MusicIC, Iowa City’s premiere chamber music festival exploring the connections between music and literature, presents THE BLACK ANGEL: Music, Myth, and Memory, a three-day festival examining how composers across centuries have engaged with themes of mortality, symbolism, and the unseen, while also drawing inspiration from Iowa City’s own Black Angel legend.
The first event of the festival will be a hybrid evening of music and literature that will feature some of the festival’s musicians and other Iowa City writers performing and improvising on selections from program, interspersed with some written pieces related to the themes in the music.
That’s where you come in! There are two ways to take part as a writer. The first is to sign up for a generative writing workshop hosted by Porchlight Literary Center. This session, 7-8:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 9, will feature Porchlight’s Jenny Colville and MusicIC Artistic Director Tricia Park discussing the core pieces of music in this year’s festival — Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and George Crumb’s Black Angels, “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land,” (1971) — and sharing writing prompts related to those works.
The second is to familiarize yourself with the music, respond to one of the prompts below, and submit your work. All of the submitted pieces will considered for the special event on April 30 that will kick off the festival. This event, to be held at 7:30 that evening at the Black Angel Restaurant in Iowa City, will feature a blend of musical and spoken word performance, giving the audience a chance to hear the music and writing inspired by it.
Crumb’s Black Angels, “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land,” (1971), is a landmark work for amplified string quartet that marks the 55th anniversary of its publication in 2026. Crumb has called his seminal work “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.” The piece incorporates poetic epigraphs, symbolic numerology, and images of darkness and transformation.
Crumb’s score also directly quotes Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, forging a powerful musical and philosophical link between Romantic-era meditations on death and a 20th-century response shaped by war and rupture.
WRITING PROMPTS
String Quartet No. 14 (Schubert) – Wikipedia
(Poem by Matthias Claudius)
The Maiden:
Pass me by! Oh, pass me by!
Go, fierce man of bones!
I am still young! Go, dear,
And do not touch me.
And do not touch me.
Death:
Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!
I am a friend, and come not to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,
Softly shall you sleep in my arms!
1. Death and the Maiden: Character Studies
Part 1: Expand on the idea of Death, not as an ending, but as a speaker who arrives calmly, offering something seductive: rest, clarity, or release. What does the Maiden resist, and why?
Part 2: Write a third stanza or section, which contains the reply that the Maiden reply never gets to give. Is she fearful? Bargaining? Curious? Defiant? Something stranger?
2. Lucky Number 13: Form and structure
(Black Angels (Crumb) – Wikipedia: you can read here about how the numerology and specifically the number 13 figures prominently in BAs.)
Write a piece structured around the number thirteen: thirteen lines, memories, footsteps, bells, etc. This can be prose or poetry (which I guess is true for all of the prompts!)
3. The Black Angel: Place, Object, Legend/Folklore
Write from the perspective of Iowa City’s Black Angel statue that has observed generations of grief, superstition, trespass, haunting.
What does it remember that humans have forgotten?
What happens when local legend clashes with historical truth?
4. Phantasmagoria
Listen to Crumb’s “Black Angels” with your eyes closed. Imagine you are in a darkened theater and a movie or play is about to begin. What action or sequence of images appear on the screen or stage? Follow these images or actors. Create a dream sequence or a scene that includes at least one fantastical element.
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The ideal submission is a short poem, essay, flash fiction, hybrid work or other response that can be read in 3-5 minutes.
Submit your piece to info@iowacityofliterature.org by April 20. Be sure to include your contact information, including e-mail address and phone number. Some submissions will be selected and their authors invited to participate in the April 30 event.
