"Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century"
About this Quote
“Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century” is the kind of understated flex composers make when they want to dodge the tired “who are your contemporaries?” question and reroute the conversation toward lineage. Coming from George Crumb, it’s also a quiet declaration of aesthetic citizenship: his imagination lives less in the midcentury avant-garde’s argument about progress than in the fin-de-siecle’s obsession with color, atmosphere, and the supernatural hum under ordinary life.
Crumb is pointing, implicitly, to that early-1900s hinge moment when music stopped pretending it was only about melody and form and started acting like a sensory technology. Debussy’s liquid harmonies, Mahler’s huge emotional weather systems, the Symbolists’ perfume-and-shadow ethos, even the early modernists’ fascination with timbre as meaning: these are influences you feel in Crumb’s trademark sound-worlds, where amplification, extended techniques, and theatrical gestures aren’t “effects” so much as vocabulary. The subtext is that his radicalism isn’t the lab-coat kind. It’s romantic in the original sense: reaching for the uncanny, treating sound as a portal.
Context matters. Crumb came of age when serialism and its descendants often functioned as gatekeeping language. By aligning himself with “turn-of-the-century,” he’s choosing a different authority: not the newest system, but the richest atmosphere. It’s also a way of claiming continuity. His music can look experimental on the page, but he’s telling you to listen for ghosts, not equations.
Crumb is pointing, implicitly, to that early-1900s hinge moment when music stopped pretending it was only about melody and form and started acting like a sensory technology. Debussy’s liquid harmonies, Mahler’s huge emotional weather systems, the Symbolists’ perfume-and-shadow ethos, even the early modernists’ fascination with timbre as meaning: these are influences you feel in Crumb’s trademark sound-worlds, where amplification, extended techniques, and theatrical gestures aren’t “effects” so much as vocabulary. The subtext is that his radicalism isn’t the lab-coat kind. It’s romantic in the original sense: reaching for the uncanny, treating sound as a portal.
Context matters. Crumb came of age when serialism and its descendants often functioned as gatekeeping language. By aligning himself with “turn-of-the-century,” he’s choosing a different authority: not the newest system, but the richest atmosphere. It’s also a way of claiming continuity. His music can look experimental on the page, but he’s telling you to listen for ghosts, not equations.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Crumb, George. (2026, January 17). Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/most-of-my-influences-are-turn-of-the-century-70665/
Chicago Style
Crumb, George. "Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/most-of-my-influences-are-turn-of-the-century-70665/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/most-of-my-influences-are-turn-of-the-century-70665/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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