Ancient Voices of Children: I, “El niño busca su voz” (1970) – George Crumb (b. 1929)
The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.
I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger.
— Federico García Lorca, trans. W.S. Merwin
George Crumb composed the cycle Ancient Voices of Children at Tanglewood over the course of one summer. Throughout the cycle, he used the texts of Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet and active anti-Fascist who was executed during the Spanish Civil War. In Ancient Voices, Crumb seeks to evoke Lorca’s verbal imagery, which he describes as “powerful, yet strangely haunting.” As such, the text and music are intricately tied together.
Scored for soprano, boy soprano, electric piano, harp, and percussion, “El niño busca su voz” tells the story of a young boy who loses his voice to the king of the crickets (see poem). Interestingly enough, the text does not appear until the last minute or so of the piece, and even then one would be hard-pressed to aurally identify the point at which the female soprano switches from sounds to words. She enters with a series of wordless vowels and hums, enhanced by elements of extended vocal technique like flutter-tongue and tongue clicks. Though we would usually call this kind of sound “gibberish,” it is far from being meaningless.
The soprano does not speak or sing text in the beginning, but she provides us with a wordless backdrop that parallels the progression of Lorca’s poem. In the first stanza, Lorca invokes at least two sounds – crickets chirping and dripping water. If we listen carefully, we can hear the soprano recreating those sounds. We, the silent listeners, immerse ourselves in Crumb’s representation of Lorca’s sound world, and eventually, the abstract noises blend into concrete words, signaling the transition from the first to the second stanza of Lorca’s poem, in which there is a lucid, linguistic thought process. Even though the words may be unclear when the soprano begins saying them, they gradually come into focus. Ironically, when the voice is clearest, its source is invisible - the boy soprano is scored off-stage. As his disembodied voice replaces the female soprano, all background noises cease, leaving us with an eerie awareness of the silence behind the boy’s words.
