Typically, Crumb calls on the pianist to play upon the instrument's strings pizzicato and also to produce harmonics; the cello is tuned scordatura (B-F#-D#-A); the flutist is called upon to sing and play simultaneously. The work itself is a three-movement fantasy, beginning with a Vocalise (... for the beginning of time) for the flute that is suddenly interrupted by leaping, incantatory chords on the piano. There follows a set of five variations on Sea-Time (each with the name of a different geologic period) whose sea-theme, played in harmonics, is stated by the cello and piano. The last movement is a radiant Sea-Nocturne (... for the end of time) -- the Messiaen reference is unmistakable here -- with a performance direction of "serene, pure, transfigured".

Michael Walsh

programme notes in CD booklet, Zuma Records 102

In many ways, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Crumb (b. 1929, Charleston, West Virginia) descended into uncharted sonic oceans with his tribute to the humpback leviathan in Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale).

But just as importantly, Crumb also followed a well-established corpus of works that reflect the fascination composers have long found in evoking the sounds of the wild.

Even as far back as the Renaissance, the great Josquin onomatopoetically imitated the chirping of a lowly cricket in his lighthearted motet El Grillo. Later on, in the highly descriptive romantic era, many now legendary works included such imitations as trilling cuckoos (Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), braying donkeys (Mendelssohn's evocative overture to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream), and bleating sheep (Strauss's Don Quixote).

With the more widespread use of recording in this century, the need for faithful replication gained even greater importance. Ottorino Respighi was the first composer to actually utilize prerecordings of -- in this case -- birds in his landmark orchestral tone poem, Pines of Rome.

But there also were other composers with a naturalist orientation, such as Olivier Messiaen and later George Crumb, who must have at some point concluded that the combination of recordings with live music represented only an artificial -- hence insincere -- modus operandi.

Crumbs Vox Balaenae aims, like Messiaen's Reveil des Oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux Exotiques (1956) -- where the recording medium was used my Messiaen only as a means of precisely transcribing birdcalls of rural France -- at evoking the sounds from the peaceable kingdom on strictly instrumental terms.

But unlike Messiaen, Crumb's music has often borrowed elements of the theater to heighten extramusical messages embedded in many of his works. Vox Balaenae, for amplified flute, amplified cello, amplified piano, and rattles, is no exception. This score explicitly calls for each of the musicians to wear a black half-mask throughout its performance. According to Crumb in the preface to the score, "the masks, by effacing a sense of human projection, will symbolize the powerful impersonal forces of nature".

In a sense, then, Vox could serve on one level as a condemnation of man's arrogant dominion over the ocean's most mighty dwellers. This message, in fact, finds further amplification as Crumb additionally requests -- though this time in less obligatory terms -- tha Vox be performed "under a deep-blue stage lighting [so that] the theatrical effect would be further enhanced." The last movement, Sea Novturne (... for the end of time), thus can become in the right setting an elegiac statement for this much exploited sea creature.

Written in three movements, Vox Balaenae's structural weight falls in the middle section -- a series of five geologically named variations on a theme entitled Sea-Time -- bookended by two extended fantasies.

What makes Vox Balaenae unique resides in the wealth of novel color Crumb brings to this score. Indeed, from a modest trio of players, the composer explores a plethora of extended techniques, yielding sounds and textures never before heard: an eerie, shadowlike unison results when the flutist is required to sing and play simultaneously, as in the opening movement. The pianist, frequently instructed to use the harp of the isntrument, weaves a sinister web of percussive sound throughout the score, recalling many of the timbres in many of John cage's prepared piano pieces. A variety of glizzandi, pizzicati, and harmonics from the cello evoke perhaps the moist vivid collection of images: the screech of the seagull, the splash of primeval ocean waves, and the cantabile whisper of the mighty whale itself.