Ruth Crawford
Seeger (1901-1953)

JUDITH TICK

As a composer in the 1920s and 30s, Ruth Crawford Seeger was a major artist in the American modernist movement; and as an editor, arranger, and music educator in the 1940s, she was a pioneering advocate of American traditional music.

Crawford Seeger was an “ultra-modern” composer, the 1920s label for the musical avant-garde, which included among its ranks Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varese. Her style has been called Expressionist and “constructivist,” suggesting the combination of intensely emotional content within original schematic forms that is characteristic of her best work. Between 1924 and 1936 she composed most of her small corpus of about fifteen works, including nine preludes for piano; a violin sonata; a suite for small orchestra; a suite for piano and strings; Piano Study in Mixed Accents; Three Songs for Contralto, Oboe, Piano, Percussion, and Orchestral Ostinati; a string quartet; four Diaphonic Suites for instrumental solos or duos; and Two Songs for Contralto and Piano.

Crawford’s compositions divide into two style periods, determined by the cities in which she lived and composed almost all her music: Chicago and New York. Crawford came to Chicago in 1921 from Jacksonville, Florida, where she had received her early training in piano. Her initial goal was to become a concert pianist, and she enrolled at the American Conservatory of Music for one year, with the plan of returning home a “finished” musician. She remained in Chicago for eight years, receiving a Master of Music degree in 1929. Composition became her primary interest partly because of her first classes in harmony in 1922, which enabled her creative gifts to surface, and partly as a consequence of muscular problems that thwarted her ambitions as a performer. Adolph Weidig, a fine violinist and Berlin-trained composer at the American Conservatory, was her major composition teacher, and some of her early works were performed at his annual student recitals.

In 1924 Crawford began to study piano with Djane Lavoie-Herz, a Canadian devoted to the philosophy and the music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Through Madame Herz, Crawford met Henry Cowell and Dane Rudhyar; her natural affinity for dissonance and chromaticism found a base on which to thrive, and she settled on a style to explore and refine for the next five years.

Prelude No. 2 (1924) was one of five preludes that Crawford wrote between the fall of 1924 and the spring of 1925. It was performed in New York in 1925 by Gitta Gradova, a brilliant young pupil of Herz, and was described by the critic for the New York Sun as “sensational, pugnacious and curt.” This work illustrates a number of the composer’s style characteristics. Most important is her harmonic palette, which typically settles on a few chord-colors as the basis for the composition, exploring them through sequential repetition and extension through arpeggiation. The first chord, constructed of two perfect fifths separated by a minor second, is a revoicing of a seventh chord that emphasizes the parallel intervals rather than the triads. It becomes the basis of the arpeggiated figure in the middle section of the piece, starting at m.21. The melodic gesture of the tritone E flat-A, which introduces this chord, is equally developed. In m.8, the tritone skip up to F sharp is emphasized further by a chord built from fourths,- and in mm. 17-21, it directs the melodic motion. The influence of Scriabin is paramount in such choices. Another Crawford characteristic is the sense of movement achieved through rhythmic variety and extremities of range, particularly in the use of the upper and lower registers of the keyboard, which can be pitted against one another at climactic moments.

In 1927 Crawford confided to her diary that “Bach and Scriabin are to me the greatest spirits born to music.” This statement foreshadows her affinity for the dissonant counterpoint she learned from Charles Seeger, who at that point in his eclectic career was a leading intellectual and theorist for American ultra-modern music. Crawford left Chicago on the advice of Cowell, who arranged for her to study with Seeger in New York in the fall of 1929. Her formal studies with him lasted about a year, but they were decisive in shaping her compositions from then on.

In March 1930 Crawford completed “Rat Riddles,” which later became the first of a set of Three Songs for Contralto, Oboe, Piano, Percussion, and Orchestral Ostinati. It was premiered in New York in April 1930 and received a number of performances in the next few years. The most important were in Berlin, at a concert conducted by Nicholas Slonimsky in March 1932, and in Amsterdam, at the festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in June 1933. “Rat Riddles” is a setting of a poem by Carl Sandburg, whom Crawford knew and admired; her careful attention to the formal aspects of the poem as well as to Sandburg’s characteristic alliteration display her literary sensitivity.

Despite all the textural complexity of this work, its formal repetitions follow the verse structure: the opening two-line stanza, which in the poem is repeated with some variations four times, is set to virtually the same music, the instrumental ritornello that opens the work. Although there is little sense of triadic harmony, the oboe repetitions of D at key textual moments suggest extended tonality rather than avoidance of pitch centers. Crawford’s vocal line is intended more as declamation than as lyrical melody. It interacts most with the oboe, which darts and scurries about in its witty depiction of Sandburg’s wise hyperactive rats. Describing the frequent tritones and sevenths, particularly noticeable in the piano and oboe, Charles Seeger related “its vicious little stabs of dissonance” to the composer’s earlier Chicago period. Of note also are the tone clusters in the piano part, associated with the pizzicato piano figure that first appears in m.5 and is indicated by square note shapes. The masterful handling of irregular rhythms, compounded by the homophonic ostinati that Crawford added to the work two years later, is characteristic of her mature style.

In 1930 Crawford won a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. She was the first woman to receive that award and one of only five so honored until the 1970s. She spent most of her year in Berlin, composing, and the String Quartet was completed in Paris in the spring of 1931. The quartet is her most famous composition. It was premiered by the Pan American Association of Composers in New York in 1933. The slow movement was immediately singled out for special praise. In 1949 Virgil Thomson described it as “striking for intensity and elevation. Consisting entirely of notes juxtaposed in slowly changing chords of high dissonance content, the piece seemed scarcely to move at all. And yet, it was . . . thoroughly absorbing,” The composer herself pointed to its “heterophony of dynamics,” in which “no high point in the crescendo in any one instrument coincides with the high point in any other instrument.”

The fourth movement is based on a ten-tone row, which is presented ten times, on successive tones of the row. At m.21 the row is transposed a whole step higher; at m.6o the material retrogrades. The texture is two-voice counterpoint, with each voice systematically gaining or losing a pitch at each successive entry. Given that Crawford was in Berlin when Arnold Schoenberg was teaching there, it is easy to conclude that these serial techniques show his influence. But in fact, Crawford, who knew his classic twelve-tone method, never met him, did not consider herself a follower, and evolved her own methods, partly from Seeger’s teachings, to handle idiosyncratic concepts.

Crawford returned from Europe in the fall of 1931, and she and Charles Seeger were married the following year. In 1935 the Seegers left New York for Washington, D.C., a move that had decisive consequences, for Crawford Seeger as a composer never again matched the period of her late youth in either brilliance or productivity. Instead, she and her husband were caught up in the folk-music renaissance that was a byproduct of many New Deal programs. Traditional music routed composition from its status as her primary artistic medium. Captivated by the beauty and candor of field recordings, she dedicated the rest of her life to the dissemination of folk music through transcription and arrangement.

There were many reasons for her defection from composition. There was a pervasive disillusionment with the avant-garde in the wake of the disasters of the Great Depression; there were the pressures of family life—the Seegers had four children within ten years. But had she been so inclined, Crawford Seeger might have used traditional music as a new medium for composition, as did so many other American composers in the 1930s. Her Woodwind Quintet (1952), which marked her return to composition, certainly showed some absorption of traditional melody. However, her own evolution as a composer demonstrated the idiosyncratic and individualistic nature of her creative gift. She did not naturally lean toward reconstructed tonality or neo-classicism. Crawford Seeger’s achievement as a composer was to find her individual voice within a very young avant-garde movement in American music and do battle on the fronts of musical modernism.

Prelude No. 2

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Reprinted by permission of the family of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Mike Seeger, representative.

Rat Riddles

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Copyright © 1933 by New Music Edition. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Theodore Presser Company.

String Quartet

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Copyright © 1941 by Merion Music Inc. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Theodore Presser Company.