The American Romanian Festival celebrates its 20th-anniversary season with an evening of works centered around the subject of death. The recently commissioned piece by Ionica Pop, Remembering Ţăranu, employs a twelve-tone row, which also serves as a musical cryptogram to honor the recently deceased Romanian composer Cornel Ţăranu. George Crumb’s reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War is expressed through his threnody, Black Angels. The work is structured around the numbers 13 and 7, numerals often related to fate and destiny, and several tonal musical quotations can be found throughout the piece, including snippets from our next work on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet. Written in 1824, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was the composer’s coming to terms with his long-term illness and impending death, and has been called “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire.”