Eerie Voice From the ‘60s Still Speaks to the Present

George Crumb’s music is eerie, full of strangely primordial, ghostly sounds. It functions in the realm of shadows: It enters into the world of mysteries and rituals, and death often comes calling. Some of the scores are written in beautiful, symbolic graphic notation, with musical staffs drawn in almost unplayable circles. There is other symbolism galore in the music--number systems or astrological charts might generate structure; certain intervals or chords might stand for good and evil.

And yet many of the pieces are so much of their time that they were originally prized less for their arcane structures or sonic strategy than for the ability of their imaginative sounds to reach beyond language altogether and enter into a realm of the spirit. If you had to ask what the music meant, you were probably thought too hopeless to ever get it anyway. “Far out” served as explanation enough.

That time was the second half of the 1960s and the early ‘70s, and Crumb was not just then a composer; he was an icon.

But what of George Crumb, who turned 70 in October, three decades hence? That is a question that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is posing in a fascinating two-part birthday tribute to the composer. For the orchestra’s downtown chamber music series at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall on Friday night, it surveyed Crumb’s music from 1964 to 1971. The Philharmonic’s New Music Group continues the tribute chronologically tonight at the Japan America Theatre.

The music heard Friday certainly still evokes the ‘60s. When the concert began with a pianist (Joanne Pearce Martin) bending over and plucking the strings of her instrument in the opening of “Eleven Echoes of Autumn, 1965”; when the flutist (Janet Ferguson) and clarinetist (Lorin Levee) left their chairs, turned their backs to the audience and played into the piano; when the violinist (Mark Baranov) bowed his instrument high on the fingerboard, we knew exactly where we were historically. Crumb is not the first composer to do such things, and he has had more than his share of imitators since, but there is a sound, and a ritual of making that sound, that is all his and all of that era.

Such sounds and rituals are still powerful, still evocative of otherworldly things. The “Eleven Echoes” seems less to ask unanswered questions than to suggest 11 mysterious replies to unasked questions. “Black Angels,” Crumb’s string quartet written in 1970 “in tempore belli,” does ask questions. A response to the Vietnam War, the quartet, for amplified players, is a symbolic rite of good battling evil. It begins with a terrifying threnody, or lament, subtitled “Night of the Electric Insects” (music spooky enough for William Friedkin to use in his film “The Exorcist” a couple of years later). Death and the macabre haunt “Black Angels,” as fragments of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” of the Dies Irae motive, of Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata lurk in the background as incorporeal phantoms.

More abstract, but no less solemn, are the earlier Four Nocturnes for violin and piano, written in 1964. Already the mood is quiet and numinous. In “Vox Balaenae” (“Voice of the Whale”) from 1971, Crumb moves more directly into music as enacted ceremony. Written for electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano, Crumb asks the players to be masked and the lighting to provide spectral glow. The musical program searches the mysteries of deep time, of evolution and of a world coming into being.

It begins with the spectacular effect of a flutist mimicking the songs of the humpbacked whale. Ancient chant, portentous melody and even a mockery of Strauss’ famous opening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (this is post-”2001” music) provide the essence for variations of a “sea theme” that are meant to depict archeological ages--Archeozoic through Cenozoic. It is divinatory, often beautiful, music, but the ritualistic mystery is hard to reproduce in our less trusting age of irony. Theatrical illusion here was hurt by something as small as the flutist wearing her mask on her forehead above her glasses. The players must, in every detail, seem to believe in this kind of magical rite if it is not to seem silly.

Still, performances were, on the whole, superb. Baranov was especially impressive in the Nocturnes and the “Echoes.” The string quartet for “Black Angels” (Barry Socher, Roy Tanabe, Richard Elegino and Stephen Custer) was powerful, gripping, theatrically convincing in both ferocious music and the ethereal (which had them whispering in Swahili and rubbing wine glasses filled with water). Daniel Rothmuller was the properly masked cellist in “Vox Balaenae,” and he seemed to get right into music’s spirit in sight and sound.

The Crumb celebration concludes with a Green Umbrella concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, tonight at 8, $20-$25; Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St. (323) 850-2000. The composer will speak an hour before the program.