Celebrating Ruth Crawford Seeger

by Ellie M. Hisama

I first heard of Ruth Crawford as an undergraduate in Joseph Straus’s twentieth-century music theory course at Queens College. The musical imagination behind Crawford’s String Quartet 1931 inspired me to learn all I could about its composer. I immediately located her other published compositions, and read cover to cover Matilda Gaume’s biography, Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memoirs, Memories, Music, then the only available book on her. I would learn that Ruth Crawford later became Ruth Crawford Seeger, a key figure in the American folk revival of the 1940s and 1950s, and a member of the famed Seeger family of musicians, which includes her husband Charles, stepson Pete, and children Mike and Peggy. As a graduate student, I returned to the Quartet, hoping to find a way to account for what I heard to be a feminist voice behind its intriguing final two movements. My interest in Ruth Crawford Seeger led to a dissertation that explores the Quartet, then to a book on her and on two other American women composers, and ultimately to this festival.

Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music celebrates the centennial of the birth of this brilliant composer and folk music activist. We are fortunate to have as participants family members Peggy, Mike, Pete, and Anthony Seeger, Ruth’s friend and colleague Bess Lomax Hawes, composers Ursula Mamlok, Pauline Oliveros and Christian Wolff, performers Sarah Cahill, the Charleston String Quartet, Margaret Lancaster, Marilyn Nonken, and Dora Ohrenstein, and many of the scholars who have contributed to the emerging literature on Ruth Crawford Seeger and her times.

Our focus on Crawford Seeger’s prescient contributions to American modernism and on her advocacy of traditional music presents a provocative view of twentieth-century music. The festival will help to break down the notion that modern and traditional music are diametrically opposed. To straddle both worlds was by no means unique, but Ruth and Charles Seeger’s lasting and unusual musical legacy—one that embraces Elliott Carter and Pete Seeger, serialism and socialism—deserves recognition and further reflection. By presenting interdisciplinary perspectives on a pathbreaking figure who managed to bridge the modern and the traditional, the festival will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how musical movements such as ultra-modernism and the urban folk revival helped to shape twentieth-century culture.

As we enter a new century, interest in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s music percolates across the globe. Her chamber music is performed and recorded widely—throughout the United States, Germany, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere. Her folk song transcriptions and arrangements continue to be discovered by new generations of musicians. We invite you to join us in celebrating the legacy of a gifted and fascinating musical figure.

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