Touching the Music: Charles Seeger

Charles Seeger holds a truly unique place in the history of American music. A distinguished composer, scholar, and teacher, his long career transformed our understanding of how folk and classical music interact and define American culture. Charles Seeger, Yale University, 1975, courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On May 12, 1975, I spent a memorable day with Charles Seeger (1886–1979) on the Yale University campus. We met as he walked across the campus green with his elegant, long stride, carrying a first edition of The Social Harp that he donated to the Yale Music Library. Seeger generously agreed to do an interview with me during which he recalled the history of his family and his discovery of American folk music. At the age of 89, both his eloquence and his vivid memory were striking.

Charles Seeger holds a truly unique place in the history of American music. A distinguished composer, scholar, and teacher, his long career transformed our understanding of how folk and classical music interact and define American culture. Seeger graduated from Harvard University in 1908, and then taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Juilliard, the Institute of Musical Art in New York, the New School for Social Research, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yale University. He also worked for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, Works Projects Administration (wpa) Federal Music Project, and the Pan American Union.

Seeger’s second wife Ruth Crawford Seeger was a distinguished composer and musician who worked closely with him throughout her life. Three of his children—Pete, Mike, and Peggy—are beloved figures who are known for both their collecting and their performance of folk music. Seeger worked closely with folk music collectors John and Alan Lomax, composer Henry Cowell, and artist Thomas Hart Benton.

As a scholar and composer, Charles Seeger is best known for his writings on “dissonant counterpoint,” a classical music concept that describes how musical lines that are very different from each other sound harmonious when they are played together. The greatest composer of dissonant counterpoint was Johan Sebastian Bach, and Seeger was understandably drawn to Sacred Harp hymns composed by William Billings, a tanner of hides who lived in Boston during the colonial period and developed shaped notes to assist music teachers. Considered the first American composer, Billings is known for his four-part “fuguing tunes” that use dissonant counterpoint with striking effect.

While John and Alan Lomax are remembered for the vast body of field recordings they collected, Charles Seeger’s great contribution is that he embraced both classical and folk musics. With his rigorous, academic eye, he viewed the two traditions as part of a common musical spectrum and argued that together they define the canon of American music. Seeger’s career spanned more than five decades, and during that time he created the field of ethnomusicology, in which folk music is studied with the tools of musicology. In our interview, he recalls how “gradually, in the course of the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, I knit folk music, popular music—and even what we call primitive music—in with my composed music, and to me it’s one whole community process that you can’t separate.”

Seeger’s second wife Ruth Crawford Seeger (seated) was a distinguished composer and musician who worked closely with him throughout her life. Three of his children—Pete, Mike, and Peggy (at age two, in his arms)—are beloved figures known for both their collecting and their performance of folk music. Photograph courtesy of www.PeggySeeger.com .

Charles Seeger seemed eternal as he recalled his long life and his fascinating ties with family and professional colleagues whose names, like his, are revered for their work on American music and its southern roots.

Charles Seeger, in his own words. . .

I was brought up practically like all well-to-do children were at the end of the last [nineteenth...