George Crumb's Black Angels and the Vietnam War

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze how Crumb's Black Angels relates to the Vietnam War. I trace a history of this association through reviews of the piece's performances and shows that reviewers began connecting it with Vietnam after the American withdrawal and the end of the war in 1975. Through a comparison with Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried ([1990] 1998. New York: Broadway Books), the analysis shows that listeners thematically connect aspects of Black Angels with the Vietnam War. Themes of blurriness, and unreliable narrator, trauma, and morality connect the texts. Using Lochhead's concept of musical things, and O’Brien's notions of happening-truth vs. story-truth, the analysis relates issues of musical structure to the novel to show how the piece conveys presence related to the Vietnam War.

Keywords:

• Vietnam War
• Crumb
• O’Brien
• Narrative
• Black Angels

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 O’Brien served in Vietnam as a drafted infantryman in 1969–70, and much of his writing relates to his experiences in Vietnam. Objectively The Things They Carried is a novel, though at first it resembles a memoir: the main character is named Tim O’Brien; he was drafted, considered fleeing to Canada, served in Vietnam, studied writing at Harvard and is a writer, all characteristics he shares with the author (O’Brien 1969). Yet narrator-O’Brien, as I refer to him, is not always the same as author-O’Brien. Throughout the book, narrator-O’Brien plays with notions of truth and authenticity (Herzog 2000).

2 The reviews from 1982 and earlier are located in the George Crumb papers in the Library of Congress, in his Scrapbooks (boxes 29–35).

3 Program notes. Black Angels by George Crumb, performed the Bowling Green String Quartet, Sunday Evening, 14 November 1971 at Lincoln Center, New York City. [Scrapbook vol. 1, 1963–1973, Box 29, p. 103], George Crumb Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

4 For example, Crumb says he does not compose with a strict or pure approach using different types of scales or post-tonal techniques (Strickland 1991; cited in Lea 2014, 18).

5 For example, see Bass (1991, 1994, 2002); Bruns, Ben-Amots, and Grace (2005); Cook (2012, 2017); Pearsall (2004a, 2004b); and Scotto (2002).

6 This is, of course, only one interpretation. Others have understood the ‘electric insects’ differently over the years. For example, Robert Greenburg likens the insects’ sound to the whine of helicopters during the Vietnam War. However, I believe this is not supported by other semiotic elements in Crumb's piece. See Greenberg (2016).

7 Rebecca Leydon discusses timbre in Black Angels and suggests other intertextual connections in the ‘Lost Bells’ movement. She focuses especially on their haunting resonance and suggests that timbres in Black Angels allow for a supernatural experience (2012, 6.6).

8 Movements entitled ‘God-Music’ and ‘Sarabanda de la Muerta Oscura’ both feature triadic consonance and seem to invoke tonality without being functionally tonal. However, unlike the ‘Pavana’, neither includes quotation. ‘God-Music’ sometimes suggests octatonicism and the ‘Sarabanda’ imitates Renaissance harmonic style.

9 J. Peter Burkholder argues that interpreting musical meaning depends on listeners’ previous musical experiences and broader knowledge, but that those without specialised knowledge interpret musical meaning in valid ways, as they are often able to connect pieces with other music and sounds they have heard (2006, 88).

10 The relationship between Dowland's Lachrimae Pavan and Flow My Tears is complex, as versions of the piece for solo lute and for consort predate the song, though the song was the first to appear in print in 1600. For a detailed discussion of this piece see: Gale and Crawford (2004).

11 In their collection of primary source documents, Gettleman, et al. show American statesmen, including presidents, portraying the war as an effort to protect Vietnamese people from the threat of communism, beyond the need to stop its spread into other countries. In these documents, American decision makers consistently refer to protecting the freedom and safety of South Vietnam. See Gettleman et al. (1995).

12 For an analysis of the form, see Johnston (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abigail Shupe

Abigail Shupe is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Colorado State University. She studies the role of contemporary music in collective memory of American wars.