Artist Detail

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Paul Crabtree

Composer - Musician

About the artist: Paul Crabtree's innovative music intertwines the ephemeral and the eternal, bringing together the worlds of popular culture and highbrow art.

Before graduating from the Music Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany, he was the keyboard player in a catastrophically unsuccessful garage band called Goats' Opera. Crabtree grew up with an equal interest in rock culture and classical music, but was disappointed that his academic training never acknowledged the world of rock and pop, and transplanted to California in his early 20s.

Exposure to the musically permissive culture in the Bay Area led him to integrate the various strands of his personal history, to embrace and intermingle ideas as diverse as Latin poetry and 1960s girl groups. Crabtree also uses objets trouves both alone and alongside standard texts.

His various works include:

Choral Music:
Mixed Voices -
I am the Rose of Sharon
Three Rose Madrigals
Five Bird Songs (Folk Song Arrangements)
I, The Centurion (Victorian Love Lyrics) Yelton Rhodes Music
Five Romantic Miniatures (from The Simpsons)
Night (Percival)
Annunciata (Stuart-Wortley/Ave Maria)
Sunset on Calvary (Middle English)
When Are We Leaving? (sonnet #60/Murdoch)
The Rape of Proserpina (Ovid/Hughes)
Sorrows End (sonnet #30)
ReCuperario (sonnet #27)

Women's Voices -
Spinning Dance
Lapsellisia Lauseita (Children's Philosophy)
Green Summer (Three Monochromes)

Men's Voices -
Three Letters to My Father
Pax et Bonum (sonnet #81)

Vocal Music:
Three Sonnets on Old American Hymn Tunes
(Male Voice and Pipe Organ)

Instrumental Music:
Nocturne for Flash Gordon
(Trio for Viola, Clarinet and Piano)

For more information visit Paul's website at:
www.paulcrabtree.net