A Haunted Landscape is not programmatic in any sense. The title reflects my feeling that certain places on the planet Earth are imbued with an aura of mystery. ... Places can inspire feelings of reverence or brooding menace (like the deserted battlefields of ancient wars). Sometimes one feels an idyllic sense of time suspended. The contemplation of a landscape can induce complex psychological states and perhaps music is an ideal medium for delineating the tiny, subtle nuances of emotion and sensibility, which hover between the subliminal and the unconscious.

A Haunted Landscape is cast in a single, continuous movement. A unifying factor is provided by a very low B-flat, sustained throughout by two solo contrabassists. I had imagined that this low B-flat (60 cycles — the frequency of alternating current) was an immutable law of nature and represented a kind of “cosmic drone.” But, alas, science defeats art — a chemist friend informed me that alternating current is arbitrarily determined by man, and that B-flat is not even international, much less intergalactic!

— From a program note by George Crumb

Syrl Silberman of WGBH-TV in Boston had worked on a film about [Carl Ruggles] and had become friendly with the [94-year-old] man. We drove up to the rest home where Mr. Ruggles, an old — and, some said, senile — man was living. … Syrl and I just walked into his room and said “Hello,” set up a tape recorder, put some light earphones on his old and shriveled head, cranked the volume up as high as possible, and started to play an air-check of the [Boston Symphony Orchestra's recent] performance of Sun-Treader.

The first timpani stroke of the work hit the old man like a hammer. Suddenly, he was sitting bolt upright, his eyes wild and open, like an eagle, his breath coming in fast, hoarse grunts and growls and guttered noise. “Fine. Great. Damn, damn fine work!” He kept it up right through the whole piece. Sometimes singing or moaning along with the music until the end. He turned toward me, sitting at his bedside, and grabbed my hand in his, holding it in a viselike grip and just stared at me, saying nothing. We remained so awhile, then he settled back and began to talk, mostly about his friend Ives (“Charlie”), about Varèse, [artist] Thomas Hart Benton. And music, music, music:

“I don’t think much about that fellow Brahms. … Debussy — a genius — nothing wrong with him that a few weeks in the open air wouldn’t cure. … Oh, there are some fine works all right: the St. Matthew Passion, Missa solemnis, The Ring, Tristan, and Sun-Treader. When I wrote Sun-Treader, I knew it was great. I knew it!”

— Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas on his meeting with Carl Ruggles in 1970

I had always admired Mr. [James] Agee’s writing, and this prose-poem particularly struck me because the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home. I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both 5. You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.

— Samuel Barber, interviewed by James Fasset on June 19, 1949

Sung Text

by James Agee

© 1949 by G. Schirmer, Inc.

[We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.]

. . . It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping; belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.

Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes ...

Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient

faces.

The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. ... They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, ... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little l am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Dr. [Fritz] Reiner selected the portions of the opera that he wanted to play and also set the sequence of the excerpts. He expressed his ideas as to instrumentation, wishing to make generous use of saxophones and banjo and to dispense with Gershwin’s pet instrument, the piano.

I proceeded not only to follow Dr. Reiner’s ideas faithfully, but also to remain completely loyal to George’s harmonic and orchestral intentions. In other words, although carrying out Dr. Reiner’s approach, I have been careful to do what I knew — after many years of association with Gershwin — Gershwin would like as a symphonic version of his music.

— Robert Russell Bennett, in the liner notes for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s 1945 recording of the work