As a composer, George Crumb has effectively broken the notion of tradition-bound categories in music. From his deep love and respect of Mozart in his childhood to the popular music, jazz, folk songs, and sounds of Asian, African, and South American music that he has heard throughout his 78 years, Crumb has shown that a piece on a Thelonious Monk tune can be as elegant harmonically as any Romantic Age composition.

Selections from two of his most significant compositions – Makrokosmos and Ancient Voices of Children – will be among the featured works at the season’s closing concert of the New Music at the Rose series, which is sponsored by the Utah Symphony.

The concert will be presented March 13, at 8 p.m. in the Jeanne-Wagner Theater of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center and will be repeated in Provo the following day at 7:30 p.m. in the Madsen Recital Hall (BYU).

Also featured will be the chamber orchestra version premiere of September Elegy, a “funereal” song written originally for violin and piano by David Crumb, the elder’s son, in 2001, just days after the terrorist attacks.

The younger Crumb, who has established himself as a composer, cellist, and music faculty member of the University of Oregon in Eugene, will be at both performances, keeping the spirit of the new music series where audience members can interact directly with the composer and the performers, according to Jeff Bram, vice president of artistic operations for the symphony.

The Crumb family occupies a significant place in American music. The elder composer has won many awards, including a 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Echoes of Time and The River and a 2001 Grammy for Star-Child, the best contemporary composition of that year. The son is following his father’s step in earning his own substantial list of commissions, awards, and performances, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ancient Voices of Children, a sort of mini-opera written in 1970 that certainly is more dramatic in effect than a cantata yet more compact than an opera, will feature mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger and boy soprano Connor McCoy of the Madeleine Choir School. It is based on the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, the great 20th Century Spanish writer.

The work, in which the mezzo-soprano sings most of her lines into an amplified piano, reflects the daring, experimental nature of Crumb’s compositional style. In a 2002 interview with NewMusicBox’s Frank Oteri, Crumb said his initial inspiration for the work came during his student days when a friend had composed a musical setting of an English translation of a Lorca poem.

“And it was beautiful,” Crumb recalls. “And I got a bilingual edition then and got more and more into the poetry, but decided, as dangerous as it was, that it should be in Spanish. Because I have no real facility with Spanish, I read a little but and, when I say dangerous, it is a leap to set another language that’s not absolutely familiar to you.”

Performers include a chamber orchestra led by Keith Lockhart, Utah Symphony’s music director, which also will play in September Elegy, featuring violinist Gerald Elias, one of the symphony concertmasters, and keyboardist Jason Hardink.

Eight of the 24 selections from Makrokosmos, constituting the first volume of the three which comprise the work, will be performed by Hardink on amplified piano. Listeners will easily recognize the remarkable range of effects – incorporating everything from paper clips and metal chains to glass tumblers and the soloist’s spontaneous vocalizations – that transform the piano from a mere instrument to a “veritable orchestra of timbral effects,” Bram explains.

As for September Elegy, the younger Crumb says the work reflects the sadness and uncertainty he personally felt in trying to make sense of the violence and horror of those late summer days in 2001. Listeners will note the transcendental musical fragments of a Bach chorale during its performance.

Bram says the response for the new music series has been promising with “new faces” in the audience who normally do not subscribe to other symphony series.

Next year, the series, which will eventually feature four concerts each season, will be moved to Westminster College and will be hosted by Ardean Watts. “It will be intimate, a wonderful opportunity for audience members to mingle directly with composers and performers and create their own first-hand accounts of today’s new music,” Bram says.