Charles Seeger

Conductor

• Born: December 14, 1886
• Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico
• Died: February 7, 1979
• Place of death: Bridgewater, Connecticut

American ethnomusicologist

Seeger helped to establish the disciplines of musicology and ethnomusicology in the United States, and as a music theorist and educator, he influenced the development of modern composition; as a scholar, he raised fundamental questions about the relationship between music and language.

The Life

The son of a merchant who had offices in the United States and Mexico, Charles Louis Seeger studied music composition at Harvard. After graduating in 1908, he went to Germany, where he studied conducting, and he conducted for the Cologne municipal opera. After a period in Europe, he returned to the United States and, in 1911, married violinist Constance de Clyver Edson. They gave concerts together, and soon they moved to Berkeley, where Seeger had been invited to help start the music department at the University of California. Along with developing a systematic study of music, he immersed himself in academic life, learning from his colleagues in other disciplines. The outspoken Seeger disagreed with powerful figures over American involvement in World War I, in which his brother had been killed, and chose not to return after a sabbatical.

The Seegers moved to the New York area in 1919. In the 1920’s Seeger began teaching music theory at the Institute of Musical Art, which later became the Juilliard School. In the early 1930’s, he lectured at the New School for Social Research. Before Seeger and Constance separated, they had three children, among them Pete, who became a famous folksinger and political activist.

Seeger’s egalitarian political views led to his involvement with like-minded intellectuals, including modern composers such as his former student Ruth Crawford, who became his second wife in 1932. By 1935 the political climate had shifted in response to the Great Depression, and Seeger joined the government as an expert on music. He became part of the Resettlement Administration, which moved struggling families into planned communities. He and his family moved to Washington, D.C. In 1937 Seeger became deputy director of the Federal Music Project, which employed musicians for performances, teaching, and, in what became especially important for the Seegers, the research and documentation of American folk music. Together with their friends John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger worked on the Archive of Folk Culture for the Library of Congress, which resulted in the publication in 1947 of Folk Song U.S.A.: The 111 Best American Ballads, for which the Seegers served as music editors. The Seegers had four children.

Seeger’s next government position was chief of the Music and Visual Arts Division of the Pan American Union and director of its Inter-American Music Center. In this office, which he held from 1941 to 1953, he worked with his staff to give music educators access to Latin American material, arranged for an exchange of musicians throughout the Americas, and improved the conditions for Latin American composers, whose work had sometimes been pirated by publishers in the United States.

Ruth Crawford Seeger died suddenly in 1953 from an illness, and Seeger, who was the subject of a an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into his activist past, resigned from his government position. He stayed active in scholarly circles and helped to found the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1956. In his seventies, in response to an invitation from ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood, Seeger returned to a full-time academic career, becoming a research professor at the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1961 to 1971 and contributing to the legendary interdisciplinary Wednesday seminars that influenced future leaders in the field of ethnomusicology. He spent his last decade in Connecticut, lecturing occasionally at nearby institutions.

The Music

Dissonant Counterpoint. As a composer, performer, and teacher of twentieth century classical music, Seeger believed in the importance of developing a modern approach to the study of counterpoint. He devised a method of preparing and resolving consonances (into dissonances), a dialectical inversion of the traditional species counterpoint that had changed little since the Renaissance. Seeger made a formal presentation of these ideas in his article “On Dissonant Counterpoint,” published in Modern Music in 1930. He was also interested in the concept of rhythmic dissonance and phrase structure, and he included rigorous training in rhythm as part of his music-theory curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Musical Art. The composer Henry Cowell, who attended music classes at Berkeley, as a special underage student, was among the early recipients of Seeger’s ideas about dissonance.

Music and Society. In the early 1930’s, Seeger was a member of the Composer’s Collective, a branch of the leftist Workers Music League. At this point in his career, he and his colleagues, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, and Aaron Copland, associated their own personal modernist artistic styles with their dreams of liberation for the masses. However, they soon discovered that the workers they wished to help did not necessarily appreciate the heavily dissonant, intellectually intense pieces that were intended to inspire them. Gradually, the Seegers became more interested in the musical traditions enjoyed and cultivated by the laborers. Together, the Seegers made a transition in interest from modernist composition to direct involvement with American folk music.

Seeger expanded his theoretical work to encompass not only musical structure but also social significance, reflecting to some extent the shift in his professional responsibilities. In the late 1930’s, Seeger identified a difference in emphasis between earlier musical folklorists (who emphasized the preservation of folk music as a kind of historical artifact) and the newer scholars, especially those involved in government-sponsored folk-music programs (who saw folk traditions as fulfilling an ongoing social need). Seeger once attempted to implement the use of music to strengthen a faltering relocation program for farmers. In later years, as the field of ethnomusicology matured, Seeger developed a more observational approach to music as a social function, asserting the need to encompass music in all of its forms, as practiced and utilized by all groups and all economic classes.

Music and Speech. Seeger was well read in philosophy, and he was a great admirer of the field of linguistics, which he considered to be decades ahead of musicology. As one of the first musicologists in the United States, he was conscious of musicology’s dependence on writing, which Seeger regarded as a form of speech, to discuss music: the use of one mode of communication to examine another. Although Seeger was aware of and fascinated by their similarities, he was skeptical of simplistic analogies between the two modes and regarded their juncture as one of the essential challenges of musicology.

Objective Music Transcription and the Melograph. In his quest for objectivity, Seeger turned to the possibilities of using mechanical devices to transcribe melody. Although he had once spent years helping Ruth Crawford Seeger transcribe American folk songs, he found that staff notation, with its built-in cultural assumptions and other flaws, was inadequate for capturing the melodic subtleties and possibly unrecognized structural features of the increasingly diverse music he was analyzing. He followed developments in the sciences related to phono-photography and worked with his eldest son, Charles, an astronomer, on developing prototypes for what he would call the melograph. The first, model A, was built at his own expense in 1956, and in 1958 Hood, director of a graduate program in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, secured funding to build model B. After 1968, model C, which used computer circuits to display pitch, spectrum, and volume, gave graduate students and other researchers a radical new view of sound, stimulating new dimensions of analysis.

Music as Logic. One of Seeger’s most philosophical and challenging articles, “On the Moods of a Music Logic,” brought together concepts on which he had worked in his early years as a composer and music theorist with his efforts to bring the precision of linguistics to the discussion of music. He first wrote the piece in 1956, and he revised it in 1976. By outlining and categorizing the essential elements of the compositional process, and extending these into all levels and dimensions, Seeger tried to ensure that music could be presented in its own terms. Ultimately, he viewed this as an important goal for both musicology and ethnomusicology, which he believed should not exist as separate disciplines. His emphasis on process (as synthesis) rather than design (as analysis) revealed a dynamic approach that balanced the more familiar static, text-dependent methods.

Musical Legacy

Considering the length, intensity, and diversity of his lifetime of teaching, it is difficult to overestimate Seeger’s impact on several generations of students in the areas of composition, music theory, music history, ethnomusicology, and related disciplines, extending from the classrooms of the World War I era to the graduate seminars of the 1960’s. His seminal publications and ideas continued to stimulate scholarship in music. Three of his children were influenced deeply by Seeger’s immersion in American folk music and became professional performers in traditional styles: Pete Seeger, a famous folksinger, songwriter, banjoist, and activist; Peggy Seeger, a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist; and Mike Seeger, a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. Seeger’s grandson Anthony became a prominent scholar and administrator who, like his grandfather, served as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

As a government administrator during the 1930’s and 1940’s, Seeger contributed to the development of institutions and policies that asserted the value and ongoing viability of American musical traditions. Some of the scholarly societies that Seeger helped to found, including the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and the College Music Society, grew over the years. They held annual conferences, published a steady flow of publications, and continued the lively dialogues that Seeger enjoyed.

Principal Works

writings of interest:An Outline of a Course in Harmonic Structure and Simple Musical Invention, 1913 (with Edward Griffith Stricklen); Systematic and Historical Orientations in Musicology, 1939; Folk Song U.S.A.: The 111 Best American Ballads, 1947 (with John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax); Studies in Musicology, 1935-1975, 1975.

Bibliography

Dunaway, David King. How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Comprehensive biography, with coverage of Pete’s early years in the Seeger family, including his exposure to folk music and activism during the 1930’s. Includes discography, references, illustrations, and index.

Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Detailed account of the expansion of interest in American folk music, including government sponsorship, scholarly work, and public performances, primarily from the 1930’s through the 1960’s, with attention to the prominent role of Seeger as an activist, administrator, and scholar. Includes photographs.

Hisama, Ellie M. Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Focuses on connections between musical structure and political expression and identity in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s compositions.

Perlis, Vivian, and Libby Van Cleve. Composer’s Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Includes biographical material, commentary, photographs, and an eleven-page transcription of interviews with Seeger recorded in 1970 and 1977.

Pescatello, Ann M. Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Definitive biography includes analysis of Seeger’s theories as well as an account of his diverse activities and accomplishments. Includes photographs, bibliography, and index.

Seeger, Charles. Studies in Musicology, 1935-1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Assembled and edited by Seeger, this collection of eighteen essays explores both the systematic and historical approaches to the field. Includes music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Studies in Musicology II, 1929-1979. Edited by Ann M. Pescatello. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. This anthology embraces a wider period of time than the first volume of Studies in Musicology, and it includes Seeger’s treatise on composition and his manual on dissonant counterpoint as well as seminal works exploring the relationship between speech and music as modes of communication.

Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Includes details of the composer’s professional collaborations and musical relationship with Charles Seeger as well as their mutual quest to reconcile the written and oral traditions in music. Includes a reprint of “On the Moods of a Music Logic” and references and index.