George Crumb's Black Angels and the Vietnam War

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze how Crumb's Black Angels relates to the Vietnam War. I trace a history of this association through reviews of the piece's performances and shows that reviewers began connecting it with Vietnam after the American withdrawal and the end of the war in 1975. Through a comparison with Tim O’Brien's The Things They Carried ([1990] 1998. New York: Broadway Books), the analysis shows that listeners thematically connect aspects of Black Angels with the Vietnam War. Themes of blurriness, and unreliable narrator, trauma, and morality connect the texts. Using Lochhead's concept of musical things, and O’Brien's notions of happening-truth vs. story-truth, the analysis relates issues of musical structure to the novel to show how the piece conveys presence related to the Vietnam War.