The American experimental composer George Crumb, who has died aged 92, came to prominence in the mid-1960s with a series of ground-breaking compositions scored for unusual instrumental combinations, using then still-novel performing techniques. One of the most remarkable works to come out of these departures was the haunting Ancient Voices of Children (1970), setting five poems by Federico García Lorca. As well as singing, its solo soprano is called upon to intone softly over the strings of the piano in order to set up sympathetic vibrations; breathe and whisper through a paper funnel; and screech.
Elsewhere Crumb required players to sing, whistle or double up on percussion, or play the piano directly on the strings with paper clips. In the trio Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) (1971), the flautist sings and groans through the instrument as well as playing it conventionally, and the ranges of the cello and piano are similarly expanded.
Crumb was an early adopter of electronic and amplified instruments, for example in Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), for baritone and an ensemble comprising electric guitar, electric bass, two amplified pianos and percussion. In Black Angels (1970) for “electric string quartet” the four performers’ instruments are amplified, and they speak and play a small array of unpitched percussion. It marked a protest against the Vietnam war raging at the time, and specifically against the use of helicopter gunships.
The use of the amplified piano, sometimes accompanied by percussion, was a recurrent fixture in Crumb’s work from then on, most vividly in the four collections of illustrative pieces inspired by the Zodiac and entitled Makrokosmos (1972-79). Its title pointed to a counterpart at several removes in the six volumes of character pieces for piano, Mikrokosmos, by Béla Bartók.
The Hungarian composer’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) was a formative influence, as was, at a more fundamental level, the music of the Viennese serialist Anton Webern. Indeed, Makrokosmos vol 3 (1974), subtitled Music for a Summer Evening, used two amplified pianos and two percussionists to create its by turns hypnotic and evocative soundscapes. In his own generation, Crumb’s exploratory approach was akin to that of another Hungarian, Gyorgy Ligeti.
Amplified piano was the medium for Crumb’s last major collection, the two volumes of Metamorphoses (2015-20), 20 “fantasy-pieces after celebrated paintings”, inspired by the works of artists ranging from Whistler and Van Gogh to Klee and Jasper Johns. His final completed composition proved to be, in typically unconventional fashion, a percussion quintet, Kronos-Kryptos (2019, revised in 2021 after the composer made a recovery from a stroke).
There were almost always illustrative, dramatic or expressive purposes behind Crumb’s mature music, whether in his many vocal cycles, such as the seven volumes of the American Songbook (2003-10) and the three of the Spanish Songbook (2008-12), or what proved to be his largest composition, the vocal-and-orchestral Star-Child (1977), which won the 2001 Grammy for best contemporary classical composition. The recording was released in Bridge Records’ ongoing complete Crumb edition.
Often his music took on a mystical quality, sometimes reflected in the graphical notation of particular scores, as in the circles of Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965, completed the following spring, or the Spiral Galaxy finale of Makrokosmos vol 1, where the music is laid out as a helix.
Born into a musical family in Charleston, West Virginia, George was the son of Vivian (nee Reed), a cellist, and George Crumb Sr, a clarinettist. His father taught him the clarinet, and he started composing in his teens.
A summer course at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, in 1947 was followed by a bachelor’s degree from the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts (now part of the University of Charleston) in 1950. He gained further degrees from the universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1952) and Michigan (1959). In between, a Fulbright scholarship enabled him to study in Berlin with Boris Blacher.
Crumb began teaching at a college in Virginia, and from 1958 at the University of Colorado, before moving in 1965 to the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until retiring in 1997. A Pulitzer prize (1968) for his orchestral suite, Echoes of Time and the River, commissioned by the University of Chicago to mark its 75th anniversary in 1965, was followed by many other awards.
Though outwardly he was a relatively shy man, his pupils, including the composers Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Rouse, Margaret Brouwer and Osvaldo Golijov, all spoke of his warm-hearted and gentle personality. He was able to nurture the best in all he worked with, including the many performers of his own works, most of which are enormously demanding. On occasion he could be blunt: when asked for an opinion on a fellow American composer’s music he described it succinctly as “horseshit”.
In 1949 he married the pianist Elizabeth Brown, with whom he had three children: Ann, a singer, David, also a composer, and Peter. Ann died in 2019, and he is survived by Elizabeth, and his two sons.
• George Henry Crumb, composer, born 24 October 1929; died 6 February 2022
• This article was amended on 11 February 2022 to correct details of surviving family members.
