George Crumb

And I think that he was it seems like he was kind of listening to like maybe a lot of Steve Reich and things that informed like the post rock stuff.

Were you kind of maybe listening to like George Crumb?

Knife Clay, one of the records that you showed a copy of it when we first got here.

On the original sticker, I don't know if they do it anymore, but Kill Rocks would have a sticker that would kind of talk about the record.

We mentioned Black Angels, which is a George Crumb.

Oh, yeah,

yeah.

And actually, Angela saw my bandmate in Shushu.

And I mentioned to Mike, this classical guy that he claims that he likes.

What was his name again? George Crumb.

Okay.

But so, for some of these less immediately accessible things, do you know, like, can you recommend, like, a way in to people? Like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? Gateway? The gateway.

And I think the reason he brought that up was because I didn't explicitly say, you know, Messiaen heard the Ives piece and imitated it.

And then George Crumb heard the Messiaen piece and imitated it.

So they were all working with the same you know, consciously developing these things off of each other.

But I don't think that that matters so much because I do think that it could spontaneously occur to three different people to do the same thing.

Singing bowls, uh, temple g- gongs, as you've been playing today.

And George Crumb is a great composer who used these, oh, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago.

And someone would sustain temple bowls through an entire piece while violins and pianos would play above them.

And that's where I first collected my instruments.

I mean, I remember one of the first things she said to me, you know, when we invited her for this was, oh, I can't wait to bring my crumb mallets.

And I thought that was so cool because George Crumb, as some of his pieces require, he has specific kind of drum mallets that you can use to hit the strings inside the piano to evoke a completely different type of atmosphere and sound world.

I think she was immediately connecting to the way shamisen is in terms of it's one instrument that can actually do many different things.

Like piano, we tend to think of you hit the keys and then we know what that sounds like.

And it helps if there's a dialogue because you really can learn a lot from your performers.

I think George Crumb was telling me this,

you know, and he

got he was a walking example of that.

of.

Yeah, the same to be said for the George Crumb piece, ¿Por qué nací entre espejos?

Huh.

Why was I born between mirrors?