George Crumb

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It is easy to write unthinking music.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”