A Haunted Landscape

Composed by: Crumb
Composed: 1984
Duration: about 20 minutes

Orchestration: 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (almglocken, bass drums, Cambodian angklungs, Caribbean steel drum, chimes, Chinese temple gongs, claves, crotales, cuíca, flexatone, glass wind chimes, glockenspiel, güiro, hammered dulcimer, kabuki blocks, maracas, marimba, rute, sand blocks, sleigh bells, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tambourine, tam-tams, temple blocks, tom-toms, vibraphone, xylophone), 2 harps, piano, and strings

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