celebrating three hundred years of music by women

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

Crawford was an outstanding figure among early modern American composers in the 1920s and 1930s. As a folk music specialist, she transcribed, edited and arranged important anthologies in the 1940s and 1950s.

Born in Ohio, she moved to Chicago in 1921, studying at the American Conservatory of Music. She had private piano lessons with Djane Lavoie-Herz. Compositions from her time in Chicago (1924-9) show her predilection for dissonance and post-tonal harmonies influenced by Scriabin. She met the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, and later set his writings to music. In 1929 she spent the summer at the MacDowell Colony. She studied with Charles Seeger from 1929, and married him in 1932. In 1930 she was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. She met Bartòk (Budapest) and Berg (Vienna), moving on to Paris in 1931.

At the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Amsterdam (1933), she represented the United States with her Three Songs for contralto, oboe, piano, percusssion and strings (Sandburg words). Her reputation as an innovator comes mainly from the works she composed in New York 1930-3, when she concerned herself with dissonant counterpoint and indigenous American serial techniques.

Crawford combined composing some highly experimental and innovative American music with being a folk music specialist. Her children Pete and Peggy Seeger became important folk musicians, central to the American folk revival. Her small, but concentrated output includes a highly thought of Violin Sonata (1926), three Suites for various chamber ensembles (1927, 1929, 1952), and several vocal works.

To hear Diana Ambache talk about Ruth Crawford, click here.
Click on this work for more details below:

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Music for Small Orchestra. 1926. 10 mins
1. Slow, pensive. 2. In Roguish humor. Not fast. Fl, cl, bn, 4 vns, 2 vcs, pn.
This was Crawford's first work for more than two instruments. She features the alto range in the very unusual scoring. Instruments are often used in the extremities of their registers, such as a high bassoon above a low flute, the cellos playing higher than the violin. There is an impressive rhythmic and tonal diversity among the various strata. In the solemn first movement the mood of 'night music' expands from a single tone to a multilayered harmony and rhythm. The contrasting and humourous second movement has a 'roguish' theme offset by an ostinato on cello, bassoon and piano. This piece was never played in Crawford's lifetime.
Published by A-E Editions.

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String Quartet. 1931. 2 vn, va, vc. 12 mins
1. Rubato assai. 2. Leggiero. 3. Andante. 4. Allegro possible
This is considered Crawford's masterpiece; it was written in Berlin in the Spring of 1931, funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, and first published in 1941. Crawford relies on instrumental timbre and the balance of textures. Though brief, there is a structural complexity and density of part writing which give it great tragic power. She described the slow movement as a study in dissonant dynamics, the waxing and waning of crescendos and diminuendos carefully organised to be shaped through single pitches in each instrument. She arranged this movement as Andante for String Orchestra in 1938.
Published by Presser.com

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Suite for Wind Quintet. 1952. fl, ob, cl, hn, bn. 10 mins
1. Allegretto. 2. Lento rubato. 3. Allegro possible - Andante - Allegro - Meno mosso - Tempo primo
This Suite won first prize in a National Association of American Composers and Conductors competition in 1952. It was part of her re-emergence as a composer after a fallow period; however she only lived for one more year. She leaned heavily on past material to recharge herself. The ostinato in the first movement and the third movement's twelve-tone row are quite similar to material in the String Quartet, while the dirge-like second movement recycles an unpublished chant for women's chorus entitled To an unkind God. The repeated-note figures and lively rhythms of the third movement evoke American fiddle tunes.
We gave the UK première in February 2003. The London Evening Standard described it (not entirely accurately!) as "a lightish, even mischievous confection" stemming from Schoenbergian roots.
Published by Kaiser Productions Inc.

Scores:
Preludes for piano, 1-5, Hildegard.com .
String Quartet 1931; Andante for Strings; Rissolty Rossolty, Preludes; Presser.com.
Suite for Wind Quintet, 1952; Kaiser.

Writings:
Ruth Crawford Seeger, A Composer's Search for American Music, Judith Tick, Oxford University Press, 1997; OUP.
Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds, Innovation and tradition in twentieth-century American music, Ray Allen & Ellie M. Hisama, 2007, Boydell & Brewer.
Review of American Classics CD on Naxos 8.559197 MusicWeb International.
Collection in Los Angeles Public Library.
The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Joseph N. Straus, 2004 Cambridge University Press .
American Folk Songs for Children: Ruth Crawford Seeger's Contributions to Music Education, Sarah H Watts Sage Journals. 2008.
Making Music Modern, New York in the 1920s, Carol J Oja OUP .

Recordings:
Portrait of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Knussen/Deutsch Grammophon, 2017.
The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Jenny Lin, Timothy Jones; BIS Records
American composers, Cleveland Orchestra/Dohnányi; Decca, 2015.
Ruth Crawford, CRi American Masters, NWCR658, Anthology of recorded music.
Voices from Elysium, 80543-2; New World Records. 3 Songs on Sandburg texts (p 37).
Twofold, ICR029; Diaphonic Suite solo flute, 1930.
Seeger, Vocal, Chamber and Instrumental Works, Continuum; Naxos.