Ruth Crawford Seeger

American classical composer

• Born: July 3, 1901
• Birthplace: East Liverpool, Ohio
• Died: November 18, 1953
• Place of death: Chevy Chase, Maryland

Crawford is known for her modernist musical compositions, which established her as a leading figure in the history of music by women. Through her arrangements, her teaching, and her family, she also exerted a pivotal influence on the American folk-music revival of the middle twentieth century.

The Life

The child of a Methodist minister, Ruth Crawford lived in several Midwestern cities, moving to Jacksonville, Florida, in 1912. At the time of her high school graduation, Crawford took up the conventional occupation of children’s piano teacher. Her first works were modest responses to the compositions she found for her young students, although she remained focused on a career in piano performance. She moved to Chicago in 1921 to study piano at the American Conservatory of Music. By 1923 she was studying composition; by 1926 she had become part of a circle of ultramodernist composers, including Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and the poet Carl Sandburg.

Through Cowell’s influence, in 1929 she moved to New York to study composition with Charles Seeger. In 1930 she became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to spend a year in Berlin and Paris. Returning to New York, she began living with Seeger in 1931, and she married him in 1932. The years in New York were heady: Seeger and Crawford’s patron Blanche Walton were forming the first American musicological organizations (from whose meetings Crawford and even Walton, as women, were excluded). Crawford helped Seeger complete his theoretical treatise on dissonant counterpoint, probably contributing ideas to it. In the midst of the ongoing economic depression, the couple saw a chance for composition to regain social relevance through use in the workers’ movement.

Crawford abruptly stopped composing in 1933. The reasons are many. Never confident of her voice as a composer, she was disappointed with her opportunities following the Guggenheim Fellowship. The first of her four children was born in August, 1933. The family encountered economic hardship and moved in 1936 to Washington, D.C., a city that gave little attention to modern music. The failure of their composed music to move the proletariat led Crawford and Seeger to shift their musical interests toward folk music. Crawford remained musically active, transcribing and arranging folk songs for a number of publications, teaching folk music at nursery schools, and privately teaching piano to children. In the last years before her untimely death from intestinal cancer, she briefly resumed original composition.

The Music

Crawford’s career as a composer was short, and she tended to be modest in her estimation of her own abilities. Perhaps partly for the latter reason, nearly all of her works are for solo instruments, small chamber ensembles, or voice accompanied by piano or chamber ensemble. Her mature music tends strongly toward polyphony, taking the form of several melodic lines operating at once (rather than melody with chordal accompaniment). Coherence arises through the constant transformation of motives: initial notes will often open up a space of pitches that are later filled in with all the available notes of the chromatic scale, using related motives whose shapes grow to fit whatever musical room is available. Crawford avoids repeating pitches until at least five or six notes have passed, usually more, and this partly accounts for the absence of a pitch center such as one finds in tonal music. In addition, Crawford and Charles Seeger embraced the notion that dissonance could be the norm of modern music with occasional consonances treated as incidental, thus reversing a basic principle of tonality.

1922-1924. After a year of piano study in Chicago, Crawford’s hopes for a career as a pianist dimmed, and she resolved to broaden her abilities as a musician, receiving technical grounding in composition from Adolf Weidig at the American Conservatory. Crawford’s early work as a composition student is in a post-Romantic style, with chords used coloristically and pressing the bounds of tonality (that is, the familiar organization of musical works in major and minor keys).

1925-1929. Crawford’s piano studies from 1925 with Djane Lavoie Herz proved decisive in her compositional development. Herz introduced her to the music of Aleksandr Scriabin, and he brought her into the ultramodernist circle of composers—Rudhyar, Cowell, Edgard Varèse, and others—who helped shape her aesthetic outlook and who promoted her career. In opposition to such neoclassical composers as Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson, the ultramodernists sought to create truly indigenous American music by eschewing such putatively old-fashioned features as tonality, consonance, and repetition. However, their modernism was not a cerebral rationalism; inspired by Scriabin, they championed Theosophy and other forms of mysticism. Crawford’s music from from this period shows the influence of Scriabin in its chord structures, although, unlike Scriabin, by this time Crawford was no longer writing tonal music.

Crawford established herself as a mature, cutting-edge composer quickly. Her 1926 Sonata for Violin and Piano was performed at the first Chicago concert of the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1928, and her Piano Preludes, nos. 6-9, were published in the ultramodernist journal New Music Quarterly. During the same year her first two preludes were performed at one of the important Copland-Sessions Concerts in New York. Works that received less notice during this period include Music for Small Orchestra, suites for wind quintet and piano and for string quartet and piano, and five songs to texts by Sandburg.

1929-1936. While Crawford’s compositional style did not change enormously after her move to New York, certain of its features became more prominent as she studied with Charles Seeger and collaborated in his theoretical work. The melodic lines are shaped according to a basic distinction between line (in which several notes continue changing in the same direction) and twist (in which their direction changes). For example, a passage in which pitch rises throughout a series of notes is a line neume; a passage alternating between rising and falling is a twist neume. Lines and twists operate not only in the realm of pitch but also in dynamics, timbre, tempo, and other domains. (Such parallel organization of multiple musical domains is one way in which her work anticipates that of the post-World War II avant-garde.) Much of the music is organized in verse form (to use Seeger’s term), which is to say that the works consist of several sections of similar length (often set apart by double bars in the scores) that are conceived to rhyme with each other.

String Quartet. The four-movement String Quartet exhibits a dissonant counterpoint of melodic lines and twists, and it makes much of dynamic and timbral twists and lines (most notably in passages in which the instruments play long notes, each getting louder and softer at different times). Ellie Hisama has claimed that the way the first violin is set apart from the rest of the quartet and the way the twist lines undercut the third movement’s climax both reflect Crawford’s consciousness of herself as an outsider in a man’s world.

Two Ricercari No. 1 and No. 2. At the height of the Great Depression, Crawford became enthusiastically involved in radical politics. Two Ricercari No. 1: Sacco, Vanzetti and Two Ricercari No. 2: Chinaman, Laundryman are unique in her oeuvre in their piercing expression of moral outrage, expressed in the language of ultramodernist music. These works were performed at a Workers’ Olympiad in May, 1933. Crawford and other ultramodernists thought their music might contribute to proletarian power through its avoidance of the kind of musical stability that they associated with bourgeois culture. However, Crawford and Seeger soon concluded that neoclassicism had carried the day in composition, and that the way toward the proletarian music of the future was through engagement with folk music.

1936-1953. Between 1933 and 1952, Crawford completed only one original composition, Rissolty, Rossolty, a brief work for orchestra that sounds more like a hoedown than an ultramodernist composition. During the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Crawford transcribed numerous American folk songs for the publications of John and Alan Lomax, an activity she continued in her own published collections starting in 1948. In Crawford’s folk-song settings, her personal compositional inclinations are evident in piano accompaniments carefully written to imitate the figurations of folk instruments, such as the guitar or banjo, as well as in the settings’ emphasis on harmonic and metrical irregularities found in the originals. This work may appear to be fully removed from Crawford’s earlier activity as a composer, but it seems less so when one considerts that Crawford and the Seeger family had developed a notion that folk music was a form of ongoing collective composition. In the introduction to American Folk Songs for Children, Crawford explains how children can be part of the folk-composition process. Nevertheless, her lone late composition, the Suite for Wind Quintet, is stylistically of a piece with her compositions of more than two decades earlier.

Musical Legacy

From the first, Crawford’s innovative and moving compositions impressed those who encountered them. In particular, the melodic, dynamic, and tempo processes of her String Quartet profoundly influenced composers such as Cowell, Elliott Carter, and John Cage during her lifetime. In addition, through her husband, she seems to have influenced the scale-oriented music theories developed by Joseph Schillinger, Nicolas Slonimsky, and others in New York in the 1930’s. In the decades after her death, composers such as George Perle and Morton Feldman continued to be aware of her compositions, but her reputation as a composer was eclipsed by her influence in the area of folk music, as her children’s collections were used in many school curricula and her well-known children (notably Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, and stepson Pete Seeger) brought many of her ideas about folk music to a wider public. During the 1960’s, the children’s collections became infrequently used in schools, thanks to changing musical and curricular tastes as well as the efforts of anti-Communist politicians. The feminist movement of the 1970’s brought Crawford the composer back into prominence, as composers, performers, and music historians sought to integrate music by women into the classical canon. Crawford continues to hold the attention of scholars and musicians because of her ability to become a first-rate, cutting-edge avant-garde composer, despite restrictions on women and because of her influence within a family of prominent musical scholars and folk musicians.

Principal Works

chamber works:Music for Small Orchestra, 1926; Sonata for Violin and Piano, 1926; Suite, 1927 (for five wind instruments and piano); Diaphonic Suite No. 1, 1930 (for solo oboe or flute); Diaphonic Suite No. 2, 1930 (for two clarinets); Diaphonic Suite No. 3, 1930 (for flute); Diaphonic Suite No. 4, 1930 (for oboe or viola and cello); Rat Riddles, 1930; Suite No. 2, 1930 (for strings and piano); In Tall Grass, 1932; Prayers of Steel, 1933; String Quartet, 1933 (1931); Suite for Wind Quintet, 1952.

choral works:Chant No. 1: To an Unkind God, 1930 (for female chorus); Chant No. 2: To an Angel, 1930 (for soprano and chorus); Chant No. 3, 1930 (for female chorus).

orchestral work:Rissolty Rossolty, 1939.

piano works: Five Preludes, 1925; Four Preludes, 1928; Nine Preludes for Piano, 1928; Piano Study in Mixed Accents, 1930.

vocal works:Adventures of Tom Thumb, 1925 (for voice and piano; based on the story by J. L. Grimm and W. C. Grimm); Five Songs: Home Thoughts; White Moon; Joy; Loam; Sunsets, 1929 (for voice and piano; based on Carl Sandburg’s poetry); Three Songs, 1932 (for voice, oboe, percussion, and strings; based on Sandburg’s poetry); Two Ricercari No. 1: Sacco, Vanzetti, 1932 (for voice and piano; based on H. T. Tsiang’s poetry); Two Ricercari No. 2: Chinaman, Laundryman, 1932 (for voice and piano; based on Tsiang’s poetry).

writings of interest:American Folk Songs for Children in Home, School, and Nursery School, 1948; Animal Folk Songs for Children, 1950; American Folk Songs for Christmas, 1953; Let’s Build a Railroad, 1954.

Bibliography

Allen, Ray, and Ellie M. Hisama, eds. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007. An important volume containing chapters by several musicologists and folklorists exploring Crawford’s compositional methods, her involvement in the ultramodernist and proletarian movements, her work with folk music, and her legacies in composition and folk music.

Hisama, Ellie M. Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hisama devotes more than half of this study to Crawford’s compositions, concentrating on how they can be understood in light of her experiences as a woman. The musical analyses are technical, but they are thoroughly explained and accessible to nonspecialists able to read music.

Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890-1940. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. This source contains a valuable account of Crawford’s music viewed in the context of the new music of her time.

Seeger, Ruth Crawford. American Folk Songs for Children in Home, School, and Nursery School: A Book for Children, Parents, and Teachers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948. In the extensive introduction to this anthology, Crawford’s discussion of how children learn and use songs amounts to a simple version of her own aesthetic theory.

Straus, Joseph. The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A valuable introduction to Crawford’s compositional approach, with concise discussions of her significance as a modernist composer and as a woman composer. Much of the musical analysis is quite technical, but the rest of the book is accessible to the general reader.

Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A full-scale biography by a leading authority on Crawford.