This CD presents the 6th of 7 American Songbooks that occupied Crumb at the millenmium’s opening. He amplifies the “folk idiom” by adding a “prepared” concert-grand piano and 100+ percussion instruments that echo their global identities: drums, snare snips, gongs, marimba, crotales, tubular bells, sleigh bells, cymbals, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and tam-tam. The effects range from Western, Colorado, Ozark and Appalachian sonorities, to the percussive sounds of Indonesian gamelan orchestras. Thus, he combines ethnic-American identities with a global awareness that embraces Bartok, Mahler, Debussy, Ives and Webern. Along with the human voice, the instruments’ metallic sounds provide an irony that Crumb admits is part of his style. True to his sense of “exotic” harmony, many of his songs utilize pentatonic scales (5 notes per octave) and modal chord combinations (the 7 modes each start on a different note in the octave).
An Idyll for the Misbegotten (Images III) for amplified flute and percussion (1986) was inspired by Debussy’s work for flute solo, Syrinx (1912). Crumb intends the piece as a paean to peace and renewed brotherhood. The Sleeper (1984) for mezzo-soprano and amplified piano has words by Edgar Allan Poe. Crumb adjusts Poe’s eerie lament into a meditation on a woman slumbering beneath the “mystic moon.” At the end, the piano invokes the midnight bell five times.