In the basement studio of Crumb's home in Media (where he barricades himself away from the six household dogs), you can pick up a cylinder resembling a sawed-off mailing tube, pull the string hanging out of the bottom, and hear the sound of a cavernous exhalation. It's typical of Crumb's otherworldly ominousness, heard most famously in his settings of Garcia Lorca poems, titled Ancient Voices of Children.
As with his six previous songbooks, the new one builds phantasmagorical sound environments around hymns, spirituals, and folk songs, many of which he heard during his upbringing in Charleston, W.Va. His daughter, Ann Crumb, is again a featured soloist, along with baritone Patrick Mason. Though the huge battery of percussion is used with spare precision - there are only four players - the voices have to be amplified, especially in passages inspired by the flocks of crows in the composer's backyard.
Crumb flips through the score: "Here I use a low-pitch siren. It's in a very soft range, like a disembodied human voice. Here's the African-Brazilian berimbau," a stringed instrument that makes a buzzing sound. "I knew about it long ago. A percussionist found the crazy thing and I thought of a way to use it. . . . "
Though Philadelphia has surprisingly extensive percussion rental agencies, baritone Mason is bringing American Indian rattles in from Boulder, Colo., where he lives. One new feature of Voices From the Heartland is the presence of Navajo and Pawnee chants, the words of which are similar in tone to the Chinese poems Gustav Mahler used in his Das Lied von der Erde.
