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

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music is a recent offering in the Eastman Studies in Music series. The words "innovation and tradition" will make it immediately attractive to the folklorist, but the book is aimed at a much wider intellectual audience. Most of the contributors to the volume are professors of music, while one is a historian (and member of the American Folklore Society), and only Bess Lomax Hawes is identified as a folklorist. The broad intellectual sweep of this book is highly appropriate, for it reflects the many interests and accomplishments of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

The twelve essays are arranged in much the same way that Crawford Seeger's life was arranged. The first six deal primarily with her work as an ultramodernist composer, while the latter six deal with her work as a folksong transcriber, interpreter, teacher, and theorist. Even her name changes, as she is known primarily as Ruth Crawford in the first section, while she is generally called Ruth Crawford Seeger in the second. Yet several themes emerge that tie the two halves of the book together: Crawford Seeger's interest in musical dissonance, her desire to compose and disseminate a distinctly American music, her experience as a "woman composer," and the interplay of her work with her personal life. Folklorists will probably find the second half of the book more interesting than the first, but the first section should not be ignored.

The introduction provides a brief overview of Crawford Seeger's life and work: her early years as a composer of the ultramodernist school, her status as the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition, her 1932 marriage to Charles Seeger (formerly her teacher), her movement away from composition toward teaching and child-rearing, her growing professional interest in folksong (in collaboration with her husband and the Lomaxes), the publication of her three folksong books with her own piano accompaniment, and her ultimate return to composition shortly before her death in 1953. The first essay is by Judith Tick, Crawford Seeger's biographer and preeminent scholar. Tick's essay examines the place in music history of Crawford Seeger, who was celebrated as a promising young composer yet nearly forgotten by the time of her death. A revival of interest in her work occurred in the 1970s—the result of second-wave feminism, the burgeoning field of women's studies, and the growing maturity of American music scholarship, with its attendant recognition of Crawford Seeger's influence. Both the introduction and Tick's essay nicely situate the subject. We see how inadequate it is to study Crawford Seeger—or indeed, any artist—apart from historical and personal context.

The essays by Joseph N. Straus, Lyn Ellen Burkett, and Nancy Yunhwa Rao are primarily formal analyses of Crawford Seeger's compositions and hence will be of limited interest to folklorists. But even here, it is impossible to separate the composer from her work. Burkett's study of Crawford's Piano Study in Mixed Accents analyzes Crawford's use of dissonant counterpoint, a compositional strategy favored by Crawford the composer and championed by Charles Seeger the theorist. Yet Burkett challenges the conventional view that Crawford's work was the outgrowth of her husband's theories; instead, Burkett suggests that Crawford's compositions were frequently the inspiration, rather than the result, of Seeger's theories.

The essays by Ellie M. Hisama and Melissa J. de Graaf link Crawford's music with her interest in radical politics. Hisama's essay examines Crawford's musical setting of a poem commemorating Sacco and Vanzetti and suggests that it is an example of what Charles Seeger called "proletarian music," radical music that would further the interests of the working classes. De Graaf 's essay examines Crawford's experience with...