of folklorism, but without the citation of actual folk music.

Black Angels for Electric String Quartet (1970)
Program Note by David B. Levy

American composer George [Henry] Crumb [Jr.] was born on October 24, 1929, in Charleston, West Virginia, and died in Media, Pennsylvania, on February 6, 2022. The son of musicians (both parents were members of the West Virginia Symphony), Crumb grew up in an environment filled with classical and romantic music, as well as music composed by early twentieth-century masters. He received training in composition at the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts (University of Charleston), the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan. His favorite composers included Mahler, Debussy, and Bartók, but his own music frequently quoted music by Bach, Chopin, Schubert, and Richard Strauss, and others, always with a specific dramatic or programmatic goal in mind. His Black Angels for Electric String Quartet (1970, published 1971) is one such piece, quoting a part of Schubert’s lied “Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”). Schubert himself used this theme in the variation movement of his String Quartet in d minor. Crumb was the recipient of several prestigious grants, as well as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1968). Black Angels is Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War. It was commissioned by the University of Michigan and was first performed by the Stanley Quartet in October 1970. An inscription in the score reads “Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli).” In addition to their amplified instruments, the performers are required to play crystal glasses, maracas, suspended tam-tam, and gong, as well as using their voices to produce phonemes and reciting numbers in a variety of languages.

George Crumb was a composer who was at once conscious of the tradition of concert music to which he belonged, as well as the social issues of his day. Many of his works made use of texts by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, most notably Ancient Voices of Children (1970). This work, and many others, makes use of theatrical effects and lighting. According to Crumb’s own program notes, Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) is a “parable on our troubled contemporary world.” The work is rife with multiple layers of symbolism, part of which is numerological (7 and 13). The interval of the tritone, known as “the devil in music” (diabolus in musica) in the Middle Ages, plays an important role throughout the piece. In addition to the Schubert quotation, Crumb also alludes to the medieval Latin chant Dies irae that is the sequence in the Catholic Mass for the Dead. This tune was also used to great effect by Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastique and by Rachmaninoff in several of his works. Crumb also opens the work with a movement titled “Night of the Electric Insects”—a clear reference to a (non-electric) effect found in some music by Bartók.

While Black Angels is linked specifically to the composer’s response to the Vietnam War, its dramatic message is timeless. In writing the words in tempore belli (in time of war), for example, Crumb was doubtlessly aware of the title of Joseph Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli (Mass in Time of War) of 1796. Crumb described the structure of Black Angels as a “huge arch-like design” portraying “a voyage of the soul [in three stages]” being “Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).” Even here, Crumb was surely thinking of the three movements of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano, Op. 81a (“Lebewohl” or “Les Adieux”), whose three movements are labeled Departure, Absence, and Return. While much of Black Angels is harsh and angular, the use of tonal quotations provides a helpful anchor for the listener.