Time & Perspective Quote by George Crumb

A composer as meticulous and otherworldly as George Crumb doesn’t toss off a line like this as mere complaint; it’s a quiet alarm. “This kind of music” is doing heavy lifting: not just contemporary classical, but the whole ecosystem of patient listening, public subsidy, adventurous programming, and institutions willing to risk confusing their donors. Crumb’s phrasing is tellingly unsentimental. He doesn’t say audiences are “wrong,” or that the music is “misunderstood.” He says it’s “not a happy time” - a moral weather report, not a tantrum.

The subtext is about power, not taste. New music in the U.S. has often survived on universities, foundations, and a small circuit of ensembles. When budgets tighten, when cultural life gets reorganized around metrics and marketability, the first thing to become “optional” is art that can’t easily be summarized, branded, or made into an experience. Crumb’s own work - haunting timbres, ritualistic theater, amplified whispers - asks for conditions modern life actively disrupts: silence, attention, and a little humility.

There’s also an implied contrast with earlier moments when American institutions, flush with postwar confidence, treated avant-garde culture as a sign of national sophistication. By Crumb’s later years, that prestige had thinned, replaced by a consumer model: sell the familiar, rent the experimental for special occasions. The line reads like grief, but also like a defense of values: some music exists to slow the culture down, and the culture increasingly resents being slowed.