Francis Humphreys
speaker
112 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jun
Francis Humphreys’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the thump, thump, thump is a march in the background, a slow march allied with the haunting limit.
Now, we know from contemporary times that you have lots of pop music that was, for example, created as a result or during or about the Vietnam War.
whether it was about that song 19, about the average age of the kids who died in the Vietnam War was 19, 19.
But I wasn't aware there was much in the way of what you would call chamber music.
But I want people to listen to this and then you can tell me all about it.
Now that sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie, but of course for many in Vietnam it was a horror story for them.
Yes, that was George Crumb's Black Angels.
Thirteen Images from the Dark Land was the subtitle for it.
He wrote it as part of the Vietnam protests in the 1970s.
And that particular movement was called the Knights of the Electric Insects, which kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
Indeed, when you give it its full title, you can throw yourself listening to that into the jungle and hear those insects all around, I suppose.
And then the screeching of the horror of what they underwent in that terrible war.
But the idea that this was played by the Kronos Quartet.
That's right.
A celebrated string quartet.
Yes, the Kronos Quartet are kind of...
They're almost entirely electric now, but they play to audiences of thousands, unlike most string quartets, if they're lucky, play to an audience of hundreds.
But Kronos became hugely popular.
But playing music from classical composers, what you might call classical contemporary composers, and they're still at it.
They're a bit like the Beatles.
Showing 81–100 of 112 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →