George Crumb is the kind of modern classical composer whose music can startle the listener with unexpected elements — Tibetan prayer stones, a toy piano — and with unpredictable vocalizations. In Crumb’s pieces, singers don’t just sing — they shriek and click their tongues, they whisper and hiss.
So you’d think that Crumb — a Pulitzer prize winner for composition and a highly regarded musical innovator — would spend a whole lot of time banging on things, hooting and hollering with pals, letting loose like a madman to see what serendipity and luck might bring his way.
But noooooooo.
“I work alone and in complete silence,” says the amiable Crumb. “All composers develop a pretty vivid sense of inner hearing, so your imagination projects the sound. It’s not as vivid as notes on instruments, of course, but it’s an inner echo of that sound. It’s not so different from hearing the words in your head when you read a book, although it runs on a deeper level. The texture is wider in music.”
Crumb, who’ll be offering two nights of concerts Friday and Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, has a sealed room in his house where he has composed most of his music. It’s there where, armed with coffee and cigarettes, for years he’d lock himself in in the mornings and let the music dance silently around in his head.
“I have a desk right opposite my piano,” says Crumb.
But he has that arrangement mostly so that, once he thinks something up, he can check the sound if he absolutely needs to. In other words, if you peeked in, you’re much more likely to see him hunched over the desk than the piano.
“I just swivel around from the desk to the piano when I need to try and filter out what doesn’t belong,” Crumb says with a laugh. “But mostly, I just think a lot.”
Don’t think, though, that the desk is covered with sheet music, full of bars jammed with bubbly notes and asides to include a sudden burst of banjo or a stunning silence. Crumb composes by jotting and doodling in artists sketchbooks.
More Top Picks Best Hoop House Kits
“Sometimes, hours go by and I don’t write anything!” he says. “I do a lot of sketching, lots of re-writing. Really, re-writing is a main ingredient.
But — given the collaborative nature of so much of Crumb’s music — does the man ever have friends over to jam?
“Well,” he says with a chuckle, “that is a very traditional approach. I’m used to improvising a bit on the piano myself, exploring ideas that way. For composers, that’s a way of getting ideas started sometimes.
“And yes, when I was young, I did some group work. I guess that would be equivalent to `jamming.’ “
But the more abstract, the more complex, the more personal the work, the more to himself he keeps.
“If I’m finishing a score, I can work all day long,” says Crumb. “But composition itself is always restricted to morning hours. It would just wear me out after two or three hours. After that, it becomes more mechanical — it’s more about editing, reading, publishing.”
His family, he says, knows to leave him in his solitude. “When I’m composing, they don’t see me much. It’s not an easy thing, this kind of creative work; it’s a difficult thing intrinsically.”
But when he emerges from his self-imposed exile, Crumb turns off the orchestra in his head. “I really do leave it to my working hours,” he says. “I think I adapt pretty well to the real world.”
In the last few years, he’s been adjusting his relationship to the world in a variety of ways. Now 70 years old, he retired from teaching and began a new health regimen, including giving up his beloved coffee and cigarettes.
“Maybe that’s my problem now,” Crumb says with a laugh. “Coffee and cigarettes went so well together. My little room was sometimes like an opium den, clouds of smoke were always wafting.”
He’s composing less, he admits. But maybe it has less to do with giving up his previously inspirational vices than with the fact that, since retirement, Crumb has been in high demand for concerts in the U.S. and Europe.
“I’ve really got to slow down a little,” he admits.
But what does he do for relaxation?
“Well, I have a score collection,” says Crumb. “And I read scores like a book. I love all that music, I hear a lot of it in my mind. I think composers are this way. I think we store up an immense amount of music and make connections between our own writing and all that other music.
“To be frank, I don’t go with recordings so much anymore — although I do check out my own new CDs when they first come out, to see how close they got to the ideal sound I had in mind.”
Crumb will perform (with an ensemble) at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Call 312- 397-4010 for more information.