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    The Kronos Quartet Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary

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    The group, which celebrated its birthday on Friday at Carnegie Hall, changed music with its open-eared and open-minded approach.Late one night in 1973, a young violinist named David Harrington was listening to the radio. He heard some music that was just a few years old: George Crumb’s “Black Angels,” a harsh and eerie, prayerful and screaming piece for amplified string quartet, full of grief and anger about the quagmire in Vietnam.“A lot of people my age,” Harrington recalled in a recent interview, “were desperately trying to find work that felt like it somehow related to what we were experiencing, what our country had been going through.”For him, “Black Angels” was it. “I thought, I don’t have any choice,” he said. “I have to play that piece.”Harrington got three friends together and, with the help of a Greco-Roman mythological dictionary to brainstorm a name, the Kronos Quartet was born with a vision, then rare, of focusing on new and recent compositions.Fifty years, and over 1,000 fresh works and arrangements later — an anniversary and achievement celebrated on Friday with a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall — the group has changed the music world.When Kronos formed, contemporary music was widely viewed as mathematically rigid and atonal: unlistenable audience poison. Buoyed by dramatic stage lighting, trendy clothes and passionate, eclectic performances and recordings, the quartet showed that a new approach to the new could fill halls and draw young crowds.Kronos proved that composers working in different idioms than standard-issue modernism — like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov — could become core string quartet material, as could world traditions and collaborators on nonwestern instruments. A quartet could adapt the music of far-afield artists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Astor Piazzolla and Sigur Rós, and could define the hard-edge soundtracks of films like “Requiem for a Dream.”Kronos and dozens of collaborators ended the quartet’s anniversary concert at Carnegie with a performance of Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.”Stephanie BergerThe group didn’t necessarily shy from modernism and its tough descendants — the likes of Schnittke and Zorn — but it did play that music in welcoming company on its programs, and with populist theatricality. At one 1987 show, a New York Times review noted, the modernist composer Elliott Carter sat next to Sting, which says it all.For all its variety, Kronos had a point of view, an aesthetic, a brand. Few if any ensembles of any size before it had been so flexible, open-eared and open-minded.“I can’t think of a more significant player in terms of contemporary music becoming seen as fun and enjoyable,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director. “It’s not a risk. It’s music you’ve never heard before, but you’re going to enjoy it.”Not everyone was convinced. Some sniffed that the group too often tipped into wan crossover. Some found the energy good-natured but the playing a little ragged. Some thought the showy lighting and sound were overwrought. Some rolled their eyes at an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” that was once a standby for Kronos encores.But playing Hendrix was a sincere gesture, the symbolic move of a quartet seizing the whole of music for its own and boldly crossing traditional genre — as well as racial, national, ethnic and gender — divides. This was, after all, the era of “Graceland,” Paul Simon’s blockbuster 1986 album, and some of Kronos’s defining recordings were in that globe-trotting spirit: “Pieces of Africa” (1992), the omnivorous “Caravan” (2000) and “Nuevo” (2002), which explored Mexican classical, folk and pop.Like the more traditionally minded Emerson String Quartet, also formed in the mid-1970s, Kronos was lucky to come of age during the CD boom — Emerson on the august label Deutsche Grammophon, Kronos on hip Nonesuch.The 1997 album “Early Music” was a surprising dip into medieval repertoire — but typical of Kronos in that it combined arrangements of Machaut, Pérotin and Hildegard with Cage, Schnittke, Pärt, Scandinavian fiddling and Tuvan chant, closing with a minute and a half of bells tolling at a monastery in France.This was a narrative approach to recording, rather than one of just stacking pieces, at a time when projects like that were hardly mainstream in the classical world.“What were thought of as these wacky ideas are very much normal now,” said Andrew Yee, the cellist of the Attacca Quartet. “Everyone — all the young quartets — has at least a small part of Kronos built into their DNA.”The Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq, center, joined the quartet at the concert.Stephanie BergerFriday’s concert embodied the Kronos spirit, with a parade of collaborators from around the world, multimedia elements and sound effects, in works that often had an earnest, liberal political message. In one piece, the writer Ariel Aberg-Riger recited a plain-spoken account of the life of the conservationist Rachel Carson as the quartet underscored her. During another, the Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq roared “You colonizer!” over and over.Laurie Anderson was her usual gnomically witty, poignant presence for part of “Landfall,” her 2012 work with the quartet about climate and loss. Roots Americana was on the program, as was one of Kronos’s Mexican arrangements, Indonesian sinden (a style of gamelan singing) and Bollywood. A longtime collaborator, the pipa virtuoso Wu Man, was featured in an excerpt from her “Two Chinese Paintings.”Dozens of musicians joined for the finale, Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (1980). An initially minor-key, slightly melancholy, ultimately propulsive jam, it is a wistful counterpart to the composer’s “In C.” Most moving was the spectacle: Many of those onstage hadn’t yet been born when Kronos formed.Laurie Anderson joined Friday’s performance with part of her 2012 work “Landfall.”Stephanie BergerThe evening passed in something of a blur of activity, which is not unusual for the quartet. The group has done — and still does — so much that it can be easy to take it and its impact for granted.“One of our jobs,” Harrington said, “is to make it seem like music just falls out of the sky.”There is so much music, of so many kinds, that if one piece or album doesn’t appeal, the next very well might. “The Kronos does not guarantee profundity,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times in 2006. “It just likes to keep the conversation going.”Early on, Kronos created a nonprofit arm that let the quartet raise money, sponsor ambitious initiatives and commission music on its own, rather than depending on composers and presenters. The group’s recently completed “50 for the Future” project commissioned dozens of new pieces designed for young players and made them available online for free.This is the work of a quartet with its legacy in mind, but there are no plans for Kronos to disband. An ensemble constantly chasing newness may be less beholden to a given set of players than a more traditional quartet. Harrington, of course, has been with the group from the beginning, and the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt since the late ’70s. The cello chair, long held by Joan Jeanrenaud, has had some more turnover; Paul Wiancko, a generation younger than the others, joined earlier this year.At 74, Harrington demurs when retirement — “the R word,” as he called it in a short documentary screened at Carnegie — comes up. “There’s nothing else I’ve seen in life that would be half as interesting as this,” he said in the interview. “The idea of stepping away from it is impossible.”That said, he added: “I can imagine this group continuing on and on. I want it to be the most activist, energetic, energizing ensemble in the universe. If we can make it that way, I don’t think it should be restricted by my own lifetime.” More

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      Scott Johnson, Playfully Inventive Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      In works like “John Somebody,” he mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Scott Johnson, a composer and guitarist who forged an original style involving the rhythmic cadences of speech and the gestures and timbres of popular music, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70.Mr. Johnson’s sister Susan Lee Johnson said the cause was complications of aspiration pneumonia. Mr. Johnson had also been diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2021.Mr. Johnson immersed himself in music and art from an early age and played in rock bands in high school. His artistic breakthrough came with “John Somebody,” a playfully inventive work for solo electric guitar with taped accompaniment, which he assembled from 1980 to 1982, and which, as performed regularly and recorded in 1986, won him considerable acclaim.To create that work, Mr. Johnson transcribed into approximate musical notation portions of a friend’s telephone conversation he had recorded in 1977 (“You know who’s in New York? You remember that guy, John somebody? He was a … he was sort of a…”), along with other snatches of speech and laughter.Mr. Johnson added dense layers of guitar, saxophone and percussion, and a virtuosic solo part for live guitarist, with pitches, melodic motifs and rhythms derived from the recorded vocalism. The result mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.“To these ears, the music mirrors the subterranean rumble, the welter of voices and other overlaid sounds of the city, with the cries of superamplified guitars hovering like angels above the fray,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote about “John Somebody” in 1986. “It’s a compelling marriage of rock elements and classical formalism that doesn’t shortchange either.”Mr. Johnson refined and extended the process he developed for “John Somebody” in several subsequent works. He also created purely instrumental works and, for a time, led an ensemble comprising three saxophonists, two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist and two drummers.The technical demands of Mr. Johnson’s music could make collaboration a daunting prospect. But he formed close bonds with younger artists and groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound and the guitarist and composer Mark Dancigers, who came of age at a time when fluency in rock and pop idioms became more prevalent among concert-music composers and performers.“He was a player who embraced complexity,” Mr. Dancigers said in a phone interview. “The writing is challenging from a number of perspectives: There are leaps, there are rapid virtuosic passages, there are chord voicings that change very rapidly.”Mr. Dancingers suggested that Mr. Johnson’s compositions paved the way for younger composers similarly inclined toward hybridity. “The first time I heard him present his music,” he said, “I thought, this guy’s a little ahead of his time.”Mr. Johnson developed a passion for electric guitar in high school, and his music mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Patricia NolanScott Richard Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on May 12, 1952. His father, Robert Warren Johnson, worked in marketing, merchandising and sales positions for a battery company. His mother, Janet Mary (Stecker) Johnson, was a homemaker. They both belonged to a church choir and attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra.Intellectually inquisitive and artistically inclined, Mr. Johnson played clarinet before switching to electric guitar in high school. An early infatuation with folk groups like the Kingston Trio ceded to a passion for Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.“His bands practiced in the family basement,” his sister Susan wrote in an email, “and the practice sessions shook the house.”Hearing Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” sparked Mr. Johnson’s interest in modern classical composition. By college, he wrote in a biography on his website, “I was studying music theory during the week and playing in bars on the weekends.”Daunted by the serialist compositional style that held sway in academia, Mr. Johnson turned to visual art. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1974 and then drove a cab in Madison for a year to finance his move to New York City in 1975.By that time he had temporarily set music aside. But he quickly established himself among a rising generation of versatile, inquisitive Downtown creators, including the composers Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon and Arthur Russell, the choreographer Karole Armitage and the interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, with all of whom he collaborated.On arrival, Mr. Johnson supported himself by demolishing and renovating lofts with a friend from Madison, Scott Billingsley, later known as the filmmaker Scott B. He also joined Mr. Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra.“It sometimes took Scott days to be able to use his fingers for guitar, after sanding floors all day” Mr. Gordon said by email. Like many other downtown composers, including Mr. Gordon, Mr. Johnson also worked as a tape editor for the sound artist and performer Charlie Morrow.Tape played a key role in Mr. Johnson’s oeuvre. For the earliest work he acknowledges on his website, “Home and Variations” (1979), he manipulated the voices of members of a dance company to accompany a dance.In the liner notes he wrote for a 2004 reissue of “John Somebody” on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Mr. Johnson said that germinal material for the piece dated as far back as 1977. At that time, he had to cut up strips of magnetic tape and then tape them back together. One particular passage in the work, he recounted, required a tape loop 25 feet long.Addressing the work’s development in a 2018 interview for the web publication NewMusicBox, Mr. Johnson cited several inspirations: early tape works in which Steve Reich looped and layered recorded speech, the call-and-response convention fundamental to the blues, and compositions in which Olivier Messiaen transcribed and notated bird song. In turn, “John Somebody” announced a signature style that anticipated Mr. Reich’s landmark 1988 piece “Different Trains,” and had a strong influence on other composers.Despite the seeming novelty of his approach, Mr. Johnson asserted his alliance to a historic lineage of rigorous formal composition. In his view, bringing elements of rock into the concert-music world extended a tradition of composers borrowing from vernacular styles, like folk songs. “John Somebody,” he wrote, resulted “when the partially developed elements laid out on my table met the animating idea of the Baroque dance suite, episodic but unified.”Mr. Johnson performed the work regularly. A 1986 recording made for the upstart record company Icon benefited from a partnership with Nonesuch, a more established label whose cachet was growing, and the commercial clout of that label’s corporate parent, Warner Bros.Mr. Johnson’s score for the 1988 Paul Schrader film “Patty Hearst” was released on Nonesuch. So were portions of “How It Happens” (1991-93), an evening-length composition for the Kronos Quartet with the recorded voice of the political commentator I.F. Stone, scattered across three different albums.Mr. Johnson, increasingly used his speech-manipulation technique to address social and philosophical concerns. In “Americans” (2003), he sampled the speech of immigrants recorded in Queens to examine cultural isolation and assimilation. For “Mind Out of Matter” (2009-15), a 75-minute work for Alarm Will Sound, he employed the voice of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has examined the history of religion.The Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson grew familiar with Mr. Johnson’s exactitude while preparing “Mind Out of Matter.” The percussion parts included some nearly impossible passages, and at one point players suggested altering a few notes.“Even as a conductor and a listener, I’m thinking you’re probably not even going to hear those notes,” Mr. Pierson said by phone. “But having to rethink that was so intense for Scott. Watching the amount of attention that he would put into reconsidering just a couple of notes, in a passage where there was so much going on, was really something to see.”In addition to his sister Susan, Mr. Johnson is survived by another sister, Lynne Ann Johnson. His wife, Marlisa Monroe, a classical-music publicist, apparently died on Friday: A Police Department spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that a 70-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive, and later pronounced dead, at the Manhattan address where Mr. Johnson and Ms. Monroe lived. No cause of death has yet been determined; an investigation is ongoing.In his last months, Mr. Johnson completed a final composition: a wholly acoustic work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. The piece, titled “Map,” features an elegiac text by Mr. Johnson, which reads in part:Every route is a branching fatewell worn path or departureshared inherited highwaysengineered exitsor unmarked dirt swervesaccidents, errors, discoveries. More

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      Review: Kronos Quartet Offers a Creative Snapshot of a Global Pandemic

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      A diverse group of composers presented nine new and recent works at Carnegie Hall on Friday, ranging from exuberant joyfulness to existential questioning.No one is ever going to say that Kronos Quartet is satisfied with the string quartet status quo. This group, founded nearly 50 years ago by violinist David Harrington, has, in its malleable virtuosity, become a wellspring for hundreds of new music commissions. Some of those have become iconic pieces of repertoire; others have provided real-time snapshots of creative collaborations. True to form, this Kronos program at Zankel Hall featured nine new and recent works, nearly all written during the past three years. It offered a wide palette of sonic ideas and creative visions, though some were more fully formed than others.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. Jennifer TaylorThe movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake entered Zankel for the world premiere of her “eyes closed” with the regality of a one-woman procession, carrying a clutch of large plastic sheets. She distributed them to Harrington, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt. They became her fellow dancers, twisting and fluttering the sheets into three-dimensional shapes. The conceit was spectacularly imaginative: the sheets had enough form to become both dynamic sculptures and, in their murmured crinkling, significant percussive accompaniment for occasional wails from Sunny Yang’s cello. (The elegiac visual effect was not unlike the plastic bag scene from the film “American Beauty.”)Some works didn’t cohere quite as completely. Mazz Swift’s “She Is a Story, Herself” included several exciting moments, such as flitting small melodic ideas that subsided into a graceful chorale, but the piece overall did not feel fully conceptualized. Canadian composer Nicole Lizée’s “Zonelyhearts,” a lengthy homage to “The Twilight Zone,” tacked wildly between willful wackiness — including using Pop Rocks (yes, the classic 1970s candy) as a form of percussion, amplified with the performers’ open mouths nestled up to microphones — and existential musings on censorship and surveillance.While the stage setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it was also, at times, hard to see what was going on.Jennifer TaylorThe quartet played in Zankel Hall’s temporarily reconfigured, in-the-round seating arrangement. While this setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it also meant that it was hard for a large portion of the audience, myself included, to see three composer/guest musicians who performed their own works alongside Kronos. Instead, we saw only their backs. I overheard nearby concertgoers lamenting that they couldn’t really view such instruments as Soo Yeon Lyuh’s haegeum, a hoarsely voiced, two-stringed and bowed Korean instrument used in her sweetly nostalgic piece “Yessori (Sound from the Past),” or the one-stringed dan bau, the Vietnamese zither played by the virtuoso Van-Anh Vo in her pandemic-era piece “Adrift,” in which the musicians circle around each other melodically, grounded by a walking bass line plucked out by the cello. Nor could we fully appreciate the facial expressions and hand gestures of Peni Candra Rini, the composer and singer from the East Java province of Indonesia who appeared with the quartet in her wistful piece “Maduswara,” also arranged by Garchik.With zero fanfare, this Kronos program included music by eight female composers and one who is nonbinary; many are people of color. (In 2023, such a program would still be lamentably rare at many venues. Carnegie Hall had pledged to give a particular limelight to female performers and composers this season.) What Harrington did note proudly from the stage is that Kidjo, Candra Rini, Darvishi and Lyuh’s pieces were works created for Kronos’s engaging and inspired 50 for the Future commissioning project, which has put 50 recent compositions in the hands of young and emerging ensembles without cost online.This concert also marked the final New York City Kronos Quartet appearance for the cellist Sunny Yang, who has been part of the ensemble for the past decade. (Next month, the group will welcome Paul Wiancko in that chair.) As an encore, the group played Laurie Anderson’s “Flow”; in this context, her short, tender work felt like a benediction.Kronos QuartetPerformed on Friday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      George Crumb, Eclectic Composer Who Searched for Sounds, Dies at 92

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      Mr. Crumb wrote startling works, sometimes with political themes, and challenged musicians to employ new techniques, vocalize and move about the stage.George Crumb, a composer who filled his works with a magpie array of instrumental and human sounds and drew on the traditions of Asia and his native Appalachia to create music of startling effect, died on Sunday at his home in Media, Pa. He was 92.His death was announced by Bridge Records, his record label.While rejecting the sometimes arid 12-tone technique of Modernists, Mr. Crumb beguiled audiences with his own musical language, composing colorful and concise works that range in mood from peaceful to nightmarish. Mr. Crumb looking over one of his compositions in 2019.  “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he once said. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesHe continued to compose late in life. His 90th birthday was celebrated by organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which presented the premiere of a new piece for percussion quintet. “The apocalypse itself seemed to be evoked in the new Kronos-Kryptos piece, whose third movement has four bass drums going full tilt at the same time,” the critic David Patrick Stearns wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer.“Black Angels” (1970), one of Mr. Crumb’s best-known works and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his imaginative eclecticism. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles. A mournful fragment from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is interrupted by fierce bow strokes and human shouts.The grimly claustrophobic music of the first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” was deemed sufficiently scary to be used on the soundtrack for the horror film “The Exorcist.”Mr. Crumb described the piece as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.”The members of the Stanley Quartet, which premiered the work in 1970, were baffled by some of the unusual requirements and not necessarily happy to play them. Nevertheless, they went along.In 2014 Mr. Crumb, who guided their first performance, said: “They hadn’t played much contemporary music, so they were willing to do anything I wanted. And I ended up conducting, can you imagine? I felt like a fool conducting a string quartet, but it helped them keep it all together.”The piece has since entered the repertory and been championed by prominent ensembles like the Kronos Quartet.Other pieces were equally theatrical and sometimes featured ritualistic elements. A recording of whale songs made by a marine scientist inspired his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” for electric flute, cello and amplified piano (1971). The performers wear black half-masks; Mr. Crumb also specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting. He used various extended techniques, like strumming the piano strings with a paper clip, to create eerie sonorities.Each movement of his orchestral piece “Echoes of Time and the River” (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968) features processionals in which small groups of musicians move around the stage in patterns and directions specified in the score — requirements Mr. Crumb later acknowledged were rather impractical.Practicality usually wasn’t one of his primary concerns, however. As in Charles Ives’s massive Symphony No. 4, multiple conductors preside over Mr. Crumb’s “Star-Child” (1977), a major work set to Latin texts for soprano, solo trombone, children’s choir and large orchestra. A recording of the work, one of his few forays into orchestral repertory, won a Grammy in 2001.Mr. Crumb’s fascination with Federico García Lorca led to other major works. Lorca’s poetry “somehow reconciled the joyous and the tragic,” the composer said, and he set Lorca’s verse to music in four books of madrigals for soprano and various instruments in the 1960s, and later in several song cycles including “Ancient Voices of Children” (1970).Given its premiere by the mezzo soprano Jan DeGaetani, Mr. Crumb’s frequent collaborator and muse, “Ancient Voices” features a range of haunting vocal effects, sinewy oboe lines and spare sounds coaxed from Japanese temple bells, Tibetan prayer stones, mandolin, harp and toy piano.He was less prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, when he suffered a creative block, but found renewed energy after 2000. He created a series of American Songbooks, collections of arrangements of hymns, popular tunes and African American spirituals. The gentle melody of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, is punctuated by uneasy percussive interjections and an array of shimmering sonorities.Mr. Crumb’s repertory for piano includes four books called “Makrokosmos,” the title inspired by Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos,” an influential series of student works of varying difficulty. The pianist is instructed to sing, shout and moan at various points in the series by Mr. Crumb.He wrote many of his works in an elaborately creative and nontraditional format. The score of “Makrokosmos II” (1973), for example, is notated in the shape of a peace sign.Mr. Crumb eschewed computer notation and even drew his own staves. The flutist Tara Helen O’Connor described Crumb’s idiosyncratic scores as “his way of expressing how the music flows through space,” adding that it “also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”Detractors sometimes called him New Age-y or beholden to sound effects.The New York Times critic John Rockwell found fault with Mr. Crumb for at times failing to put his borrowings from other composers into a natural-sounding context, or to integrate them into his own style, or for not expressing more clearly his higher meanings.“What makes all this so frustrating is the sheer beauty and originality of so much of Mr. Crumb’s music,” he wrote in a 1983 review. “Hearing it is like trying to bask outdoors on a partially cloudy day: the sun feels wonderful when it breaks through, but it is too often obscured.”One of Mr. Crumb’s works was inspired by a recording of whale songs. The performers wore black half-masks, and he specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting.Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesGeorge Henry Crumb Jr. was born on Oct. 24, 1929, in Charleston, W.Va., to George Henry Crumb, a clarinetist, and Vivian (Reed) Crumb, a cellist. Both were professional musicians who played in a local orchestra; his father taught him the clarinet.Like Ives, Mr. Crumb, who began composing around age 10, was exposed to eclectic musical styles growing up, including gospel, country, folk and pop. He was also fascinated by the sounds of the forest near his home. “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell exactly where they’re coming from,” he told The London Telegraph in 2009.He received his bachelor’s degree in 1950 from the Mason College of Music in Charleston and a master’s degree two years later from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Crumb received his doctorate in composition in 1959 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with the composer Ross Lee Finney. Mr. Crumb’s student works reflected his burgeoning interests in combining unusual sounds: he meshed Appalachian folk songs and instruments like the harmonica and musical saw with Asian influences. Mahler, Bartok and Debussy — whose use of color and timbre fascinated Mr. Crumb — were other important compositional influences.Mr. Crumb, a prominent teacher whose students included Christopher Rouse, Osvaldo Golijov and Jennifer Higdon, all successful composers, taught early in his career at the University of Colorado and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1995. His works have been performed alongside those of his son David Crumb, a composer who teaches at the University of Oregon.Besides his son David, Mr. Crumb is survived by his wife, Elizabeth May (Brown) Crumb, a violinist; another son, Peter; and a sister, Ruth Crumb. His daughter, the actress and singer Ann Crumb, died of cancer in 2019.When asked in 1988 if he liked his own music, Mr. Crumb responded: “I think most composers like their own music. But I’m aware at the same time that in my opinion I haven’t fully realized a piece. In other words, I haven’t yet written the kind of music I would like to write in my heart of hearts. I sense that maybe that’s the human condition; maybe one never does, in fact.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in June

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      The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More