That same year, Crum married soprano Patricia Snell. He made his conducting debut in 1948 inthe company'sproduction of Faust.Ĭrum also worked in 19 with the Opera Nacional de Centro-America in Guatemala.įranca, founder of the National Ballet, invited him to become conductor for the newly formed ballet corps in 1951. Hebecame chorus master and a conductor for the Royal Conservatory Opera, which later became the Canadian Opera Company. In 1946, Crum became coach with the Royal Conservatory opera departmentand assistant to its director, Nicholas Goldschmidt, with whom he had studied conducting. He made a debut as a recitalist in Toronto at age 16 and was a regular on CBC Radio. He began piano and organ studies at the age of 12 with Edmund Cohu, organist and choirmaster of Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont. 26, 1926 in Providence, R.I., and moved with his family to Toronto at age three. "Along with our founder Celia Franca, he forged a fledgling ballet company into the great institution it is today.We all owe him a great debt and will miss him greatly."Ĭrum was born Oct. "George Crum was a pioneer of the arts in Canada," said National Ballet artistic director Karen Kain. He was 80.Ĭrum died Saturday after a short illness in Toronto, according to a press release from the National Ballet.Ĭrum, a frequent conductor for CBC Radio opera broadcasts, was music director and conductor of the ballet for 33 years and remained music director emeritus at the time of his death. Many of his pupils became influential composers in their own right, including Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golijov, Melinda Wagner and Christopher Rouse.George Crum, the pianist and conductor who was invited by National Ballet of Canada founding artistic director Celia Franca to become the ballet's first music director, has died. "They're floating clear of that."Ĭrumb attracted a legion of students, both private and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1965 to 1995. "They're not thinking of aligning parts in a vertical way," he said. In a 2002 interview with All Things Considered, Crumb said that such nonstandard notation, which he used in much of his music, was freeing - not just for him, but for the musicians who played his work. The written score for one piece within his 1973 collection for solo piano, Makrokosmos II, is in the shape of a peace symbol. He received his doctorate in composition at the University of Michigan in 1959.Ĭrumb was famed for his notated scores - so visually beautiful that some were featured in museum exhibitions. He graduated from the Mason College of Music and Fine Arts in his hometown (which later became part of the University of Charleston), and received a master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before traveling to study at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin as a Fulbright fellow. His parents were both professional musicians his father was a clarinetist and his mother played cello. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his work Echoes of Time and the River and a 2001 Grammy Award for his 1977 piece Star-Child, for soprano, children's choir, a male speaking choir, bell ringers and large orchestra.Ĭrumb was born Oct. He also found inspiration in many other diverse sources, including the colors and timbres in Debussy's music, the poetry of Federica García Lorca and the calls of humpback whales in his 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), written for electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano. In his later years, Crumb frequently returned to American hymns and spirituals as a wellspring of inspiration: In the 2000s, he published over a dozen arrangements of old American folk material that he grouped together under the larger title American Songbook, including The Winds of Destiny. So the material goes very deep into a still-unhealed wound in the American psyche." "These were American songs from a time when the country was torn apart, and they reflect the kind of emotional intensity of the divide and also the longing to come together. "There's the same loneliness, bitterness, sourness that these songs reflect from the Civil War period," Sellars said. In a 2011 interview with All Things Considered, Sellars observed how Crumb had tapped into still-unresolved elements of American history. In 2011, theater director Peter Sellars staged the work, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw along with amplified piano and a percussion quartet. Political divide and the anguishes of war were a subject Crumb returned to in his 2004 work The Winds of Destiny, for which he arranged Civil War-era songs.
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