Word: crumb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rushed through the audience, raised his arm and-splat! Prankster Aaron Kay, the man who once pasted Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the face with a cream pie, had struck again. This time the pie was apple crumb and the victim was New York City Mayor Abe Beame, who was participating in a mayoral forum at Manhattan's Cooper Union. Fortunately for Beame, the pie merely splattered his blue suit. The mayor shrugged off the caper with a quip: "I like the Big Apple, not apple...
...went last week as the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of Star-Child, a 33-minute parable for soprano, solo trombone, boy choristers and large-very large-orchestra by American Composer George Crumb. Gimmickry aside, Star-Child turned out to be a work of immense power, daring and, at times, even horror. A requiem of sorts drawn primarily from two anonymous medieval texts, Dies Irae and Massacre of the Innocents, Star-Child is imbued with the same Blake-like contrast of innocence and evil that characterizes much of Crumb's other work, notably Ancient Voices of Children...
...piece builds over a slow, droning, continually repeated chordal procession called Musica Mundana (Music of the Spheres). Says Crumb: "I like sounds that never stop." He also likes a good explosion or two. Halfway along comes a percussive cataclysm that shakes the rafters like a latter-day The Rite of Spring. At the end, the glistening harmonics from three solo violins perched high in a rear balcony evoke a paradisiacal kingdom where the chil dren of light will reign...
Musical Saw. Star-Child was composed on a Ford Foundation grant for the Philharmonic and for Irene Gubrud, who sang the soprano part splendidly while supported by crutches (be cause of an old back injury). The score is Crumb's first for full orchestra since Echoes of Time and the River, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Crumb, 47, is a visionary who has shaken orchestration up in recent years with an ingenious knack for producing new sounds with old instruments and homely domestic objects. The grimly surrealistic Black Angels...
...Chief Justice Earl Warren to Mobster Frank Costello. Generous and impulsive, he once dropped more than $60,000 on a World Series bet, and would carry down-and-out customers on the cuff for months on end. Master of the boorish putdown, he called his famous customers "creeps" and "crumb-bums." "If he doesn't insult you, he doesn't love you," Actor Pat O'Brien once said. "And if he doesn't love you, then you have missed a chunk of life...