Ruth Crawford Seeger

by Joseph Stevenson
Ruth Porter Crawford Seeger was a remarkable composer, admired greatly among the few who knew her music, and one of the most stylistically advanced composers of her time. She was also a leading ethnomusicologist and an excellent teacher and academic. Born in 1901, she worked as a piano teacher and later attended the American Conservatory in Chicago. On graduation she began teaching at the Conservatory and at nearby Elmhurst College of Music. Her music began to appear in the "New Music Editions," and she also studied under Charles Seeger in New York. Meanwhile, her music was becoming more chromatic and dissonant until she approached the forefront of the American avant garde of the day.
After she returned to the United States she married Seeger, becoming the step-mother of Pete Seeger and soon the mother of Michael and Peggy Seeger, all of whom later became noted folk-singers. Her husband introduced her to the music and theoretical writing of Arnold Schoenberg, as a result of which she became one of the first Americans to write a twelve-tone piece, her 1931 String Quartet. During the mid-'30s, Ruth joined John and Alan Lomax in working for the Library of Congress on its collection of American folksong. Together they published the great volume Our Singing Country.
After abandoning composition in the 1930s, she returned in the early '50s, though any further development was prevented by her early death in 1953. By the end of the 20th century her music was only in the early stages of being "discovered." The music is imaginative, personal, and often strongly dissonant, with the impression of a bold spirit on the part of its author.