George Crumb Quotes on Music (20 Quotes)

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

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

It is easy to write unthinking music.

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.

I am optimistic about the future of music.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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