SEEGER: Vocal, Chamber and Instrumental Works
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Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) Vocal and Chamber Music A remarkable pioneering figure of the American modernist movement, Ruth Crawford was born in East...
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)
Vocal and Chamber Music
A remarkable pioneering figure of the American
modernist movement, Ruth Crawford was born in East
Liverpool, Ohio in 1901. The daughter and granddaughter
of ministers, the young Ruth lived in various
locations before settling in Jacksonville, Florida, where
she received a serious musical education and started to
teach piano. In 1921 she came to the rich cultural
climate of Chicago to pursue compositional studies at
the American Conservatory. Her composition teacher,
the German-born composer and violinist Adolf Weidig,
encouraged her non-traditional explorations. Another
extremely influential mentor was her piano teacher, the
charismatic Djane Lavoie Herz, a woman of wide
knowledge and interests, who had been a student of
Artur Schnabel and Alexander Scriabin. The Herzes
held regular soirees, attended by prominent intellectuals
and musicians, including Henry Cowell and Dane
Rudhyar, who were to take a special interest in
Crawford. The Herzes also introduced her to Theosophy
and non-Western thought. Another Chicago friend,
Alfred Frankenstein, later a prominent critic, introduced
her to recent European music, and was responsible for
her meeting the celebrated poet Carl Sandburg, who
became a close friend and inspired her own passion for
writing poetry. She was to set many of Sandburg's
poems in her compositions.
In 1929 Ruth Crawford moved to New York, having
already had well-received performances in Chicago and
New York, and publication of her Piano Preludes in
Cowell's New Music Edition. The indomitable Cowell
persuaded a skeptical Charles Seeger, Cowell's former
teacher and a composer and ethnomusicologist of keen
intellect and originality, to accept her as a pupil. The
same year she was named the first woman to receive a
Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. She spent
1930-31 abroad, primarily in Berlin, travelled
extensively, and was received warmly and respectfully
by such notables as Alban Berg, Bela Bartok, Josef
Matthias Hauer, Arthur Honegger, Albert Roussel, and
Nadia Boulanger.
Upon returning to America, Ruth Crawford and
Seeger married and established their home in New
York. Mike was born in 1933, with Peggy, Barbara, and
Penelope to follow. (The well-known folk-singer Pete
Seeger, Charles's son by his first marriage, was twelve
at the time of Ruth and Charles's marriage.) Life was
difficult for the Seegers during the Depression; their
intense concern with society's plight drew them to
leftist causes, such as the Composers' Collective, which
they helped organize. Deeply committed to music of the
people, the Seegers also worked on settings of American
folk-music for the collections of John and Alan Lomax.
In 1935 the family moved to Silver Spring,
Maryland. With the responsibilities of raising a big
family, composing became impossible during this
period of her life, but she energetically pursued musical
projects that could be accomplished in more manageable
units of time. She and Charles transcribed thousands of
field recordings in the American folk-song archive of
the Library of Congress; she was active as a piano
teacher and taught music in several nursery schools, and
she wrote her own folk-song books for children, which
are still popular. (Their children Mike and Peggy were
to become noted folk musicians.) Except for her one
symphonic work, the short folk-inspired Rissolty,
Rossolty, commissioned and broadcast by CBS in 1941,
she completed no compositions from 1933 to the early
1950s. In 1952 she wrote the Suite for Wind Quintet for
a competition (which she won), but shortly after, her
health took a devastating turn. In the summer of 1953
cancer was diagnosed, and her life was tragically cut
short later that year.
Ruth Crawford Seeger's compositional career is
strikingly divided into two phases, separated by her
studies beginning in 1929 with Charles Seeger. Her
earliest mature compositions, dating from about 1924,
show strong influences of post-Romanticism and
impressionism, and, in the restless, ambiguous
harmonies and mystical aura, particularly the music of
Scriabin. Slow movements are often dark and brooding,
and fast movements are filled with exuberant themes,
developed in an improvisatory spirit.
The earliest major work on this recording, the
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1925-26) has a dramatic
history. Although it had been received extremely
favourably, the composer mysteriously burned the work,
along with many of her poems, in the early 1930s,
perhaps because Charles had been highly critical of her
early work. Years later, her former student Vivian Fine
found that she had a copy of the Sonata and "repremiered"
it in 1982.
The Suite for Five Wind Instruments and Piano was
composed in 1927 and extensively revised in 1929
under Charles Seeger's guidance. First heard in a private
concert of her music presented by her New York patron
Blanche Walton in 1930, the Suite languished for many
years, considered problematic for its two versions, and
was first performed publicly only in 1975.
As the composer began to work with Charles Seeger
her music became much more concentrated. Each
movement is restricted to a single idea developed
intensively. The structures become more sharply etched,
the musical lines more controlled in their dissonance,
the conceptions more daring. This was the period of her
work with such experimental techniques as serialism,
tone-clusters, Sprechstimme, rhythmic independence of
parts, numerical orderings, and spatial separation of
performing factions.
The four Diaphonic Suites, composed in 1930 for
solo or duo wind/string combinations, and the Piano
Study in Mixed Accents (1930) were compositional
etudes, intended to perfect the technique of
"dissonating" long melodic lines - that is, propelling the
harmonic tension, without respite, from first to last note.
Her long-range control of dissonance and mastery of
form reached perfection in Three Songs (1930, 1932).
This bold, original work is performed by two groups
independent of each other: a "concertante" of voice,
oboe, percussion, piano, and an "ostinato" of thirteen
players, seated as far as possible from the soloists.
While the songs can also be performed in a version
without the ostinato, its presence adds a rich and often
bizarre dimension, befitting Sandburg's evocative
poems.
Crawford Seeger's last work before the hiatus in her
composing was Two Ricercari: Sacco, Vanzetti and
Chinaman, Laundryman (1932), composed for a
Composers' Collective concert. The texts deal with the
miseries of exploited immigrants and the notorious
Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1921 (in which two Italian-
Americans were executed for the murder of a guard
during a robbery, for which it was widely believed they
were innocent). To project the impassioned text, she
combined singing with Sprechstimme (a cross between
singing and speaking, where only a relative vocal
contour is indicated, not specific pitches).
Other major works by Crawford Seeger are Nine
Piano Preludes (1924-28), Suite for Small Orchestra
(1926), Suite for Piano and Strings (l929), Five Songs
(1929), Three Chants for chorus (1930), her great
masterpiece String Quartet (1931), Rissolty, Rossolty
for orchestra (c.1941), and Suite for Wind Quintet
(1952). For decades Ruth Crawford Seeger was known
almost exclusively through her later, more avant-garde
compositions. In recent years, more of her earlier works
have been published and performed, making possible a
re-evaluation and deeper appreciation of this unique
voice in American music.
Cheryl Seltzer
© 2005 Continuum
Suite for Five Wind Instruments and Piano (more info)
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I. Adagio religioso / Giocoso - Allegro non troppo - 3:57
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II. Andante tristo - 2:52
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III. Allegro con brio - 2:56
Violin Sonata (more info)
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I. Vibrante, agitato - 5:09
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II. Buoyant - 3:14
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III. Mistico, intenso; Allegro - 5:58
2 Ricercari (more info)
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Sacco, Vanzetti - 5:05
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Chinaman, Laundryman - 3:11
Prelude No. 1: Andante (more info)
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Prelude No. 1: Andante - 1:14
Prelude No. 9: Tranquillo (more info)
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Prelude No. 9: Tranquillo - 2:54
Study in Mixed Accents (more info)
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Study in Mixed Accents - 1:31
Diaphonic Suite No. 1 for Flute (more info)
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I. Scherzando - 0:48
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II. Andante - 2:20
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III. Allegro - 1:06
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IV. Moderato, ritmico - 0:51
Diaphonic Suite No. 2 for Bassoon and Cello (more info)
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I. Freely - 1:25
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II. Andante cantando - 1:50
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III. Con brio - 1:03
3 Songs (more info)
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Rat Riddles - 3:16
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Prayers of Steel - 1:54
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In Tall Grass - 3:54