George Crumb

George Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1929, the son of two professional musicians, and he kept a soft Appalachian courtliness all his life. He spent his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania, and from that quiet base wrote some of the most arresting-sounding music of the late twentieth century.

Crumb treated instruments as sources of pure sound. His players might bow a cymbal, chant, whisper, or reach inside a piano to pluck its strings, and his handwritten scores are works of visual art, with staves sometimes drawn in circles and spirals. Black Angels, for amplified string quartet, was written in the shadow of the Vietnam War and asks the players to bow water-tuned crystal glasses.

Start with Black Angels. It is eerie, theatrical, and unlike anything else, which makes it the clearest door into his world.