Underrated Classical Music: Black Angels by George Crumb

 Black Angels - the greatest string quartet by a non-Soviet composer in the 20th century's second half. This is dissonant music, but it's dissonance with a point. It expresses: this string quartet has all the rhythms of bebop, African drumming, and mantra chants, all the timbral abrasiveness of guitar distortion, overtone dissonance of a microphone overload, imitations primal wailing and air raid sirens beautiful islands of consonance within the dissonance, bird calls in the high registers of the violin, quotes from the Dies Irae, quotes from Schubert and Falla and Schoenberg and Franck, harmonies from Machaut and rhythms of baroque dance, whistling and whispering and shouts, not to mention some gong explosions.... ...and a gorgeous glass harmonica passage. It was written as a political protest, but it's not just political music, it's a human experience of the tragedy of the world with all its destructive power

There are two basic schools of American artists: Whitmans and Dickinsons. One is the master of public statements that speak for America, for democracy and freedom, for the dream itself. One is the actual practitioner of those freedoms, who create a hermetic, uncompromising language that's entirely private. If you get it, you listen, if you don't, the artist doesn't seem to care.

There are plenty of frauds in both schools, but the private composers don't get more real than George Crumb - an avant-garde genius who belongs in the company of Ligeti and Berio, who listened to the entire world of music, took what he needed from it all, and sounded like none but him. This... is... MUSIC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etHtCVeU4-I&fbclid=IwAR2kLY-iUFFsqNPUWjOZLW6AiOm7mhE7_GYtgmJ_j7uq-__o3Kw60T8Xe-I