Makrokosmos, Volume I - Twelve Fantasy Pieces after the Zodiac for Amplified Piano (1972)
Composed by George Crumb
Nic Gerpe, Piano

Program Note:
Makrokosmos, Volume I was composed in 1972 for my friend David Burge. Ten years previously, in 1962 (we were then colleagues at the University of Colorado), he had commissioned and premiered my Five Pieces for Piano. I was very much excited about the expanding possibilities of piano idiom – it seemed as if a whole new world were opening up to composers; and I was especially impressed by Burge’s immediate and total mastery of this new idiom, which implied an organic synthesis of conventional (keyboard) and unconventional (inside the piano) techniques. I wanted to do a sequel to the Five Pieces but, alas, several attempts proved abortive. One set of sketches was assimilated into my Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death; other ideas wandered homelessly through the years; and two or three germinal ideas finally evolved into Makrokosmos.

The title and format of my Makrokosmos reflect my admiration for two great 20th-century composers of piano music – Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. I was thinking, of course, of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Debussy’s 24 Preludes (a second zodiacal set, Makrokosmos, Volume II, was completed in 1973, thus forming a sequence of 24 “fantasy-pieces”). However, these are purely external associations, and I suspect that the “spiritual impulse” of my music is more akin to the darker side of Chopin, and even to the child-like fantasy of early Schumann.

And then there is always the question of the “larger world” of concepts and ideas which influence the evolution of a composer’s language. While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the “magical properties” of music; the problem of the origin of evil; the “timelessness” of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life (so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler); the haunting words of Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”); and these few lines of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen halt” (“And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are all falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands”).

Each of the twelve “fantasy-pieces” is associated with a different sign of the zodiac and with the initials of a person born under that sign. I had whimsically wanted to pose an “enigma” with these subscript initials; however, my perspicacious friends quickly identified the Aries of Spring-Fire as David Burge, and the Scorpio of The Phantom Gondolier as myself.

Makrokosmos, Volume I was premiered at Colorado College (in Colorado Springs) on February 8, 1973. - George Crumb

Makrokosmos, Volume 1 by George Crumb © 1974 by C.F. Peters Corporation, New York. Permission by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved.

Recorded, edited and mastered by Matthew Snyder - Allegro Recordings, Burbank, CA

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