Water as beats? Marimba and steel drums? 100 instruments will sound off in an innovative percussion work.

One musician stands on stage pouring water from a pitcher into an ordinary, medium-sized gray metal bucket.

“My only complaint is you really need more water. It should fill up three beats,” says James Freeman.

Another player takes a double-bass bow to the side of a tam-tam, trying various approaches until she gets just the right kind of creepy, ringing harmonic.

Bar by bar, Kronos-Kryptos, an unusual piece for a hundred or so instruments, comes together.

“In the past, George would have been here in the first row giving instructions,” says Freeman wistfully.

He’s talking about George Crumb, the composer who turned out one innovative work after another for decades from his modest home in Media, Pa. Freeman is the conductor who lived just a few miles from the composer, giving premieres and performances of many of those works.

Now, with Crumb’s death in February at age 92, Freeman’s role has become more essential than ever. He is a living link to Crumb, an authoritative source on how to interpret the composer’s often mysterious, unfailingly spiritual works in which a high degree of detail adds up to a disarming simplicity.

Freeman exercises his artistic authority once again on Oct. 23 when he leads the area premiere of Kronos-Kryptos: Four Tableaux for Percussion Quintet at Swarthmore College’s Lang Concert Hall. He believes this revised version of the piece was Crumb’s last completed work, and it will be presented alongside the second-to-last: Metamorphoses II for solo piano, performed by the pianist for whom it was written, Marcantonio Barone.

“For us, being in this space and beginning the rehearsals for this piece is at once wonderful and at the same time very sad,” said Freeman.

Freeman has performed an estimated 15 to 20 Crumb scores, mostly when he was chief of Philadelphia’s Orchestra 2001. He has since moved on and founded Chamber Orchestra First Editions, under whose banner the free Crumb concert is being presented.

Lang Concert Hall’s stage will be filled with percussion instruments for Kronos-Kryptos, but the result is anything but a cacophony. Crumb gathers a long list of instruments to achieve specific colors, textures, atmospheres and feelings: Marimba, Caribbean steel drum, Japanese temple bells, suspended metal plates, tambourine, Tibetan prayer stones and on and on.

“This is certainly among his most ambitious pieces for percussion. There are five percussionists who play an enormous range of instruments,” says Freeman.

And to get the very sound Crumb was looking for, the composer left very specific instructions.

“If you look at the scores to his music, all the published scores are in his hand, in his absolute hand. He never did computer scores, unlike most other composers today. And they are all beautiful,” says Freeman. “Some of them are in museums, actually, they’re so beautiful. And so intricate. George’s music was always modeled off a sort of perfection. Musicians are often comparing him, interestingly, to Mozart. Because there is perfection about Mozart and perfection about Crumb that is extraordinary.”

In the written score, one movement carries the mood-setter: Gently undulating (hauntingly, like a spectral apparition). To Crumb’s ear, just one kind of wind chime will not do. The piece uses ones made of glass, metal or bamboo.

It’s all part of a vision that shook the music world.

“His influence has been enormous, partly, I think, because his music is not only incredibly individualistic to George, it also is beautiful. When George’s music first started being heard, especially with Ancient Voices of Children [1970], people commented on the fact that parts were very noisy, parts were soft, but it was always beautiful and beautifully imagined.”

Maybe not always beautiful. A terrifying section from his Black Angels was put to memorable use in the soundtrack to The Exorcist. But his pursuit of a new aesthetic did have a certain liberating effect.

“I think the idea — I’m talking 1970s now — that composers didn’t have to write 12-tone music if they didn’t want to — George’s music is not 12-tone music, it’s out of his own head — gave license to many, many younger composers to say, ‘I can do what I want, too.’ And that led to a whole range of new ideas for composers to experiment with,” said Freeman.

Crumb’s outlook that music was all around us if we listened in the right way — in water pitchers as well as instruments you’d find in any orchestra — lasted his entire life. At one point in Kronos-Kryptos, percussionists are asked to “play” their parts in pantomime for a while before actually touching their instruments and producing any sound.

Elsewhere they chant or shout. In a section subtitled “Forest Murmurs,” players emulate the voices of animals.

hoo-hoo (an owl)

zee-oo (cicada)

deek-da (a frog)

We are a long way from Wagner’s famous forest murmurs. Yet inspiration springs from a similar place for both composers. Wagner was at the Rhine River, and Crumb in this last movement of Kronos-Kryptos is recalling his Appalachian upbringing. The title character in Wagner’s opera Siegfried encounters his forest murmurs in the scene where he is confronting the dragon. Crumb at the end of Kronos-Kryptos is coming face to face with mortality. The movement, “Appalachian Echoes,” was revised in 2020, a few months after the death of his daughter, actress and singer Ann Crumb, and it is dedicated to her.

“I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger, a-traveling through this world of woe,” a percussionist whispers in the piece. “I’m just a-going over home.”

In rehearsal, Freeman corrects the pronunciation, asking for the words to be uttered in the same slight West Virginia drawl Crumb retained throughout his life.

As Freeman demonstrates — I’m just uh poor wayfaring strange-uh… — his voice sounds eerily like that of the famous composer. And for a moment, lines blur, and the distance between two men seems to disappear.

Kronos-Kryptos — with percussionists William Kerrigan, Phillip O’Banion, David Nelson, Angela Zator Nelson and Brenda Weckerly — will be performed with Metamorphoses II Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. at Swarthmore College’s Lang Concert Hall. Admission is free. Information: chamberorchestrafe.org.