George Crumb
George Crumb
George Crumbis an American composer of avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation, and extended instrumental and vocal techniques. Examples include seagull effect for the cello, metallic vibrato for the piano, and using a mallet to play the strings of a contrabass, among numerous others. He is not an electronic music composer; however, many works call for amplification of instruments, such as Black Angelsor Ancient Voices of Children. Crumb defines music as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth24 October 1929
CityCharleston, WV
CountryUnited States of America
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 interesting practice in music since the atonal period of the Viennese composers has been the widespread use of a few tiny pitch cells.
Numerous recordings of non-Western music are readily available, and live performances by touring groups can be heard even in our smaller cities.
In any case, the task of finding fresh approaches to opera and to choral music will be inherited by the future.
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.
This awareness of music in its largest sense - as a world-wide phenomenon - will inevitably have enormous consequences for the music of the future.
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.
Music might be defined as a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse
It is easy to write unthinking music.
Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century.
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.
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.
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.