"Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years"
About this Quote
A composer admitting that writing gets harder with age punctures the tidy myth of mastery-as-ease. George Crumb isn’t talking about stiff fingers or fading inspiration so much as the cruel arithmetic of taste: the longer you work, the sharper your ear becomes, and the less willing you are to accept your own shortcuts. Early career confidence can be a useful blur; late career craft is a high-resolution camera that catches every compromise.
Crumb’s remark also carries the quiet pressure of a legacy. By the time you’re “George Crumb,” you’re no longer writing into a void. You’re writing next to your own catalog, your own signatures, your own innovations. The page is crowded with earlier selves. The difficulty isn’t only producing notes; it’s producing necessity. What can be added that doesn’t feel like repetition, self-parody, or the tasteful recycling critics politely call “late style”?
Context matters: Crumb came to define a distinctive sonic world - ritualistic textures, extended techniques, theatrical notation, a kind of haunted lyricism - during a period when American composition was polarized between academic systems and populist reaction. If your art depends on specificity and atmosphere rather than a formula, aging can raise the stakes. The more recognizable the voice, the riskier each new sentence becomes.
The line lands because it’s unsentimental. It refuses the feel-good arc of “experience makes it easier” and replaces it with a more honest one: experience makes you harder to please. That’s not decline; it’s accountability.
Crumb’s remark also carries the quiet pressure of a legacy. By the time you’re “George Crumb,” you’re no longer writing into a void. You’re writing next to your own catalog, your own signatures, your own innovations. The page is crowded with earlier selves. The difficulty isn’t only producing notes; it’s producing necessity. What can be added that doesn’t feel like repetition, self-parody, or the tasteful recycling critics politely call “late style”?
Context matters: Crumb came to define a distinctive sonic world - ritualistic textures, extended techniques, theatrical notation, a kind of haunted lyricism - during a period when American composition was polarized between academic systems and populist reaction. If your art depends on specificity and atmosphere rather than a formula, aging can raise the stakes. The more recognizable the voice, the riskier each new sentence becomes.
The line lands because it’s unsentimental. It refuses the feel-good arc of “experience makes it easier” and replaces it with a more honest one: experience makes you harder to please. That’s not decline; it’s accountability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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