Time & Perspective Quote by George Crumb

Crumb’s sentence is the sound of a composer staring at the late-20th-century buffet table and feeling both dazzled and slightly sick. “Nonetheless” does a lot of work: it concedes that the present is a glorious mess - extended techniques, new technologies, global musics circulating on tape and radio, the post-serial hangover, the whole fractured condition of “anything goes” modernism - then pivots toward obligation. Not desire, not preference: “the task of the future.” He frames aesthetic direction as a civic job.

The key phrase is “sheer diversity of our present resources.” Crumb isn’t just talking about styles; he’s talking about the enlarged toolbox of sound itself: timbre as structure, noise as color, the piano as percussion battery, notation stretched into theater. “Resources” also smuggles in an anxiety about abundance: when everything is available, selection becomes the real art, and chaos starts to masquerade as freedom.

Then comes the tell: “somehow synthesize.” The word admits uncertainty; there’s no manifesto here, no single system to replace the old ones. Crumb wants a coherence that isn’t doctrinaire. That’s why he reaches for “organic,” a Romantic term with modernist ambition baked in - suggesting growth, internal logic, and necessity rather than collage or gimmick. “Well-ordered procedure” sounds almost scientific, but paired with “organic” it signals a balancing act: discipline without sterility, structure without dogma.

In context, it’s a quiet rebuttal to both academic rigidity and postmodern shrug. Crumb is betting that the future won’t be won by novelty, but by integration: making the era’s pluralism feel inevitable, not merely eclectic.