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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Victor J. Rodriguez Ang-Cheng Kris Ho
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2015.07.006
University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Shanghai, China Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College, Zhuhai, China
This paper proposes new ways to understand the sense of universality in music through a reflection and analysis of George Crumb’s Black Angels (Images I): Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, one of the defining musical expressions of the Vietnam War era. It centers on an analysis of the relationship of the body/self to an “ecology of war” produced through Crumb’s music that renders these selves indistinct within this musical geography. The selves that inhabit Black Angels could be that of anybody in particular since Crumb seeks to invoke in his music the primeval experience of terror that inhabits in all of us as the inheritors of mankind’s violence. This sense of the universal militates against the desirable qualities of popular music that rely on the production of autonomous and singular selves that make the distinction between enemy and friend possible and distinct. We focus on Crumb’s use of archaisms, his construction of time in this piece, and the author’s overall purpose to invoke a time of war rather than to reflect the conditions of war, in order to delineate the contours of the universal time and space producing the undifferentiated primeval self of war. We conclude that although Crumb’s rejection of the national self deprives the piece of a salient place in the popular cannon of the war, it has left an intellectual legacy on the times of the Vietnam War that deserves to be preserved.
Crumb, Black Angels, Vietnam, war, universal, experimental music
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