![]() Violinist Stephen Bryant, who’s playing the work Friday night on the Seattle Symphony’s concert, says “All of our traditional training is pretty useless . . . Crumb managed to go far outside the box. (“Night of the Electric Insects” is this section’s title, and that sums it up.) In this 19-minute work for string quartet-with help from amplification, gongs, maracas, and bowed water glasses-Crumb seemingly poured every shocking idea he had about what a quartet should sound like, and the piece still sounds arrestingly freakish today. Anything you may read in program or liner notes about George Crumb’s 1970 Black Angels-the numerological structure (it’s all about 13s and 7s, apparently), the Beethoven references, the “Dies irae” quotes, the Vietnam War subtext-will likely be pushed right out of your head by the manic scrabbling of the work’s opening bars.
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