Apparition

The Night in Silence under Many a Star -

Vocalise 1: Summer Serenade -

When Lilacs Las in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Dark Mother Always Gliding Near with Soft Feet

Vocalise 2: Invocation -

Approach Strong Deliveress! -

Vocalise 3: Death Carol (“Song of the Nightbird”) -

Come Lovely and Soothing Death -

The Night in Silence under Many a Star

George Crumb might not be one of the most prolific of American composers - his productivity has slowed down considerably over the last twenty years or so - but he is certainly one of the most original. He has a particular genius for creating new instrumental and vocal colours, not usually by electronic means (apart from amplification) but by unconventional ways of producing the sounds. The soprano in Apparition, for example, is asked not only to sing over an unusually wide pitch range but also to imitate bird song, to whisper, to hum and, in the closing bars, to mouth her words in silence. The pianist in the same work produces as many notes by direct contact with the strings of the instrument as by way of the keyboard, and in the latter case it is often a matter of depressing the keys silently so as to allow the strings to vibrate in sympathy with other sounds.

Crumb’s extravagant and often dramatic colouring is not deployed simply for its own sake. Apparition, which is dedicated to Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish in 1979, is a virtuoso piece for both performers but it is also a deeply felt and haunting setting of lines drawn mainly from the “Death Carol” section of Whitman’s reflections on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The first song - which is repeated at the end of the cycle to symbolize Whitman’s idea of the circularity of life and death - is unlike the others in that the performers are not required to synchronise except at certain points. The few notes produced by way of the keyboard here are an anticipation of the following bird-song Vocalise culminating in a particularly vivid turtle-dove effect. When Lilacs…” is a dream-like setting of the one poem not from the “Death Carol” section of Whitman’s poem, the voice producing “white sound” (without vibrato) against fragrant keyboard figuration.

Partly sung through wide upward intervals and partly chanted, the very quiet Dark Mother is accompanied almost entirely by piano harmonics. As an extreme contrast, the second Vocalise is a dramatic vocal cadenza, with a heavily rumbling piano part, leading to a stridently joyous march, Approach Strong Deliveress! The song of the hermit thrush is carried over from the voice in the third Vocalise to the keyboard in Come Lovely and Soothing Death, ecstatically welcoming “delicate death.” The cycle is completed by a near- literal repetition of The Night in Silence under Many a Star, the last repetition of “nestling close to thee” seen but not heard.