Victoria Adamenko: Could you tell me, how did you come to circular notation? Were you influenced by the notation used by Ross Lee Finney— your teacher—in his Spherical Madrigals?

George Crumb: I did not know this piece. I knew Stockhausen's Refrain before I did any of my own circular works, but his work was not a direct influence on me. I use a different principle when drawing my scores. My pieces of circular notation are aleatoric just in a sense that they erase the vertical alignment of the score. My first circular notation was a piece called Night Music I, in 1963. It was also my first setting of a [Federico García] Lorca poem. The poem set with circular notation was called “The Moon Is Rising.” The two circles in the score were supposed to represent the moon, and so it was suggested by the poem. Another composition in which I used circular notation was The Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death, of 1968. That has a title, Casida of the Dark Doves, which refers to the sun and the moon. One of the circles is titled “The Sun.” So the circular notation here was suggested by the sun.

VA: So you refer here to heavenly bodies. Is it therefore connected to the concept of the music of the spheres?

GC: It is later, in the Star-Child, that the circles are connected to the medieval concept of the music of the spheres, as well as in Makrokosmos. There is another work called Night of the Four Moons, where I used “Musica Humana” and “Musica Mundana.” It has Lorca's text. At the end of the work I have the two musics going at the same time. The “Musica Mundana” is quasi-pentatonic: it has really four notes, only white notes. “Musica Humana” is in F# major. I was thinking very much about the opposition of those two. The “Humana” is kind of Ragtime—the music of the people—and the “Mundana” is in the strings, just open fifths throughout the whole piece, a sort of a metaphysical kind of music, a representation of nature. I was thinking of the dichotomy of a similar kind that Ives uses in his Central Park in the Dark: the music of nature opposed to the popular music of the time.