Water Gongs, saw blades, and a powerful voice reveal a mesmerizing side of American hymns.
The Room
Early in the morning over coffee before the concert, my teacher shared that two of his teachers were students of George Crumb. My teacher explained how his “compositional grandfather” wrote music by laying out sonic events rather than by developing a narrative (like a typical symphony or a song). I was curious what this style of writing would bring out in these familiar hymns.
When our little group found our seats in the small auditorium at Jackson State, we scanned through the astonishing array of instruments: gongs, cymbals, and vibraphones organized across the entire stage. This absurd arrangement even managed to hide a grand piano toward the back of center stage. The ensemble chatted and prepared their music.
I caught a glimpse of the radial score for Time is a Drifting River from a percussionist reviewing her music, the same cryptic image we had on our concert programs. The lights dimmed, the musicians made their way on stage, and the ensuing hush was interrupted by the muffled sound of lawn mowers roaring outside (not called for in the score). Not so surprising, I guess, at ten in the morning on a Saturday. When that was addressed, Chrystal E. Williams and the conductor, Mark Loria, entered with our applause.
The Music
“Shall We Gather at the River” starts with the refracted tone as the percussionist dips a resonating cymbol in a water-filled container. A piano ostinato follows and creates a rippling surface on which Williams sings the old tune with a building command. The intensity picks up in “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown” as the full force of the bass drums and cymbals color the tune with an impressive radiance. We also hear cello bows graze across saw blades and pitched glasses, adding to the luster surrounding Williams’ voice.
“Give Me That Old Time Religion” taps into a different energy with a propelling low end rhythm. Williams directs the charge through the fast paced skips and jumps. “Time is a Drifting River” arrives as the center instrumental piece, in which the piano meanders through another calmly revolving ostinato. Gliding sounds and the soft recurring melody hover by like overhanging branches and moss. This peaceful and intriguing departure gives ample room for Crumb’s mesmerizing instrumentation, always balanced and precise.
“One More River to Cross (Noah’s Ark: A Humoresque)” presents a string of light moments, led by Williams’ animal commentary between notes of the children’s tune. The pianist, Marcantonio Barone, leaves his post behind the clutter to hunch down and bang on a toy piano center stage for this song. “Nearer, My God to Thee” begins as a carefully slow instrumental, but suddenly Williams’ eerie voice begins to carry the song from far off backstage, leaving me more sensitive to the loneliness and vulnerability this sometimes austere music could dig deep into.
The emotionally raw “Deep River” concludes the cycle. The resonance remained quiet and low (with the exception of a score-written rattling paper in the piano), which makes more wonderful space for Williams to lead the music to its end with chill-inducing command of emotion.
What was that?
When the final song finished, I felt overwhelmed by what I had just heard. The arrangements and performances certainly elevated these hymns out of familiar territory. Williams’ vocal force and subtly were stunning. However, the “sonic events” that Dr. S had warned me about at times made it an apparent challenge to receive, much less comprehend. Though the cycle does not need extrapolation to appreciate, I left the hall feeling changed and charged to explore how and why the piece had such power.
There were so many details buzzing in my head. I started at its surface, with some funny connections I noticed. Crumb’s singular use of water in “Shall We Gather By The River,” the shimmering cymbals in “Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown,” and the wading and endless tune of “Time is a Drifting River” which revealed some literal wordplay at work in the cycle. It wasn’t always clear what was meant by these literal connections, though. In “Nearer my God to Thee Thee,” the space created by the ensemble and Williams colors the song with a sad and haunted feeling, in sharp affective contrast to the hopeful nature of the lyrics. With this seeming contradiction, one may hear this use of audible and literal space as darkly humorous, defiantly hopeful, mournful, or all of them in some complex balance. As a listener, the effect was staggering. I had also begun to notice instances of sound reflecting around the melody, repeating it or competing with it, sometimes just touching it briefly. I found that this strange accompaniment was pointing at a center in its defiantly oblique way, much like the parts visually laid out in the radial score for “Time is a Drifting River.” Not only did the emotional gravity inherent in these familiar tunes pull everything around them, the constellation of sound in their particular orbits gave beautifully disorienting contexts for those tunes.
Is that normal?
As often happens when witnessing something compelling, we look back and find that it was moving us even when we were not fully aware of how or why. More often than we like to admit, we never find out the how’s or why’s behind what compels us most. We can connect and categorize moments with others, like the character Anton Ego in the movie Ratatouille, who is transported to his childhood home by just a bite of an excellently prepared meal. We can simply be overwhelmed by the astounding unity of something, like Tom Haverford of the show Parks and Recreation, who in one episode, though initially incredulous of art in general, becomes obsessed with an abstract painting. His response to this change goes “A piece of art caused me to have an emotional reaction. Is that normal?” The rest of the Parks team is similarly confused. This is not a dichotomy or even a categorization of two responses to art. Ego’s and Tom’s experiences are just that: their singular experiences.
I think I had similar reactions and more during the piece. The hymns recalled my childhood experiences of gathered friends and family singing from hymnals. The extraordinarily wide palette of sounds often coalesced into one beautiful moment within a passage of cacophony. In numerous instances throughout the performance of “River of Life,” I and those around me nearly cracked with laughter at some of the music’s ridiculous whistling, zipping, and crashing across the stage. More than a few of these instances were in what would otherwise be powerfully emotional songs. I was not expecting this levity and even reacted with annoyance to some of those moments, but whether as a whole, or in the extremely particular moments, the music never let me go, such that I often realized I had been holding my breath.
As a first time listener without this context, what most moved me in “River of Life” was the surprisingly coherent blend of those emotional extremes; “sonic events” evoked an unpredictable cocktail of moods throughout hymns that were already emotionally charged. As a musician, I am always ready to believe that art reflects life, but I was not prepared for how this piece reflects life. I have grown up in an age where finding music that is neatly packaged in a playlist for any mood or life experience is scarily easy, and this music defies any packaging. We are afraid of art that we cannot trust to give us some particular response we know.
Worse yet, we often project this particular fear onto others, judging artist and audience with equal repugnance or praise on whether or not a work of art validates us and consoles our fear of unfamiliarity. Both Ego and Tom berate others who do cannot empathize with their experience. What does this fear mean and how are we to respond to it? Is it that we fear some new experience or that we may be changed by it?
And so I return to Crumb’s music. The relevant strength of this work in particular is how clearly its expectations and promises are presented: the expectation that the listener will engage with unfamiliar sounds and the promise of the warmth and human connection in praise which hymns offer. Of course, art is not meant to be appreciated ultimately through some carrot and stick system, but the music here presents a place to start. What Crumb masterfully offers in River of Life is a way into music for the Egos, the Toms, and the undefined multitude of people whose individual experiences may lead anywhere.
Listen
Here is a recording of George Crumb’s daughter Ann Crumb singing the cycle with the same ensemble, Orchestra 2001.
-Josiah
Josiah Seth Pervis 