"George Crumb" is an American composer of avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation, and extended technique/extended instrumental and vocal techniques. Examples include seagull effect for the cello (e.g. Vox Balaenae), metallic vibrato for the piano (e.g. Five Pieces for Piano), and using a mallet to play the strings of a contrabass (e.g. Madrigals, Book I), among numerous others. He is not an electronic music composer; however, many works call for amplification of instruments, such as Black Angels (Crumb)/Black Angels (string quartet) or Ancient Voices of Children (mixed ensemble). Crumb's music contains an intense humanism, which is reflected in his personal definition of music: "a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse."

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.