One more post apropos for International Women's Day. Ruth Crawford Seeger had a very small output, but what there is is enough to say definitively that she was one of our country's greatest composers. This is music utterly unlike any other. She is a contemporary of Copland, but unlike Copland - the son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn whose primary influence was American folklore, her music was that of a social registry WASP who nevertheless brines her music in the salty acid of the 20th century. She's clearly influenced by Scriabin's most advanced pages, and even more by Schoenberg, and yet there is something utterly different from the Schoenberg school. Schoenberg never dealt so profligately in polytonality as this. One musicologist refers to her unique way that sits between polytonality and atonality as 'post-tonal pluralism.' Although they shared a friend and mentor in Henry Cowell, I doubt Crawford could know much of the unpublished catalogue of Charles Ives, but perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist of intellectually sophisticated New England Protestants that creates a kinship in their music - polytonality as the dissonant harmony of democracy. Her musical corpus is sadly tiny, no secret as to why. As a woman, she was required to be wife and mother first, and minister to her children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny, and also... by the way... a stepson from Charles Seeger's first marriage named Pete, yes, that Seeger, who went on to far greater musical fame.
Starting in the late 30s, her husband, Charles Seeger, being one of America's foremost musicologists and American folklorists (Pete didn't develop his interests in a vacuum), worked in the Library of Congress in the folk music division where he was instrumental in assisting the hugely famous and consequential folk music recordings of Alan Lomax, which to this day and for all time is America's most reliable connection to its musical roots. Mrs. Crawford-Seeger spent those years making musical arrangements which harmonized the songs which Lomax and her husband compiled.
Crawford-Seeger unfortunately died in her early fifties, unable to even benefit from the Second Wave of American feminism which might have made her a living icon. There are so many names in American music which deserve a space in the concert hall never yet procured, but any proper redressment with the greatness of America's underperformed musical accomplishments must put Ruth Crawford Seeger very near top priority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_MQo3py3Xw
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