"George Crumb's imagining of worlds in sound runs deep as ever in Music for a Summer Evening ... Aside from the wider range of timbres, Music for a Summer Evening explores fresh paths of instrumental chant, different shapes of harmonic spaces, and new weaves of rhythm. 'The Advent' has a softly-reverberating middle section called 'Hymn for the Nativity of the Star-Child'. The composer said after the performance that the 'star-child' was not Christ or the celestial invader who takes over Planet Earth at the end of '2001', but the concept of a great hope. The music, so richly programmatic in its historically colored allusions to what we still think of as things of the spirit, captures that concept unerringly."

Leighton Kerner, Village Voice, 20 January 1975

[Makrokosmos III] "becomes ... the completion of what must be considered a single large work thirteen years (fatally) in the writing that began with the Five Pieces for Piano (1962). Heterogenous borrowings, superimpositions, sometimes rudimentary transcriptions that enter along the way, sounds, motives, phrases, passages, procedures, entire structures, fail to break this persisting unity, but rather point up the sense of constriction produced by the tightly circumscribed use of primary material, an assemblage of spooky effects and symbols chosen to evoke a particular mood, and a compositional method reduced essentially to their simple concatenation. The lack of musical substance, in turn, exposes the emptiness behind the assortment of symbolic-expressionistic titles and descriptions not to be taken seriously (numerological, psychological, mythical, astrological, religious, philosophical, cosmological) that are added throughout and together create the panoply of a cavaliere inesistente."

Robert Moevs, Musical Quarterly, April 1976