Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger (July 3, 1901 – November 18, 1953), born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer primarily during the 1920s and 30s and an American folk music specialist from the late 1930s until her death. She was a prominent member of a group of American composers known as the "ultramoderns," and her music influenced later composers including Elliott Carter (Shreffler 1994).

Life

Ruth Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, and began her music education at age 6 with her first piano lesson. Later she studied with her mother. She studied with Madame Valborg Collett later on, who was a student of Agathe Grøndahl. Later, she continued at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn. She learned composition from Adolf Weidig, whose instruction accelerated her skill. But her study under Djane Lavoie Herz, a disciple of Scriabin, was important for the social and intellectual world it opened for her. During this time, she met Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg whose writings she eventually set to music.

In 1930 she became the first woman to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Berlin and Paris (Hisama 2001, 3; Tick 2001). Despite being in the heart of German modernism, she chose to study and compose alone. Yet, through letters, Seeger’s ideas were crucial to the development of her style and selections. She and Charles Seeger married in 1932 after her subsequent trip to Paris. Notably, at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam (1933) her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings represented America (Tick 2001).

The family, including Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Barbara, Penny, and stepson Pete Seeger, moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after Charles’ appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C. Crawford Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Her arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs are among the most respected including transcriptions for: American Folk Songs for Children, Animal Folksongs for Children (1950) and American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953) Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA by John and Alan Lomax. However she is most well known for Our Singing Country (1941.) She also composed Rissolty Rossolty, an ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes, for the CBS radio series American School of the Air.

She briefly returned to her modernist roots in early 1952 with Suite for Wind Quintet (Tick, 1997, 314–19). She died the following year, from intestinal cancer, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Composition

The compositions that Crawford Seeger wrote in Chicago from 1924-1929 reflect the influence of Alexander Scriabin, Dane Rudhyar, and her piano teacher Djane Herz. Judith Tick calls these years Crawford Seeger's "first distinctive style period" and writes that the composer's music during this time "might be termed 'post-tonal pluralism'" (Tick 1997, 65). Music from this first style period, including Five Preludes for Piano, Sonata for Violin and Piano, Suite No. 2 for Strings and Piano, Five Songs on Sandburg Poems (1929), is marked by strident dissonance, irregular rhythms, and evocations of spirituality (Tick, 1997, 65-84).

Crawford’s reputation as a composer chiefly rests on her New York compositions written between 1930 and 1933, which are concerned with dissonant counterpoint and American serial techniques. She was one of the first composers to extend serial processes to musical elements other than pitch, and to develop formal plans based on serial operations (Tick 2001). Her technique may have been influenced by the music of Schoenberg, although they met only briefly during her studies in Germany. Many of her works from this period employ dissonant counterpoint, a theoretical compositional system developed by Charles Seeger and used by Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer, and others. Seeger outlined his methodology for dissonant counterpoint in his treatise, “Tradition and Experiment in (the New) Music," which he wrote with the input and assistance of Crawford during the summer of 1930 (Seeger 1994,). Crawford Seeger’s contribution to the book was significant enough that the possibility of co-authorship was briefly raised (Tick 1997, 131–32).

String Quartet 1931, in particular the third movement, is Crawford Seeger's most famous and influential work. The composer described the “underlying plan” of the third movement as “a heterophony of dynamics—a sort of counterpoint of crescendi and dimenuendi. […] The melodic line grows out of this continuous increase and decrease; it is given, one tone at a time, to different instruments, and each new melodic tone is brought in at the high point in a crescendo” (analysis by Ruth Crawford Seeger of the third and fourth movements of the String Quartet 1931, in Tick 1997, 357–58). The dynamic slides thus create the lengthy melody that spans the entire movement and shape the narrative arc.

Compositions

Early

• Little Waltz, for piano, 1922
• Piano Sonata, 1923
• Theme and Variations, for piano, 1923
• Little Lullaby, for piano, 1923
• Jumping the Rope (Playtime), for piano, 1923
• Caprice, for piano, 1923
• Whirligig, for piano, 1923
• Mr Crow and Miss Wren Go for a Walk (A Little Study in Short Trills), for piano, 1923
• Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, Ending with a Fugue, for piano, 1924
• Five Canons, for piano, 1924
• Piano Preludes No. 1-5, 1924-1925
• Adventures of Tom Thumb, 1925
• Sonata for Violin and Piano, 1926
• Two Movements for Chamber Orchestra (Music for Small Orchestra), 1926
• We Dance Together, for piano, 1926
• Piano Preludes No. 6-9, 1927-1928 (corrected version)
• Suite No.1, for Five Wind Instruments and Piano, 1927, rev. 1929
• Suite No. 2, for Four Strings and Piano, 1929
• Five Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg : Home Thoughts, White Moon, Joy, Loam, Sunsets, 1929

Middle

• Piano Study in Mixed Accents (three versions), 1930
• Four Diaphonic Suites: No.1 for oboe or flute, No.2 for bassoon and cello (or two cellos), No.3 for two clarinets, No.4 for oboe (or viola) and cello, 1930
• Three Chants for Female Chorus: To an Unkind God, To an Angel, To a Kind God, 1930
• Three Songs to poems by Carl Sandburg, for contralto, piano, oboe, percussion and optional orchestra: Rat Riddles, Prayers of Steel, In Tall Grass, 1930-1932
• String Quartet, 1931
• Andante for Strings (after String Quartet Slow Movement), 1931 ?
• Two Ricercare to poems by H.T. Tsiang: Sacco, Vanzetti; Chinaman, Laundryman, 1932
• The Love at the Harp, 1932

Late

• Nineteen American Folk Songs for Piano, 1936-1938
• Rissolty Rossolty, 1939-1941
• American Folk Songs for Children, 1948
• Animal Folk Songs for Children, 1950
• Suite for Wind Quintet, 1952
• American Folk Songs for Christmas, 1953

Unknown date

• Songs: Those Gambler’s Blues, Lonesome Road, Lord Thomas, Sweet Betsy From Pike, Go to Sleep,
• Songs: What'll We Do with the Baby ?, Three Ravens, A Squirrel is a Pretty Thing, Who Built the Ark?, Every Monday Morning, I Wish I Was Single

Sources

• Allen, Ray, and Ellie M. Hisama, eds. (2007). Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
• de Graaf, Melissa (2008). "'Never Call Us Lady Composers’: Gendered Receptions in the New York Composers’ Forum, 1935-1940." American Music 26, no. 3 (Fall): 277-308.
• Gaume, Matilda (1986). Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memoirs, Memories, Music. Composers of North America, no. 3. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.
• Hisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64030-X.
• Seeger, Charles (1994). “Tradition and Experiment in (the New) Music”. In Studies in Musicology: 1929-1979, edited by Ann M. Pescatello, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
• Shreffler, Anne (1994). “Elliott Carter and His America,” Sonus 14, no. 2:39 & 49.
• Straus, Joseph N. (1995) The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cambridge University Press.
• Tick, Judith (1997). Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tick, Judith (1999). "Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music". Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (Winter): 171–74.
• Tick, Judith (2001). "Crawford (Seeger), Ruth (Porter)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Tick, Judith, and Wayne Schneider, eds. (1993). Music for Small Orchestra (1926); Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano (1929). In Music of the United States of America (MUSA) vol. 1, Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions.
• Vogel, Scott. (2001). "Composer Chose ‘Life’ over Work: Ruth Crawford-Seeger Never Revived Her Promising Musical Career". Honolulu Star-Bulletin (January 30).

External links

• Ruth Crawford Seeger Biography in 600 words by David Lewis with a note by Peggy Seeger
• Institute for Studies in American Music (ISAM) Newsletter: Ruth Crawford Seeger's Contributions to Musical Modernism by Joseph N. Straus, Fall 2001 Volume XXXI, No. 1
• Art of the States: Ruth Crawford Seeger Nine Preludes (1924-1928)
• Del Sol Quartet: Tear includes Seeger's Andante from quartet: (1931) played by Del Sol Quartet
• Ruth Crawford Seeger at Music of the United States of America (MUSA)