The University of Memphis Scheidt School of Music will kick off its 2009/10 season with the first in a four-part George Crumb Retrospective on September 10, 2009. Crumb is an American composer of modern and avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres and extended technique. His reputation as a composer of compellingly beautiful scores has made him one of the most frequently performed composers in today's musical world. In 2001, Crumb won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Star-Child. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Echoes of Time and the River in 1968. Crumb's music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles. The references range from music of the western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk music, to non-Western music. Many of Crumb's works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his meticulously notated scores. Crumb received his Bachelor's degree from Mason College of Music in Charleston, West Virginia in 1950. He studied under Boris Blacher at the Hochschule fur Musik, Berlin (1954-55) and received his Master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he studied under Eugene Weigel. He received his D.M.A. in 1959 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he studied with Ross Lee Finney. In 1965, after teaching at a college in Virginia and the University of Colorado, Crumb took a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for more than 30 years, becoming Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1983.