War & Peace Quote by George Crumb

Crumb’s phrasing is deliberately calm for a revolution that detonated music’s old power structures. “Advent” gives electronically synthesized sound the aura of a historical force, not a fad; it arrives like electricity or cinema, something you adapt to or get left behind by. “After World War II” is doing quiet but heavy lifting. It links the studio and the oscillator to the same postwar world that produced the Cold War, NASA, and mass media: a society reorganized around technology, surveillance, and speed. In that context, “synthesized” isn’t just a timbral novelty. It’s a new relationship between humans, machines, and authorship.

The subtext is a composer’s double awareness: excitement and a hint of resignation. “Unquestionably” shuts down the purist complaint that “real” music is acoustic, embodied, artisanal. Crumb isn’t arguing whether electronic sound is tasteful; he’s declaring it historically decisive. “Enormous influence on music in general” is also strategically broad, a way to name electronic music’s victory without picking a side between the lab and the pop chart. The influence isn’t confined to avant-garde studios; it bleeds into how every genre thinks about sound as something you can design, layer, sample, and distribute.

Coming from Crumb, a figure known for theatrical color and extended instrumental techniques, the line reads as self-positioning. Even when he writes for “traditional” instruments, he’s composing in a post-synthesis world where timbre is no longer incidental. The quote stakes out a reality: after WWII, the basic unit of musical imagination shifted from notes to sound itself.