One of the composer’s sketch pages reveals that he intended to write “an all-inclusive technical work for piano ( all conceivable techniques).” The most celebrated precursor of this kind of work is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, comprised as it is of two volumes, each with twenty-four preludes and fugues, one in each major and minor key. Indeed, very few post 1950 piano compositions continue to be so widely performed and recorded, and from the present vantage point, it seems increasingly certain that these pieces have earned a secureĭespite the many innovative features of this composition, the general conception of the two volumes of Makrokosmos belongs to the long and venerable tradition of composing pieces that demonstrate the technical and musical resources of an instrument. The twenty-four “fantasypieces” of Makrokosmos remain the most comprehensive and influential exploration of the new technical resources of the piano from the latter twentieth century. Volume I of Makrokosmos followed in 1972 and Volume II in 1973. ![]() Crumb had received the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music (before turning 40), and he produced a series of masterpieces in rapid succession: Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), Night of the Four Moons (1969), Ancient Voices of Children and Black Angels (1970), and Vox Balaenae (1971). George Crumb’s Makrokosmos pieces for amplified piano were created during an especially fertile period of his compositional career.
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