Newsletter
Fall
2001 Volume XXXI, No. 1
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About Dio
by Peggy Seeger
7 West Kirke Street, Chevy Chase,
Maryland. We moved there in 1944, when I was nine years old. The piano room
was just below my bedroom. Many an early Saturday morning while Barbara and I
played three-deck canasta on my bed (thus postponing weekend housework) we
could hear Hugh Latimer or Chuck Miller getting piano lessons. Many a late
evening while I plowed through homework, entertained my parakeet, cleaned up
my room, ran up a skirt on the sewing machine or just lay trying to get to
sleep, I would hear the piano below as Dio unwound from her day’s teaching.
Sometimes she’d be playing her dear Bach or Mozart or launch into her
favourite Schubert or Schumann lieder, singing the words lustily in German.
She and Charlie might sit down for a session of four-handed piano
arrangements of a Beethoven symphony, or she might be making a new setting
for a traditional song for one of the books. Sometimes I would wake up the
next morning with the previous night’s selection running through my head. As a child and teenager I do not remember
her early life as a composer ever being a subject of family discussion. I
remember the creation of Rissolty, Rossolty, but to me this was just a new
way of hearing a familiar song. In the early 1950s, she started playing
something totally new. I wasn’t sure I liked it. It wasn’t Dio-music. Up to
then I had associated her with a love of singable melody and a penchant for
the traditional harmony structures that, in varying degrees of complexity and
acceptable (?) dissonance and cadence, run through Western European-based
traditional and “classical” music. I knew she was composing something for a
competition — but this? There was no obvious form in this new work, the Suite
for Wind Quintet. No beginning and no end. You couldn’t hum it the next
morning and none of it made sense, even though I had been to concerts with
her and understood how the tower of ensemble music is constructed. She would
spread out the score and indicate the parts that she listened for. She’d
whisper, “The oboe… [her finger would move down and across the huge sheet]….”
Following her finger, I would concentrate on hearing an entrance that
otherwise might have been masked by other instruments in the tapestry of
sound. The huge pages would crackle although she tried to turn them quietly.
She was one of those people who tap their feet during a Bach invention. We
got many a dirty look from silent listeners in those concert halls. In my
teenage years this began to embarrass me and I stopped going, thus losing
that connection with her. She won the competition! The awards
concert was the first time I heard all those parts come together. I think she
expended more worry about what to wear to the ceremony than she had about
composing the Suite. I rattled up a long black full gored taffeta skirt on
the old foot-treadle Singer and we bought a bright red silk blouse. Barbara
and I schooled her in lifting her skirt daintily, warning her not to show
those awful but comfortable laced shoes as she mounted the steps to accept
her prize onstage. Thus I realised for the first time that my mother was a
composer. I lost my mother to cancer when I was 18
and re-found her in my forties when the records began to arrive with
professional instrumentalists tackling pieces which, to me, were still not
“Dio-music.” This was music from a Dio I did not know, far more dissonant
than the Suite. It was un-harmonic (where are the chords?); it was un-melodic
(for a melody, to me, is hummable either in part or whole); it was not in
rhythm (you couldn’t tap your feet to it). Many of the pieces seemed to be a
jumble of disconnected sounds, strange and upsetting. I am devoted to traditional music and
quite limited in my musical scope, although skilled enough to make my living
and my reputation at it. But because Dio is my mother and I am a musician, I
listened doggedly and gradually began to see what she was getting at. To me
her music compositions represent a glorious melding of head and heart,
although heavy on the head-side. It is a music of contrived spontaneity,
mathematics and precision. Every note, every pause, serves a purpose. I can
hear her thinking, planning, laughing, crying, intent on creating a continual
musical cause-and-effect, an edifice of sound. Edifice? No — a cabin, a
conversational stream, a graveside lament, a personal joke, a last cry of
passion… or just sound for sound’s sake, produced as nature produces the
wind, the earthquake, the trill of the lark. Sounds pompous, but that’s what
happens to me when I listen to her music: my mind moves first into parallel
emotions, then into totally contrary ones. My heart responds unpredictably.
My head is fascinated. I will admit that there are one or two pieces that
make me so unhappy that I cannot listen to them at all and I grieve yet again
that I cannot talk to my mother about these facets of her diamond. Does this music have anything in common
with folk music? Folk music as sung by Texas Gladden, Aunt Molly Jackson,
Basil May, the Carter family — no, I feel little or no connection. The
methods of creation and the intention of the makers are too different. But
folk music as Ruth Crawford Seeger saw it when she created those wonderful
piano accompaniments — yes, I see a wealth of connections but many of these
are bridges that Dio created herself. Her folk accompaniments borrow from
both folk and formal music but belong more to the latter disciplines. Looking
back on some of my own accompaniments, I realise quite a lot of them are
mathematical and precise, full of contrived spontaneity. Others are totally
off the wall. When improvising on the piano, Dio was
also off the wall, full of fun and unplanned surprises — quite like the
stereotype of a folk musician. But in her written music, whether
accompaniment, quartet, suite, prelude, sonata, ricercare, chant or Study
in Mixed Accents (my very favourite), Dio was a thinking, feeling,
joyful, purposeful musician, able to create, judge, edit and re-create. She
moved between the various musics as a spider moves from branch to wall to
ground, relating the unrelated and ending up in the center with ONE Ruth
Crawford Seeger. I still see three or four of her — but I am caught by all of
them. |
