George Crumb: Voice of the Whale

In 1976, "music filmmaker" Robert Mugge created his first music-related film. Titled GEORGE CRUMB: VOICE OF THE WHALE, it was this dazzling, 54-minute portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning and Grammy-winning composer George Crumb. The film was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and makes innovative use of color and a dialectical structure to reveal Crumb's life (green-tinted-footage), his work (blue-tinted footage, and connections between the two (full-color footage). Included in the film are a performance of Crumb's 1971 composition, "Vox Balaenae for Three Masked Players"; samples of the rural, West Virginia gospel music that has influenced him; demonstrations by Crumb of exotic instruments and unusual effects that figure in his compositions; and scenes from his home and university teaching environments. At his home, Crumb discusses his compositional techniques with fellow composer Richard Wernick, and his musician wife Elizabeth discusses their life together; at the university, Wernick's Penn Contemporary players (Carole Morgan, Lambert Orkis, and Barbara Haffner) perform "Vox Balaenae." Words frequently used to describe George Crumb's work are "poetic, atmospheric, mysterious, evocative." He himself has said, "I feel intuitively that music must have been the first cell from which language, science, and religion originated." GEORGE CRUMB: VOICE OF THE WHALE was first broadcast over PBS on June 6, 1978. Transferred to HD from the original 16mm film and lovingly restored