Composed during the height of the Vietnam War, and 'finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)', Crumb's most celebrated work (which inspired the founding of the Kronos Quartet) was originally scored for amplified string quartet whose players are also required to bow glasses, shake a maraca and at a climax strike a tam-tam. 24" suspended tam-tam, soft and hard malletsīlack Angels, on the other hand, is a work of frightening intensity, where Jimi Hendrix and Pierrot Lunaire shake hands with the devil.Some of the equipment requires specific preparation, such as the crystal glasses, which are tuned with different amounts of water. Arsis4 Each of the string players is also assigned a set of instruments to play throughout the piece. At certain points in the music, the players are even required to make sounds with their mouths and to speak. The music uses the extremes of the instruments' registers as well as extended techniques such as bowing on the fingerboard above the fingers and tapping the strings with thimbles. The score bears two inscriptions: in tempore belli (in time of war) and "Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970".īlack Angels is primarily written for (in Crumb's words) "electric string quartet." Though generally played by amplified acoustic instruments, the work is occasionally performed on specially constructed electronic string instruments. The work draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. Sinfonietta Riga Black Angels for string quartet was written as a response to the Vietnam War. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams and water-tuned crystal goblets, the latter played with the bow for the “glass-harmonica” effect in God-Music. This surrealism is heightened by the use of certain unusual string effects, e.g., pedal tones (the intensely obscene sounds of the Devil-Music) bowing on the “wrong” side of the strings (to produce the viol-consort effect) trilling on the strings with thimble-capped fingers. The amplification of the stringed instruments in Black Angels is intended to produce a highly surrealistic effect. Henry Fuseli Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear 1779. The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the “Devil’s Trill”, after Tartini). There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (in the Pavana Lachrymae and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work) an original Sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic the sustained B-major tonality of God-Music and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”). William BlakeĪt certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili. William Blake 'The Good and Evil Angels', 1795/?c.1805.
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