Quotation and Framing: Re-contextualization and

Contemporary Music Review Vol. 29, No. 3, June 2010, pp. 309–321

Quotation and Framing: Re-contextualization and Intertextuality as Newness in George Crumb’s Black Angels Nils Holger Petersen

George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land for Electric String Quartet (1970) are individually original, but also representative for compositional practices for the twentieth century. As in his other compositions, Crumb has integrated musical quotations and various musical styles, including a web of references that extend into other media in such a way that they form an indispensable part of the basic construction of the work: these components form part of its newness. In Black Angels the composer—among other well-known pieces of music—quotes the medieval ‘Dies irae’ sequence and the second movement of Schubert’s string quartet in D minor (D. 810). The musical and intermedial references are framed with striking modernistic sounds exploring instrumental possibilities far beyond the traditional, thus creating a framework of extreme contrasts. The paper will contextualize, analyze and interpret Black Angels— which the composer explicitly linked to the Vietnam War—in a broad context of music, intermediality, religious symbolism, and cultural memory, pointing to the cultural meaning of this technique of recontextualization as a break with, as well as a continuation of, modernity. Keywords: George Crumb; Black Angels; Intertextuality; Intermediality; Analysis; String Quartet

For the American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) musical—as well as intermedial—intertextuality is part of his style, manifested not only through musical quotations and references to historical musical styles but also through verbal references in work titles as well as instructions in the score which connect the composition to other items, works, genres, features, or discourses, in various media.

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2010.535365

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In this essay, I shall use George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land for Electric String Quartet (1970) as my main example. It should be emphasized that Crumb’s compositional intermediality should not be seen only as an individual original practice but as representing, in its own original way, a fairly broad tendency in modern as well as traditional music history where literary, pictorial, and other references in music are not uncommon at all.1 Crumb’s music with its musical as well as extra-musical references has recently been interpreted convincingly by Victoria Adamenko as part of a trend of ‘neo-mythologism in music’. Adamenko contextualizes Crumb with other prominent twentieth-century composers, notably Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, and Schnittke (Adamenko, 2007). Such a view is certainly relevant for Black Angels and many of the features I will discuss in the following discussion fit in very well with Adamenko’s general reading of Crumb.2 As in the cases of many of his other compositions, Crumb has integrated musical quotations and various musical styles in his Black Angels, as well as a number of verbal and linguistic references, number symbolism and other mythologizing strategies, forming a web of references which extend into other media in such a way that they form an indispensable part of the basic construction of the work: these components form an important part of the ‘newness’ of the work as it will be analyzed in the following. As Victoria Adamenko remarks in general concerning the composers discussed in her book, being part of the same overall trend to mythologize in no way precludes ‘manifest differences in their aesthetic positions’ (Adamenko, 2007, pp. xiii, 3). Indeed, Crumb may be said to subscribe to an attitude absolutely opposite to the statement expressed in 1968 by his near contemporary Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) in his Litanei (from the improvization instructions Aus den sieben Tagen): For many years I have said it innumerable times and sometimes written it: that I do not make MY music, but only relay the vibrations I receive; that I function like a translator, that I am a radio. If I composed in the right way, in the right state of mind, my SELF no longer existed. Now I am trying to reach the next stage, to connect you, the player, to the currents that flow through me, to which I am connected. I am not trying to make a composer of you in the old sense, but rather to gain a completely new confidence in your abilities: so that through me you will be connected to the inexhaustible source that pours out through us in the form of musical vibrations. Do not try to grasp it with your mind . . . (Stockhausen, 1968/70, p. 25)3

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Although as a composer, in the late sixties and seventies, Stockhausen appeared stylistically radically transformed from his previous complex compositions and from his personal avant-garde role connected to Darmstadt, at least in one sense his new musical openness appears to have been wholly a continuation of his earlier musical manifestations. Perhaps he no longer investigated ‘never previously heard sounds’ in the more technical meaning in which he had been seeking such new sounds in his experimental electrophonic compositions of the 1950s, but he was still—in principle—listening for something no one else would be able to hear, he was still a kind of medium for finding a ‘new’ music outside of himself and of everyone else. For Crumb it seems to be the opposite. Crumb composes in the historical and geographical universe occupied by humans. In an article about the future of music from 1980, he stated: One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture—some might say the supremely important aspect—is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past. To consider firstly the extension through time: in a real sense, virtually all music history and literature is now at our fingertips through both live performances and excellent recordings, whereas earlier composers knew the musics of only one or two generations before their own time. The consequences of this enlarged awareness of our own heritage are readily evident in many of our recent composers. For example, the influence of medieval music on the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies comes to mind. For many such composers, the sound of medieval music—at times harsh and raw, at times fragile and hauntingly sweet—would more closely approximate the contemporary ideal than would, say, the sound of a Brahms or of a Richard Strauss. I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures. Perhaps we have come to think of ourselves as philosophically contemporaneous with all earlier cultures. And it is probable that today there are more people who see culture evolving spirally rather than linearly. Within the concentric circles of the spiral, the points of contact and the points of departure in music can be more readily found. The geographical extension means, of course, that the total musical culture of Planet Earth is ‘coming together’, as it were. An American or European composer, for example, now has access to the music of various Asian, African, and South American cultures. (Crumb, 1980)

The way Crumb relates his discussion of the problems of, and the prospects for, modern composition to historical figures, Beethoven, Chopin, and not least Bela Barto´k, as well as his actual employment of references to historical music in his own works, underlines that the statement in the same article, ‘the future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child’, may be taken as more than a general statement; it seems also to convey very well how Crumb relates to his works as sometimes rebellious children. The musical—including the intermedial—historical references in Black Angels are framed with striking modernistic sounds exploring instrumental possibilities far beyond the traditional, thus creating a framework of extreme contrasts. The

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composer explicitly linked his work to war, in 1970 obviously the Vietnam War,4 but the broad context of religious symbolism and various specific musical references point to a more general cultural meaning of his technique of re-contextualization as a break with, as well as a continuation of, the particular kind of modernity associated with the Darmstadt school and the idea of a self-contained modern musical style. One may say that this way of relating to history plays with what—since the 1990s— has been referred to as a ‘cultural memory’ by Jan and Aleida Assmann in a number of publications which analyse ways in which a society collectively comes to highlight certain parts of—items from—its history as the particularly important cultural memory (A. Assman, 1999; J. Assman, 2000/2004; J. Assman, 1992/2005). To this, of course, belongs not only the official political and religious heritage but also the more or less definite and continuously re-defined canons of the various arts: what we find in museums, what is played in concerts and theatres, the ‘classical’ literature, and so forth. What is now traditionally called ‘classical music’, encompassing ‘the entire canon of Western art music’ (however unstable such canons may sometimes appear to be), provides a basic pool of music material which is available for whatever potential use might fit Crumb’s own or his imagined ‘ideal’ modern composer’s particular agenda for a specific work. Partly based on such a musical cultural memory, the composer can choose and then appropriate what fits his agendas, as Crumb has made clear in the above-quoted statement.5 In the same article, however, Crumb also made it clear that he envisaged composers working not only based on a musical cultural memory, but from ‘the total musical culture of Planet Earth’. This obviously fits his own uses in several of his works of musical elements, but also of referents in other media associated with other geographical areas, cultures and religions. When asked (in 1997) about his use of ‘Latin religious titles’ in an interview, Crumb stated, ‘I use those as cultural symbols, not as expression of my own belonging to a certain religion’. He also explained ‘I am not attached to one religion. I sometimes refer to different religions, and in the same sense, to myth, which is sort of a pre-religion or early religion [. . .]’, adding that ‘[. . .] also myths and those mythical gods continue to live culturally. They represent poetic truths’ (Crumb, cited in Adamenko, 2007, p. 266).6 Musical intertextuality will sometimes lead to intermediality, such as when Crumb quotes the second movement of Schubert’s string quartet in D minor (D. 810) ‘Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen’ (Death and the Maiden) in no. 6 of the images, entitled Pavana Lachrymae (‘Pavan of Tears’), this title undoubtedly referring to John Dowland’s Lachrymae Pavan. Above the section which is based on the Schubert quotation, Crumb indicated the epithet in the original German together with a performance indication ‘Grave, solemn; like a consort of viols (a fragile echo of an ancient music)’ (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304). The musical quotation has been arranged by Crumb for electric cello (playing the upper part), electric violin II and electric viola, all playing pp while bowing behind the left hand without vibrato. Meanwhile, the electric violin I plays a ‘solo obbligato: Insect Sounds’ adding fast, nervous ppp flutters in a very high register. The ghost-like rendering of Schubert’s quasi-chorale is

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thus framed so that, in sum, an effect of something vaguely familiar is created, the suggested fragile echo of ancient music, which evidently is also modern, even shockingly modernistic. The (electrically amplified) solo violin (violin I) which breaks into the ‘consort of viols’ brings in yet another intertextual reference through the notion of insect sounds, to which also images 1 and 13 allude by the wording ‘electric insects’ in the titles (see below) and very similar musical figures which altogether are found in the score in several places. The notion—and the music— clearly seems to point to Barto´k’s so-called night music, to which Crumb also has made strong allusions in other pieces, e.g. the Makrokosmos pieces, which in themselves seem to refer to Barto´k’s Mikrokosmos. This is so not least in Makrokosmos III: Music for a Summer Evening (1974) for two amplified pianos and percussion (two players) (Crumb, n.d., No. 66590), an instrumentation seemingly referring also to Barto´k’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.7 In addition to its being a reference to Barto´k it is, of course, also a kind of musical naturalism, described by Crumb himself as a ‘sound of nature’ which might to some extent be considered the antithesis of the frequent spiritual references otherwise so important in Crumb’s work (Adamenko, 2007, pp. 79–80). An alternative version of the Pavana Lachrymae which further emphasizes the ghost-like character of the passage is given in an appendix: here the pitch of the three deep strings performing the Schubert quotation is gradually flattened by a major second over the first 8 bars (of the altogether 12 bars of the Pavana) (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304, Appendix, p. 9). The Schubert quotation, of course, carries with it further connections. Schubert, as is well known, quoted himself in the passage used by Crumb: the passage is derived from his own song ‘Der Tod und das Ma¨dchen’ (D. 531, setting a poem by Matthias Claudius). In the war context of Black Angels, the theme of a young innocent person’s confrontation with death as portrayed in the song would have been of relevance to Crumb, who signed his score in tempore belli (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304, p. 1). The Latin in tempore belli, however, is not only a reference to the Vietnam War, but also contributes one further intertextual musicoverbal reference to the well-known title of Joseph Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli (Hob. XXII: 9, composed 1796). Altogether, Black Angels incorporates musical, literary and religious references in such measure that it would be tempting to try to understand the work as a kind of allegory, translating all the references back into a structure in order to provide a discursive interpretation of the piece. Crumb has given his own clues to Black Angels in liner notes for an early recording of the piece,8 reprinted on the inside of the cover of the printed score, which is actually a facsimile of the composer’s manuscript and may well be taken as a consciously shaped intermedia art work where the composer has invested as much care in the visual, graphic presentation of his score as in the musical sounds and as also in the words used to present or explain how to perform his music.9 In his liner notes, Crumb acknowledged a number of musical quotations, including the aforementioned Schubert reference, the medieval ‘Dies irae’ sequence and other symbols used in his work.

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It is questionable to what extent the visual and verbal presentation—in the score— should be considered an integrated part of the musical work which, if such is the case, is not only a musical work but a work in several media. For the musicians who perform the piece and the scholar who analyses it, these visual and verbal aspects of the score are obviously indispensable parts of the work, and it seems reasonable to assume that the framing that these media give the music, actually influences its understanding (and hence its performance) to a significant extent. One might compare this with the programme music of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and suggest that a listener would be able to relate to the music in a rather different way if seeing the visual presentation in the score and at least knowing about the verbal presentation which Crumb has added as a kind of preface to the published score, thereby lending it a high degree of authority. Of course, much of what is said in this ‘preface’ is already contained in the details of the titles for the individual images and the overarching titles for the three-parts of the overall division of the 13 short movements to which I shall turn below. Crumb’s preface reads as follows: Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic although the essential polarity—God versus Devil 7 implies more than a purely metaphysical reality. The image of the ‘black angel’ was a conventional device used by early painters to symbolize the fallen angel. The underlying structure of Black Angels is a huge arch-like design which is suspended from the three ‘Threnody’ pieces. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption). The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These ‘magical’ relationships are variously expressed; e.g., in terms of phrase-length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. An important pitch element in the work—ascending D-sharp, A and E—also symbolizes the fateful numbers 7–13. At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili. There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet (in the ‘pavana lachrymae’ and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work); an original sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic; the sustained B-major tonality of God-music; and several references to the Latin sequence ‘Dies irae’ (‘Day of Wrath’). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the ‘Diabolus in musica’ (the interval of the tritone) and the ‘Trillo di diavolo’ (the ‘Devil’s trill’ after Tartini). The amplification of the stringed instruments in Black Angels is intended to produce a highly surrealistic effect. This surrealism is heightened by the use of certain unusual string effects; e.g. pedal tones (intensely obscene sounds of the Devil-music), bowing on the ‘wrong’ side of the strings (to produce the violconsort effect); trilling on the strings with thimble-capped fingers. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams and water-tuned crystal glasses, the latter played with the bow for the ‘glass-harmonica’ effect in God-music.

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Black Angels was commissioned by the University of Michigan and first performed by the Stanley Quartet. The score is inscribed: ‘finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970 (in tempore belli)’. (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304, inside cover)

The intermediality involved in Crumb’s Black Angels is pervasive. Still, the basic duality of good and bad, God versus Devil, permeates the piece. In a master’s thesis from 1997 concerned with the interpretation of Black Angels, Melissa West has claimed that this piece is a ‘free play between the two polarities. [Crumb] is able to achieve the free play by many means including numerology, tone colour, motive, quotations, intervals, trills, electronic amplification and distortion’ (West, 1997). The two polarities, according to West, are ‘good’ and ‘evil’. West’s interpretation is based on a direct ascription of all the symbolic elements of the composition to one of these, thus creating pairs of opposites, God versus Devil, the numbers 3 and 7 versus 13, tonality versus atonality, and insects as evil but bells as good. To some extent all this seems to be in accordance with what is suggested in Crumb’s liner notes and also with the obviously dualistic exposure of contrasts between traditional tonality and harsh dissonance; something that makes Crumb’s music, and not least Black Angels, well suited to a dance performance, such as has happened on some occasions (Cohen, 2002, p. 81 (item B 82) and p. 93 (item 195)). However, as convincing as some of these ascriptions to good and evil are, they also seem to fail to account for the ambiguities and complexities of the symbols and the progression of the work. It is, indeed, correct that the images, or movements, sometimes give such associations to good or to evil, but—as West does acknowledge—in some cases these associations are not unambiguous. Additionally, it seems to me, her analysis does not at all account for the form of the piece. Crumb’s reference to an over-arching design which—in spite of the recurrence of certain types of movements (and sometimes inversions of previous symbols)—clearly displays a progression derived from the overall Christian narrative or imagined universal history: Creation; the Fall; the earthly life outside of Paradise, in ‘exile’; redemption; and, ultimately, salvation, life in Paradise. In the three stages referred to by Crumb and inscribed in the score: I: Departure (fall from grace) consists of the movements: 1 Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects (with a performance indication: vibrant, intense) 2 Sounds of Bones and Flutes (with a performance indication: delicate and somewhat mechanical) 3 Lost Bells (performance indication: remote, transfigured) 4 Devil-music [Solo: Cadenza accompagnata] (performance indication: in romantic—phantastic style) 5 Danse Macabre [Duo] (performance indication: grotesque, satirical) II: Absence (spiritual annihilation) consists of the movements: 6 Pavana Lachrymae (der Tod und das Ma¨dchen) [Trio] (performance indication: grave, solemn; like a consort of viols (a fragile echo of an ancient music))

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7 Threnody II: Black Angels (performance indication: furiously, with great energy) 8 Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura [Trio] (performance indication: grave, solemn; like a consort of viols) 9 Lost Bells [Duo] (no general performance indication) III: Return (redemption) consists of the movements: 10 God-music [Solo: Aria accompagnata] (performance indication: Adagio (with profound calm)) 11 Ancient Voices [Duo] (no general performance indication) 12 Ancient Voices (Echo) [Trio] (performance indication: grazioso, flessibile) 13 Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects (performance indication: disembodied, incorporeal) The three-part division may also be taken to point—intertextually again—to Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 26, Les Adieux Op. 81a with its three movements entitled ‘Das Lebewohl’ (The Farewell), ‘Abwesenheit’ (Absence), and ‘Ankunft’ (Arrival) in addition to the mentioned theological references as they come to the fore in Crumb’s own description in his liner notes. This spiral form, which Crumb thinks of as the more common way of experiencing the evolving culture, may, on the other hand, because of the clearly linear aspect of the tripartite form, also indicate that Threnody III should be heard as having been overcome, something made the more likely by the music as also seen in the performance direction, disembodied, incorporeal. In other words, Black Angels may, in this line of interpretation, be heard as redemption music. In this redemption, however, a modern experience is included so that reflections of that which has been overcome are still heard. In modern music, Crumb’s Black Angels is by no means isolated in its use of intertextuality. Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia may be referred to as one of the most significant examples of intermedial intertextuality in modern music, but also composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and Alfred Schnittke have exploited similar compositional practices.10 The point I want to make about Crumb’s Black Angels is a general one concerning the transpositions and resignifications which take place in a composition by re-contextualizing words, music, and parts of liturgical or ritual performances. The items drawn upon receive additional meaning from the ritual actions of which they formed part even when they are moved out of the original context and into a new. As such, and in principle, this is neither surprising nor new. However, the extent to which such transpositions and new possibilities for constructions of meaning occur through the implications of various media are, in my view, challenging and stimulating for the task of interpretation of Crumb’s Black Angels. To take the example of the ‘Dies irae’: it is used in the Devil-music and the Danse Macabre in part I (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 George Crumb, Black Angels, ‘Devil-Music’ (Crumb, n. d., No. 66304, p. 3). Reproduced with permission of Edition Peters.

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The ‘Dies irae’ invokes the Requiem Mass, which describes the ultimate judgement, and is thus well placed in the context of the fall from grace. As Crumb has pointed out the journey here is a journey of the soul, so the fear of condemnation as part of the experience of the departure from safety, from bliss, or however one should interpret the situation before the fall in Black Angels, makes sense. At the same time, even the theological framework which Crumb sets up in his commentary should probably not be taken as a very specific Christian theological meaning of the music as such, as Crumb’s above quoted statements about his relation to religion also seem to indicate. It is clear that Crumb draws on many traditions, and the instruction ‘quasi Tibetan Prayer Stones’ at the beginning of the second image as well as the use of the Japanese and Swahili languages alongside more or less exotic European languages for ritualistic shoutings of the numbers up to 13 makes it clear that the context is not to be understood as strictly Christian.11 Rather, a Christian basic narrative, which has been constitutive for medieval rituals, as well as Western music history, which is the fundamental pool from which Crumb’s music draws its materials and its recontextualizations, also underlies Black Angels, but the re-contextualizations which are undertaken in the work bring this basic underlying framework, mythologically as well as musically, into a broader cultural context which, for better or for worse, constitutes the world in which the composer tries to form new meanings. This is one of the tasks that Crumb sees for new music, and is part of how he discusses the achievements and unresolved difficulties of composers in the early part of the twentieth century: Although we must be impressed by the enormous accruement of new elements of vocabulary in the areas of pitch, rhythm, timbre, and so forth, I sense at the same time the loss of a majestic unifying principle in much of our recent music. Not only is the question of tonality still unresolved but we have not yet evolved anything comparable to the sure instinct for form which occurs routinely in the best traditional music. Instead, each new work seems to require a special solution, valid only in terms of itself. (Crumb, 1980)

The re-contextualization of the Christian traditional overall shape of history as a comedy (i.e. with a happy ending),12 and by extension, of musical form, may be understood in various ways and I do not think the point is to have specific semantic interpretations of Crumb’s music. It is not just about good and evil, it invokes ideas, beliefs, hopes of redemption, but inserts these into a broad modern world characterized by multi-ethnicity and multi-religiousness. Crumb could be understood to be syncretistic in his seeming mixture of culture and—possibly—religious symbols, and the 1997 interview quoted above certainly could be taken to point in such a direction, but I think it is more fair to say that he takes seriously the very traditional historical narrative that sees all Western music as a reception history with a point of departure in medieval liturgical music but a history into which gradually more and more from other cultures, religions, and in any case of musical practices, has been absorbed.

Figure 2 George Crumb, Black Angels, ‘God-Music’ (Crumb, n. d., No. 66304, p. 6). Reproduced with permission of Edition Peters.

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If this is so, Crumb’s music may not necessarily have one pre-determined semantic meaning, but should rather be heard as the attempt to create musical meanings in a complex universe of sounds: of the imitation of nature; of the reception of symbolic musical statements; and of a musical reception history which can be heard as the foreground of Christian mythology and liturgy, but also of much else.13 Crumb, it seems to me, uses basic elements of this long reception history to struggle for a form in accordance with his criticisms of early twentieth-century music. The God-music standing at the crucial point of the beginning of the Return epitomizes this (see Figure 2). Here, the music is no longer a particular, identifiable, quotation, but a style reminiscent of tonality, reminiscent of traditional ‘sweet’ melodiousness and soft sound, and yet presents a recognizably different sound from everything so-far heard, bringing in the quiet sweetness of the accompanying water-tuned crystal glasses: totally recognizable sounds re-contextualized and re-phrased become resignified to form a music that—at least when the framing has been presented to the listener—can be recognized as a ‘God-music’. It occurs, as indicated in the score, after 13 seconds of silence; 13 may symbolize evil, but the 13 seconds of silence may thereby also symbolize the silencing of evil which is then followed by the God-music. There is in a sense nothing particularly ‘new’, yet in Black Angels everything seems to become new again as it is heard anew and fresh in a new context. Thus, for Crumb, redemption becomes not only a human mental and/or religious hope, but also a musical hope for creating a recognizable order in the huge, chaotic musical sound universe in which modern—conscious—man lives. Notes [1] For a recent survey and terminological discussion of such phenomena in musical composition, see Bruhn (2000). In a very direct way, Crumb has also written a musical response to Giotto’s Frescoes for the Arena Chapel of Padua: A Little Suite for Christmas, A.D. 1979 for piano (see Grace, 2005). [2] Adamenko discusses certain specific details from Black Angels as, for instance, its number symbolism (2007, pp. 194–200). [3] The 1970 edition gave the English translations quoted here. See also my discussion of Stockhausen’s statement in Petersen (2004, pp. 5–7). [4] See the discussion below, also referring to Crumb’s own description. [5] For the notion of ‘classical music’, see Hamilton (2007, p. 4); for a discussion of canon, see Weber (1999). [6] Adamenko’s book contains as its Appendix 1: An Interview with George Crumb (2007, pp. 265–271). [7] For the connection to Barto´k’s ‘night music’, see Adamenko (2007, pp. 79–81). [8] The CRI recording by the New York String Quartet, CRI SD 283. [9] See Edith Borroff’s emphasis of the ‘aesthetic visual quality’ of Crumb’s notation (Borroff, 1986, p. 241). [10] For an in-depth study of another example of the intermedial use of intertextuality, see Clu¨ver (2007, pp. 229–246). [11] Hungarian counting of numbers 1–7 (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304, p. 4); Japanese, Russian, Swahili, German shouting of the numeral 13, pp. 5–6); Japanese counting from 1 to 7 (Crumb, n.d., No. 66304, p. 8).

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[12] As famously represented in Dante’s Commedia, and see also the discussion of the notion of comedy in Dante’s disputed epistola 13, x 28. I thank Eduardo Henrik Aubert for drawing my attention to this passage. See also Hardison (1965, p. 291). [13] For the notion of ‘foreground’, see LaCocque & Ricoeur (1998, pp. xiii–xiv). See also Petersen, 2004, pp. 1–2).

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