George Crumb Quotations

Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.

Perhaps many of the perplexing problems of the new music could be put into a new light if we were to reintroduce the ancient idea of music being a reflection of nature.

In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.

Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system.

I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.

Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.

I am optimistic about the future of music.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

As interesting as that music can occasionally be, I don't think it really replaces the other.

I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.

Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

This is not a happy time for this kind of music in this country.

Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years.

If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.

I think we're in a very low point of music right now.

Nonetheless, I sense that it will be the task of the future to somehow synthesize the sheer diversity of our present resources into a more organic and well-ordered procedure.

I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.

I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish.

I pick up the New York Times or Time and it's talking about the latest rock group, which I'm sure is exciting to some people, but it neglects a huge area of music.

Numerous recordings of non-Western music are readily available, and live performances by touring groups can be heard even in our smaller cities.

My younger son is a rock archivist practically; I'm sure things have filtered out of that - it's in the air in this house.

An interesting practice in music since the atonal period of the Viennese composers has been the widespread use of a few tiny pitch cells.

I sometimes wonder, too, if people don't have kind of a window of time when they do their best work. And anything after that is like a gift.

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.

It is easy to write unthinking music.

Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century.

I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul

Music might be defined as a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse