Crawford (Seeger), Ruth (Porter)

(b East Liverpool, OH, 3 July 1901; d Chevy Chase, MD, 18 Nov 1953). American composer and folk music specialist. She had two important careers in a relatively short lifetime: as a composer, she was an outstanding figure among early American modernists in the 1920s and early 1930s; as a specialist in American traditional music, she transcribed, edited and arranged important anthologies in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Crawford received her earliest musical training while living in Jacksonville, Florida, between 1912 and 1921. Piano lessons with Madame Valborg Collett (a pupil of Agathe Grøndahl) from 1917 to 1920 led to further study at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago with Heniot Levy (1921–3) and Louise Robyn (1921–4). She gained skill in composition from Adolph Weidig (c1923–1929). Equally formative were her piano studies from about 1925 to 1927 with the Canadian teacher Djane Lavoie Herz, a disciple of Skryabin. Through Madame Herz, Crawford came into contact with Cowell and Rudhyar. By 1926 she was also acquainted with the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, contributing folksong arrangements to his landmark anthology The American Songbag and absorbing his poetic and philosophical ideals.

Crawford’s career flourished in the 1920s within the confines of the small modernist movement existing outside New York. In 1926 Cowell named her for the board of his New Music Society and later published several of her works in the New Music Quarterly. In the mid-1920s she became a board member of the Pro Musica Society and in 1928 a founder member of the Chicago chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Between 1924 and 1929 she composed almost two-thirds of her output, receiving several notable performances from new-music groups. The first professional performance of her music was given in New York in November 1925 by Gitta Gradova (another pupil of Lavoie Herz), who performed her second Piano Prelude. In 1927 her Violin Sonata was played at a League of Composers concert of music by six ‘Young Americans’ (including Copland and Blitzstein); the following year it was performed at the inaugural concert of the Chicago chapter of the ISCM. Buhlig included three piano preludes by her in a recital on 6 May 1928 in the Copland–Sessions series in New York.

In autumn 1929, after spending the summer at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Crawford left Chicago for New York to study dissonant counterpoint with the composer and musicologist Charles Seeger. There she joined Cowell’s circle of ‘ultra-moderns’, which included Seeger’s close friend Carl Ruggles. She became a protégée of Seeger and was influential in helping him to revise Tradition and Experiment in New Music and a Manual on Dissonant Counterpoint for publication. His ideas were crucial to the development of her second-style period (1930–33), a few short but fruitful years.

In 1930 Crawford was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition; she was the first woman to be named and one of only five in the next 15 years. She spent her year abroad mostly in Berlin (autumn 1930 to April 1931) and in Paris (June to early November 1931). ‘In Berlin I studied with no-one’, she later wrote (alluding to her lack of contact with Schoenberg). Yet she regarded her encounters with Bartók and Berg as high points of what was the most productive year of her life. Virgil Thomson later described the String Quartet ‘1931’ as ‘in every way a distinguished, a noble piece of work’. Crawford returned to New York in November 1931 and married Charles Seeger the following year. In the early 1930s her music was performed at the New School for Social Research, where both Seeger and Cowell were on the faculty. Her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings represented the USA at the 1933 ISCM Festival in Amsterdam.

In 1936 the Seegers moved to Washington, DC: Charles was appointed to the music division of the Resettlement Agency (a federal New Deal organization), while Ruth worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, her interests having shifted from composition to the preservation and dissemination of American folk music. The Seegers became one of the most important ‘families’ in the folk music revival of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Her stepson Pete Seeger was the leading folk revival performer in the USA; her children Mike and Peggy also became professional musicians. Her only original composition during this period was Rissolty Rossolty, an ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes, commissioned by CBS for its radio series American School of the Air.

With the publication of Our Singing Country (1941), Crawford became well known for her transcriptions. Later she developed music programmes utilizing folk music for progressive private schools in the Washington area. Compiled in 1941–6, the classic American Folksongs for Children (1948) won praise from both composers and music educators; it was followed by Animal Folksongs for Children (1950) and American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953). The Suite for Wind Quintet (1952) marked a return to composition.

Crawford’s original music falls into two style periods. Her Chicago compositions (1924–9) reveal her predilection for dissonance and for post-tonal harmonies influenced by Skryabin, as well as her fondness for irregular rhythms and metres. Unpublished diaries and poems suggest the influence of an eclectic legacy of philosophical and literary sources common to many American artists and writers of the early 20th century. Among these were theosophy and Eastern mysticism, and American literary transcendentalism, as well as the imaginative traditions of Walt Whitman and Sandburg, the latter supplying the texts for almost all of her vocal compositions.

However, Crawford’s reputation as an innovative and experimental composer rests mainly on her New York compositions (1930–33), in which she concerned herself with dissonant counterpoint and indigenous American serial techniques. She was one of the earliest composers to extend serial controls to parameters other than pitch and to develop formal plans based on serial operations. As a folksong arranger, she was no less original and skilful. Her folksong transcriptions were praised as impeccable and her arrangements as faithful to both the soul and the spirit of the original field recordings that were so often their source. She summed up her credo as a desire to give people ‘a taste for the thing itself’.

WORKS

chamber

other works

folksong arrangements and transcriptions

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Gitta Gradova to Play Compositions by Cowell, Rudhyar and Ruth Crawford’, Musical America (28 Nov 1925)

P. Rosenfeld: An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia, 1929)

C. Seeger: ‘Ruth Crawford’, American Composers on American Music, ed. H. Cowell (Stanford, CA, 1933), 110–18

V. Thompson: ‘Substantial Novelties’, New York Herald Tribune (16 March 1949)

S. Thomson, ed.: Four Symposia on Folklore (Bloomington, IN, 1953), 191–4, 209, 243

S.R. Cowell: ‘Ruth Crawford Seeger, 1901–1953’, JIFMC, vii (1955), 55–6

G. Perle: ‘Atonality and the Twelve-Tone System in the United States’, The Score, no.27 (1960), 51–61

E. Salzman: ‘Distaff Disk: Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Work Ahead of its Era’, New York Times (16 April 1961)

C. Seeger: Reminiscences of an American Musicologist [Oral History Archives Transcript, U. of California, Los Angeles, 1972]

S.E. Gilbert: ‘The Ultra-Modern Idiom: a Survey of New Music’, PNM, xii/1–2 (1973–4), 282–314

E. Carter: ‘Expressionism and American Music’, The Writings of Elliott Carter, ed. E. Stone and K. Stone (Bloomington, IN,1977), 230–42

B. Jepson: ‘Ruth Crawford Seeger: a Study in Mixed Accents’, Feminist Art Journal, vi/1 (1977), 13–16, 50

R. Mead: Henry Cowell’s New Music 1925–1936: the Society, the Music Editions and the Recordings (Ann Arbor, 1981)

D. Nicholls: ‘Ruth Crawford Seeger: an Introduction’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 421–5

M. Gaume: ‘Ruth Crawford Seeger’, Women Making Music: the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. J. Bowers and J. Tick (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), 370–88

M. Gaume: Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memoirs, Memories, Music (Metuchen, NJ, 1986)

M. Nelson: ‘In Pursuit of Charles Seeger’s Heterophonic Ideal: Three Palindromic Works by Ruth Crawford’, MQ, lxxii (1986), 458–75

E. Flemm: The Preludes for Piano of Ruth Crawford Seeger (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1987)

M. Gaume: ‘Ruth Crawford: a Promising Young Composer in New York, 1929–1930’, American Music, v/1 (1987), 74–84

W. Mellers: Music in a New Found Land (New York, 2/1987)

R.W. White: ‘Remembering Ruth Crawford Seeger: an Interview with Charles and Peggy Seeger’, American Music, vi/4 (1988), 442–54

D. Nicholls: American Experimental Music 1890–1940 (Cambridge, 1990)

J. Tick: ‘Dissonant Counterpoint Revisited: the First Movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931’, A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock, ed. R. Crawford, R.A. Lott and C.J. Oja (Ann Arbor, 1990), 405–22

J. Tick: ‘Ruth Crawford’s “Spiritual Concept”: the Sound-Ideals of an Early American Modernist, 1924–1930’, JAMS, xliv (1991), 221–61

J. Straus: The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge, 1995)

E. Hisama: Gender, Politics, and Modernist Music: Analyses of Five Compositions by Ruth Crawford and Marion Bauer (diss., CUNY, 1996)

N.Y. Rao: ‘Partnership in Modern Music: Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford’, American Music, xv/3 (1997), 352–80

J. Tick: Ruth Crawford Seeger, a Composer’s Search for American Music (New York, 1997)

T.A. Greer: ‘The Dynamics of Dissonance in Seeger's Treatise and Crawford's Quartet’, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology, ed. B. Yung and H. Rees (Urbana, 1999)

JUDITH TICK