George Crumb Quotes

As a musician, I look for certain things that stimulate me. And what I look for is something that's an evolution on a particular genre that I never heard before.

I think no matter what kind of music you play, there will be moments when you feel like it's all been done before.

Tunings are wonderfully inspiring, and it helps you to write music. If I'm stuck, you know, I change the tuning.

Composers are very individual creatures.

I've actually had a melody on my guitar since the day I learned how to play it, back when I was 7. And for some reason I can't add lyrics to it.

I think there is great interest amongst the younger people in this music. I think that there is a lot of them that are looking for interesting situations and music that is stimulating.

I think it's always important to constantly keep the band on their toes and try new things that you hope will work. That's how 'Apologize' was born, and maybe down the line another little song will be born by that mentality. I've always really liked that song.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.

If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

I want to be the most melodic artist. 'His music ability, the way he write, his creativity is undeniable.' I want people to say that about me.

R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.

Many times in music, if you are given limitations, it expands the creativity.

You can put me in front of any kit, and it is a fun thing to have to adapt. It inspires me to try different things. I like that.

I finally realized that not only was I passionate about music, but I had a unique way of thinking of music.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

Trying to write new music is definitely daunting, but I try not to overthink it.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

Nothing goes full-circle with music.

There's a lot of older musicians who say your whole life making music, you're really trying to get back to that first couple of things you liked when you were a kid. And as much as you might like to think you're not, you really are.

I like that people are still trying to guess what kind of music I'm making.