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

The work of ruth crawford seeger is increasingly widely heard, studied, and known. The current volume was authored by a virtual who's who of those who have already brought her considerable scholarly and public attention in biographies (Hisama, Tick, Straus) and monographs on American musical modernism (Hisama, Oja, Straus) and the mid-twentieth-century folk music revival in the United States (Allen). Alongside these senior scholars are several from a new generation. As outlined in Carol Oja's foreword, the anthology grew out of the Ruth Crawford Seeger Centennial Festival (2001). Perhaps this event generated the feeling of a close-knit group, evident in the printed pages; authors are clearly in an ongoing conversation, an engagement with one another. Footnotes indicate that they have shared interview material, for instance.

The originality of this compendium, as I see it, is twofold: first, its predominantly feminist perspective nuances the subject in significant and exciting new ways; second, it bridges the musicologies (as Crawford Seeger herself did) by giving her classical composition, music education, and folk music interests (nearly) equal attention. The organization of the book works well in this regard, with a fine overview by Judith Tick of the shifts in critical and scholarly representation of Crawford Seeger to begin and then a series of chapters that follow her changing interests approximately in chronological order, ending with two studies of her eldest children, Mike and Peggy. The volume's title signals that the "worlds" of the "cultivated" and "vernacular" that Crawford Seeger straddled will be the focus, arguably suggesting a sociohistorical approach. However, there is still a divide between the many approaches here with the studies of her compositions that are more heavily analytical and those of her educational initiatives and folk music work that are more cognizant and probing of social contexts.

What exactly are the feminist issues here? Editors Ray Allen and Ellie Hisama articulate the central one in their introduction: "Her efforts to traverse the male-dominated domain of modern composition and the female-centered worlds of children's folk music and teaching have inspired a new generation of scholars and critics to reexamine the complex dimensions of gender and cultural hierarchy in her work and in our larger society" (1). The structure of the male-dominated domains are articulated clearly, particularly in Melissa J. Graaf's exploration of gendered gate-keeping in the New York–based Composers Forum of the late 1930s. Sadly, we learn from Lydia Hamessley that many of the same attitudes persisted in the Critics Group of the Ballads and Blues Folk Club in London, which Ruth's daughter Peggy had to encounter decades later.

Additionally, however, several authors, most explicitly Lyn Ellen Burkett and Taylor A. Greer, challenge the female-male as helpmate-muse model by revealing how complex the intellectual and artistic relationship between Ruth and her husband, Charles, was. Each contributed to the thinking of the other. Unequivocal demonstration (by Nancy Runhwa Rao in particular) of Ruth's influence on other American modernists, especially Elliot Carter, is a further means of dismantling the helpmate-muse gendering. On the other hand, Ruth's respect for and openness to the artistry of every musician she encountered also challenge the notion of "genius" embedded in the helpmate-muse binary. In the most personal account of the book, Bess Lomax Hawes speaks to this when she describes how Ruth respected the intent of the singers in her transcriptions, presenting an "unassailable on the record rendition" (151) of their performance without the "corrections" that many of her peers made when transcribing traditional performances.

The Seegers' left-wing activism is referenced frequently, as one might expect in a feminist volume, and explored particularly in Hisama's "In Pursuit of Proletarian Music: Ruth Crawford's 'Sacco, Vanzetti'" and Jerrold Hirsch's "'Cultural Strategy': The Seegers and B. A. Botkin as Friends and...