Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (review)

The paradoxes inherent in the American veneration of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53) resonate through the ritual-like repetitions found in the proliferating studies of her life and work. That rarest of phenomena, a woman able to hold her own in the specialized world of 'ultramodern' composition during the later 1920s and early 1930s, she then embraced (how willingly is endlessly debated) marriage and multiple motherhood. As this book's cover summarizes the outcome: 'shortly after her marriage to musicologist Charles Seeger in 1932 and the birth of her first child in 1933, Ruth Crawford Seeger stopped composing and turned to the work of teaching music to children and to transcribing, arranging, and publishing folk songs, projects she would continue until her untimely death from cancer at fifty-two'.

One of this book's aims is to demonstrate that there is more to her legacy than the high-profile careers of her children and stepson. Nancy Yunhwa Rao claims that Crawford's String Quartet 1931 is 'a model of [sic] Carter's first quartet as reflected by the parallel in the schematic strategies in their Scherzos' (p. 121), and concludes that 'considering Crawford's work opens up our reading of Carter, Feldman, or Tenney, and works of these composers also help us in listening to Crawford' (p. 138). Rao thereby reinforces the essential point made by Joseph Straus in his 1995 monograph, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, and reiterated by him here in a chapter on 'Ruth Crawford's Precompositional Strategies'. Not only might Crawford 'be seen as a pioneer in the serialization of rhythm' (p. 50), and in this sense a precursor of Babbitt: she also exemplified the kind of modern-classic aesthetic instincts in which 'melodies conflict with each other, but nonetheless belong together' (p. 53). Straus claims, with reference to String Quartet 1931, that 'even the most apparently irreconcilable conflicts can in fact be mediated, indeed, can be heard to dissolve amid the subtle connections between the parties' (loc. cit.). It is striking in this context to note Charles Seeger's comment, cited by Taylor A. Greer, that 'getting folk-music and the so-called art music connected [was] the thing we talked about all the time' (p. 166). This 'principle of fusing opposites' was already working in Europe—with Bartók, in particular. But Crawford herself was never to make a substantial contribution to the process, and the brief Rissolty, Rossolty (1939)—described by another contributor, Melissa J. de Graaf, as 'a complete success in terms of the composer's desire for a fusion of the simple and complex, content and form' (p.104)—is a fascinating but frustrating glimpse of what might have been.

Crawford advocates have some difficulty in demonstrating conclusively that her Seeger-inspired switch from art music to folk music was a wholly good, or necessary, thing. But nor, on the whole, are they willing to regard the outcome of this transformation as the sad non-fulfilment of very considerable compositional potential; a waste extending over twenty years. After all, it can be argued that a good number of the best American composers to emerge since 1930 are Crawford's 'children'. Her limited but appealing output was more accessible in those early years than that of Charles Ives, and she seemed a less idiosyncratic model than Henry Cowell or Edgard Varèse. Nevertheless, the rapid expansion of American compositional confidence, as well-primed practitioners returned from studies in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, means that current attempts to accord Crawford Seeger a special prominence in the evolution of a musical culture defined in large part since her death by Cage, Copland, Carter, and Babbitt, can easily seem contrived. And such attempts can appear doubly implausible if they involve the refusal to consider that her role as model...