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Lisa Bartholow
 The School of Music’s Contemporary Chamber Ensemble was invited to perform at the annual conference of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese held in Madrid last month.
The ensemble’s commitment to the music of George Crumb, widely known for his settings of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca--the centennial of whose birth was an important focus of the conference--was the primary reason for the invitation. The ensemble performed Crumb’s Night of the Four Moons, written in honor of the 1969 Apollo moon landing and one of his best-known works.
Lewis Nielson, who directs the ensemble in the School of Music, says that Crumb has always been attracted to Lorca’s nature imagery. “I feel that the essential meaning of [Lorca’s] poetry is concerned with the most primary things: life, death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the wind and the sea,” Crumb has said. “These . . . concepts are embodied in a language which is primitive and stark but which is capable of infinitely subtle nuance.”
Crumb’s goal in his Lorca text settings is to create an unusual sound world, using unusual vocal sounds, unusual instruments and extended playing techniques. Nielson says that the resulting eclectic mixture of sound makes for a coherent and extremely effective evocation of the magic and danger of the natural world.
These compositional interests are in full maturity in Night of the Four Moons, which consists of settings of four poem fragments by Lorca. The composition’s title is drawn from the first line of one of Lorca’s most celebrated poems, Muri al amanecer (“He died at dawn”). According to Nielson, the deep mysticism of the poems is complemented by instrumental sounds that are “natural” (that is, based on the acoustic properties of the instruments without adjustment for equal temperament), folk-like sounds (the use of the banjo instead of the guitar or other, more classical, plucked instrument), and a vocal style that concentrates on few pitches but a wide range of tone color.
The university’s Contemporary Chamber Ensemble is a performance group composed of graduate and undergraduate students. Founded by Nielson in 1979, the ensemble focuses on the performance of modern masterworks and recently composed music. They have performed at many metropolitan centers and colleges and universities in the eastern and southeastern United States. Live performances by the ensemble have been broadcast on local, regional, and national public radio programs and the group has produced a compact disc recording carried by the Albany Music Group.
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