A Haunted Landscape (1984)

The work is scored for rather conventional forces: woodwinds in threes (with the usual doublings…), “Tchaikovsky” brass plus a third trumpet, two harps, and piano, percussion, and strings. The piano is amplified and functions pretty much as an extension of the percussion section. The role of the percussion is very important, as is usually the case in contemporary orchestral works. In addition to the more common percussion instruments, I have included parts for certain “exotic” ones: Caribbean steel drums, Cambodian angklungs, Japanese Kabuki blocks, the Brzilian cuica, and the Appalachian hammered dulcimer.

A Haunted Landscape is not programmatic in any sense. The title reflects my feeling that certain places on the planet Earth are imbued with an aura of mystery. I can vividly recall the “shock of recognition” I felt on seeing Andalusia for the first time after having been involved with the poetry of García Lorca for so many years. I felt a similar sense of déjà vu on visits to Jerusalem and to Delphos in Greece. Even in the West Virginia woods one senses the ghosts of the vanished Indians. Places can inspire feelings of reverence or of brooding menace (like the deserted battlefields of ancient wars). Sometimes one feels an idyllic sense of time suspended. The contemplation of a landscape can induce complex psychological states and perhaps music is an ideal medium for delineating the tiny, subtle nuances of emotion and sensibility which hover between the subliminal and the conscious.

A Haunted Landscape is cast in a single continuous movement. A unifying factor is provided by a very low B-flat, sustained throughout by two solo contrabassists. I had imaged that this low B-flat (60 cycles—the frequency of alternating current) was an immutable law of nature and represented a kind of “cosmic drone.” But, alas, science defeats art—a chemist friend informed me that alternating current is arbitrarily determined by man and that B-flat is not even international, much less intergalactic!

—George Crumb