48 Quotes by George Crumb

This awareness of music in its largest sense - as a world-wide phenomenon - will inevitably have enormous consequences for the music of the future.

Although we must be impressed by the enormous accruement of new elements of vocabulary in the areas of pitch, rhythm, timbre, and so forth, I sense at the same time the loss of a majestic unifying principle in much of our recent music.

There is, to be sure, a sense of adventure and challenge in articulating our conceptions, despite the fact that we can take so little for granted; and perhaps we tend to underestimate the struggle-element in the case of the earlier composers.

Apart from these broader cultural influences which contribute to the shaping of our contemporary musical psyche, we also have to take into account the rather bewildering legacy of the earlier twentieth-century composers in the matter of compositional technique and procedure.

In general, I feel that the more rationalistic approaches to pitch-organization, including specifically serial technique, have given way, largely, to a more intuitive approach.

In any case, the task of finding fresh approaches to opera and to choral music will be inherited by the future.

But I don't think it's a good thing to create less than good music in a world that's full of a lot of indifferent music.

An American or European composer, for example, now has access to the music of various Asian, African, and South American cultures.

The rhythms of nature - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.