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Ruth Crawford Seeger's Different Tunes
by Judith Tick
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 Ruth Crawford Seeger's
Different Tunes
by
Judith Tick
My mother was exotic, she was like a gypsy queen;
I’d pretend she wasn’t mine when I was fifteen;
Her voice was loud, she wore men’s shoes, she braided up her hair;
Men would stop and stare.
Her clothes were few and seldom new, she was always out of style;
She was always nagging me, she would treat me like a child;
Sometimes I wished I had a mother like the rest -
Sometimes she was so lovely that it took away my breath.
—Peggy Seeger, “Different Tunes”1
Ruth
Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) left an important legacy in American music as a
modernist composer and as a leader in the American folk song revival
movement, which she helped to initiate in the 1930s and 1940s. We who write
about female composers and women’s history in Western classical music are
keenly aware that our historical subjects are different, so casually have
most of them been discarded as “out of style” in the sense that they have
typically been neglected in mainstream historical narratives. Thus, for our
subjects and perhaps equally for ourselves, the question is: how do we weave
our different tunes into the counterpoint of Western music history?
Several
interrelated factors account for Crawford’s recent rebirth within American
music history. First is the emergence of a school of American serial
composers in the 1950s and 1960s. When a few American composer/theorists
turned their attention to earlier manifestations of serial interest in the
1920s, they encountered Crawford’s String Quartet 1931. One
transformative moment occurred in 1960. In his pioneering article about the
origins of American atonal and serial practices, George Perle wrote a crucial
assessment of Crawford’s contributions:
The
String Quartet 1931 of Ruth Crawford is an original and inventive work
whose numerous “experimental” features in no way detract from its
spontaneity, freshness, and general musicality…In some respects
serial procedures are suggested.2
Perle
had never forgotten a performance of the String Quartet 1931 that he
had heard at a concert at Columbia University in New York on 15
March 1949.3 He later recalled how he
“knew nothing about Ruth Crawford Seeger,” first encountering her name only
on an edition of music by her pupil Vivian Fine. “It mentioned that she had
studied with Ruth Crawford Seeger. That was the first time I heard of her.
Remember in those days if you ran into somebody who heard of Alban Berg, you
got excited. People have no idea of the isolation of
composers.”4 Ten years later, Perle
oversaw a performance of the String Quartet 1931 in Davis, California,
communicating his enthusiasm for this work directly to Crawford’s husband,
Charles Seeger. “I am delighted to learn that Miss Crawford’s
Quartet will be recorded. Apparently there are other people who share my
interest in this work!”5
In
fact, many other people would share Perle’s excitement. Reviews of the first
complete recording of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet 1931 on the
Columbia Masterworks label appeared the following year. In 1961 the
composer-critic Eric Salzman headed an enthusiastic review of the Amati Quartet’s recording with the title, “Distaff Disk. Ruth
Seeger’s Work Ahead of Its Era.”6 In 1973
a new recording of the String Quartet 1931, performed by the Composers
Quartet, was released on the Nonesuch label, along with quartets by George
Perle and Milton Babbitt. Teresa Sterne, Director of Nonesuch from 1965
through 1980, recalled how the recording came about:
The
Ruth Crawford quartet certainly wasn’t what we started out with as a concept
for the record. The recording started off with the Milton Babbitt String
Quartet no. 2. (The Composers Quartet were the only ones who could play it at
the time.) The Ruth Crawford quartet was an afterthought. They were going to
do the Babbitt and it was Josh Rifkin who suggested the Perle. We needed more
music, and I just said “Ruth Crawford” to Anahid Ajemian, and she said, “What
a marvelous idea. It’s a great idea. We’ve played it.” We used that just as a
filler, and it turned out that it became the spark that brought
attention to the other works.7
The
record elicited rave reviews from eminent New York critics, who deliberately
widened the frame of reference for the piece by linking it to the most
contemporary trends—for example, Andrew Porter, writing in The New Yorker,
made Crawford’s precedence explicit:
Influences
are harder to discern than pointers to the future. Some of Elliott Carter’s
rhythmic procedures are foreshadowed in the first movement, and while the
softly shifting cluster-chords of the slow movement may owe something to
Berg’s Lyric Suite, closer parallels can be found in
Ligeti and Lutoslawski compositions of recent years.8
John
Rockwell noted in High Fidelity:
The
quartet lasts about ten minutes and is in all ways a masterpiece. To our ears
what might seem most immediately striking is the uncanny anticipation of
later developments, particularly in Carter’s independent part-writing and
metrical explorations. But strictly on its own terms the
quartet makes extraordinary expressive sense.9
Had
Crawford’s String Quartet 1931 not been reissued in the early 1970s,
the continuity between her work and contemporary post-serial trends might not
have been noticed. This second recording was produced because of the cultural
activity associated with the Bicentennial of the American Revolution (1976)
and a renaissance of national interest in the history of American classical
music. Thus an early retrospective concert entirely devoted to Crawford’s
work by the Performers’ Committee for Twentieth-Century Music in 1975
elicited this reviewer’s comment: “Here is a composer we will be hearing much of during the bicentenary celebrations, but who should
survive in the repertory long after that.”10
In
the early 1970s, Matilda Gaume chose Ruth Crawford as the subject for her
doctoral dissertation—the first full-length study of
Crawford’s work.11 Renewed attention
paid to Charles Ives in this decade spilled over onto subsequent generations
of “experimental” composers, including Crawford. Under the guidance of H.
Wiley Hitchcock, who along with the historian Vivian Perlis contributed so
much to the Charles Ives revival in the 1970s, music historian Rita Mead
began her research on Henry Cowell. Because Cowell advocated for
and published Crawford’s music during her lifetime, Mead provided details
about Crawford’s career.12
Another
factor influencing the reception of Crawford’s music had to do with the
cultural feminist movement. Crawford’s stature and symbolic resonance within
the emerging women’s history movement intensified from the 1970s onward.
While her first biographer Matilda Gaume does not consider herself a
“feminist” scholar, in Gaume’s invaluable set of interviews with Crawford’s
family and friends in the late 1960s, she asked many questions about Crawford’s life as a woman as well as an artist, as did
Mead.13 To Mead we owe the first
recounting of Charles Ives’s resistance to Cowell’s proposal that he underwrite
the recording of the slow movement from Crawford’s String
Quartet 1931 because it had been written by a woman.14
For
Teresa Sterne, who did not welcome what she calls the “ghetto-izing of all
women,” producing the Nonesuch recording of the String Quartet 1931
was, as she recalled in 1999:
the
beginning of my immersion [in Crawford’s music]. She and her story and her
music became a fixed star in my mind. If she hadn’t been a woman, that genius
and that spark would have been not only encouraged, but would
have been welcomed and would have been promoted.15
The
String Quartet 1931 continued to enhance Crawford’s reputation. In
1975 a performance of the orchestral arrangement of the Andante movement from
the quartet occurred at a highly publicized concert by the New York
Philharmonic. Devoted to female composers, the concert was sponsored by a
feminist publishing collective for Ms. magazine, and the orchestra was
conducted by Sarah Caldwell. In 1980 Jeannie Pool organized a one-day
Conference/Workshop on Twentieth Century String Quartets by Women Composers.
It was dedicated to Crawford’s memory, and her picture appeared on conference
material. Pool would soon organize the First National Congress on Women and
Music the following year. At the time Crawford served as a focal point. Pool
remembers:
I
decided the best thing to do was anchor the whole conference around Ruth
Crawford Seeger. She was a major composer, and her String Quartet 1931
was a pivotal work done by a woman. If we anchored the conference there, then
I would have the ability to present the new works, the new
string quartets on her shoulders.16
Other
female composers looked to Crawford as a role model as well. Here was a
composer whose excellence and modernist credentials assuaged their “anxiety
of authorship” over the absence of female composers from
conventional music history.17 Vivian
Fine stated that “it was of incalculable importance that I had
Ruth Crawford as a teacher and as a model in my life.”18 Fine carried this message to others, among them
the noted composer Pauline Oliveros. In her “Sound Journal,” Oliveros wrote
about the impact of Fine’s testimony on her own sense of musical identity:
February
9 [1973]: Vivian Fine appeared and was truly fine. She teaches at Bennington
College, Vermont. Besides composing, she is a terrific pianist. Her own music
rings with authenticity.... She was a pupil of Ruth Crawford Seeger (a
remarkable composer who died too young), thus unlike most of us females, had
a model and never considered herself unnatural, consciously or unconsciously,
for writing music.... She related her experience of the ’30’s and reminded us
that there were not many composers around in those days. Then, they all knew
each other. She mentioned “Boulangerie” and how Ruth Crawford was a member of
the early Avant Garde. Significant that there was at least one woman in that
early group and that Nadia Boulanger, a woman, influenced so
many of the American composers.19
The
last twenty years have witnessed some important developments within the
overlapping categories outlined above. In general, one can point to the greater inclusion of Crawford in general surveys.20 More specifically, the coverage has shifted
somewhat, so that even in some general surveys, the String Quartet 1931
is no longer the only piece on which Crawford’s historical position
is based.21 This reflects a widening of
interest in Crawford’s work as a whole, a trend reinforced in the specialized
analytic literature. Here an article by David Nicholls in 1983 led the way,
especially in noting the stylistic watershed represented by
Crawford’s Music for Small Orchestra.22
A
trend in the recent analytic literature about Crawford concerns Charles
Seeger’s contributions to Crawford’s development. With respect to modernist theory,
Seeger had been known primarily for his classic article on
“dissonant counterpoint.”23 While it had
been understood that he had been Crawford’s teacher, no connections had been
drawn between this article and her musical development. This changed in the
mid-1980s. In 1986, Mark Nelson used Seeger’s article as his starting point,
as did other scholars, notably David Nicholls, who highlighted Seeger’s
centrality in the first full-scale study of the American
experimental tradition.24 Several years
later scholars rediscovered Seeger’s unpublished theoretical treatise,
“Tradition and Experiment in (the New) Music,” an extensive document
containing two sections, “Treatise on Musical Composition” and “Manual of
Dissonant Counterpoint.” This was published in a scrupulously
edited version by Charles Seeger’s biographer, Ann M. Pescatello.25
In
fact, Crawford considered her work on Seeger’s treatise so important
that a co-authorship did not seem implausible to her.26 Seeger’s own dedicatory reference to Crawford’s
collaboration corroborates this detail. In many respects Charles Seeger reversed
the classic relationship between male and female musician, for if anything,
he was Ruth Crawford’s muse as well as teacher. Nevertheless, the extent of
Seeger’s influence upon Crawford may be a matter of debate, and the
temptation to overstate the case is great. Nancy Rao’s article on the
partnership between these two handles the issue directly as well, describing
Crawford’s “crucial role in the creation of Seeger’s treatise, quite opposite
to the common portrayal of her merely as the typist, sounding
board, or muse of the treatise.”27
With
respect to women’s history, the growing stature of this field, particularly
since the late 1980s, brought increasing visibility to Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Matilda Gaume’s biography appeared in 1986, as did the
publication of her biographical essay in Women Making Music.28 In my biography, I took multiple points of view
toward the life and work of Ruth Crawford Seeger, dealing with issues of
gender as well as American cultural history. Moreover, I attempted to
integrate the two parts of her life, that is to say, her composition and her
work with folk music, as part of the reciprocal relationship between
traditional ethnic musics and early modernism. More recently, other scholars
have applied feminist critical theory to Crawford’s music.
Here Ellie Hisama has led the way.29
Even
from the beginning, Crawford’s placement within twentieth-century music has
moved between margin and mainstream—between the American experimental
tradition on the one hand, and serial practice on the other. This suggests
that Crawford’s music does not fit neatly into one or the other of these
categories. Within the analytic literature written since 1980, we see various
kinds of discourse being used to describe her work. Some theorists are
exploring the influence of Crawford and her generation on later experimental
figures such as Elliott Carter and John Cage. In a widely acclaimed study of
Carter’s music, David Schiff cited Crawford as one of a number
of composers whose music “reflected and refracted his [Carter’s] thinking”
ca. 1948-1950.30 Anne Shreffler makes
more explicit connections by linking the ultra-modern idiom in general and Crawford in particular to the development of Elliott
Carter’s style.31
With
respect to serial discourse, we can see consensus emerging between earlier
and more recent assessments. The noted historian Carol J. Oja describes the
quartet as “prefiguring subsequent total serialism in the
USA.”32 Joseph Straus explicitly links
Crawford’s work to a renewed appreciation of the ultra-modern circle in
general with respect to integral serialism, and explained the historical
import of Crawford’s “astonishingly radical” rhythmic and melodic
organization:
Crawford
has obviously understood the potential isomorphism of pitch and rhythm and,
in that profound sense, has “serialized the rhythm” of the piece. I don’t
want to exaggerate Crawford’s achievement—the rhythms are not serialized in
any consistent or systematic way. Nonetheless, these things happen often
enough in her music to suggest clearly that she is aware of a profound
analogy of rhythm and pitch, and of the possibility of projecting the same
musical motives in both dimensions.. The next time a history of rhythmic
practice, or of serialism is written, I think Crawford will have
to occupy a prominent place—she currently appears hardly at all.33
Issues
and controversies surrounding Crawford’s historical significance and the
nature of her influence remain volatile at this point in time. Theoretical
work by both Shreffler and Straus has yet to be assimilated into mainstream
historical writing. Most recently, Teresa Davidian has begun to explore
affinities and influences between Crawford and Cage. Even if she overstates
the case, Davidian has a point when she writes, “For all the attention and
tribute paid to Crawford over the years, scholars have stopped
short of investigating her influence on other composers.”34
With
respect to women’s history, the question has to be placed against a void: how
often in mainstream historical writing does one encounter the acknowledgement
of a female composer as an influence on a male contemporary or successor?
Rarely. Given the vicissitudes of reception, one never should underestimate
the burden of proof required to link one composer with another, especially
when a female composer is involved. No doubt the present generation of new
scholars will contribute greatly to the stabilization of Ruth Crawford
Seeger’s historical placement. Perhaps in the future, we will see her more
securely anchored within mainstream modernism, and treated less like an
anomaly who followed her own path within an historically marginalized
tradition. In the meantime, the encompassing nature of Ruth Crawford’s
musical empiricism and her “different tunes” continue to challenge the very
definitions of the categories through which modern music history has been
constructed.
—Northeastern
University
Editors’
note: This article is a revised excerpt from Judith Tick’s “Writing Female
Composers into Mainstream Music History: Ruth Crawford Seeger as a Case
Study,” published in Frauen- und Männerbilder in der Musik: Festschrift
für Eva Rieger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Freia Hoffmann, Jane Bowers, and
Ruth Heckmann (BIS Universität Oldenburg, 2000).
Notes
Click on note number to return to its place in the
text.
1 Peggy Seeger, “Different Tunes,” in The Peggy
Seeger Songbook, Warts and All: Forty Years of Songmaking, ed. Irene
Scott (Oak Publications, 1998), 230.
2 George Perle, “Atonality and
the Twelve-Tone System in the United States,” The Score (July 1960),
58-59.
3 Judith Tick, Ruth
Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (Oxford
University Press, 1997), 314, incorrectly lists the concert George Perle
attended as the performance in 1950.
4 Interview with George Perle
by the author, 16 February 1987.
5 Letter from George Perle to
Charles Seeger, 20 October 1959, Seeger Collection, Library of Congress.
6 Eric Salzman, “Distaff Disk.
Ruth Seeger’s Work Ahead of Its Era,” The New York Times, 16 April
1961.
7 Telephone interview with
Teresa Sterne by the author, 12 December 1999.
8 Andrew Porter, “Modern
Pleasures,” The New Yorker, 10 February 1973.
9 John Rockwell, review of
recording by the Composers Quartet, Nonesuch H71280 in High Fidelity
Magazine, July 1973.
10 John Rockwell, writing in
The New York Times, 21 February 1975, as cited in Jane Weiner LePage, Women
Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century: Selected
Biographies (Scarecrow Press, 1980), 49.
11 Matilda Gaume, Ruth
Crawford Seeger: Her Life and Works (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University,
1973).
12 Rita H. Mead, Henry
Cowell’s New Music, 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions and the Recordings
(UMI Editions, 1981).
13 Telephone interview with
Matilda Gaume by the author, 30 November 1999.
14 Mead, Henry Cowell’s
New Music, 257.
15 Telephone interview with
Teresa Sterne by the author, 12 December 1999.
16 Interview with Jeannie
Pool by the author, 30 November 1999.
17 The “anxiety of
authorship” is a phrase coined by the literary critics Sandra Gilbert and
Sandra Gubar to refer to the discouraging effects of the absence of female
models as artists. For a definition see Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi,
eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism
(Columbia University Press, 1995), 13-14.
18 Heidi Von Gunden, The
Music of Vivian Fine (Scarecrow Press, 1999), 71.
19 Pauline Oliveros, “Many
Strands,” in Software for People: Collected Writings, 1963-80 (Smith
Publications, 1984), 89-90.
20 Although absent from the
index, Crawford Seeger is mentioned in Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-century
Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (Norton,
1991), 297. She is excluded from Bryan R. Simms, Music of the Twentieth
Century: Style and Structure (Schirmer, 1986).
21 See Elliott Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century
Music (Prentice Hall, 1992), 201, for commentary on the Preludes for
Piano, and Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (Schirmer,
1997), 42, for a discussion of Music for Small Orchestra.
22 David Nicholls, “Ruth
Crawford Seeger: An Introduction,” Musical Times 124 (1983), 421-25.
23 Charles Seeger, “On
Dissonant Counterpoint,” Modern Music 7 (June-July 1930), 25-31.
24 Mark D. Nelson, “In
Pursuit of Charles Seeger’s Heterophonic Ideal: Three Palindromic Works by
Ruth Crawford,” Musical Quarterly 72 (1986): 458-75; David Nicholls, American
Experimental Music 1890-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
25 Charles Seeger, Studies
in Musicology II: 1929-1979, ed. Ann M. Pescatello (University of California
Press, 1994), 17-274. While I used this document in my biography of Crawford,
Joseph N. Straus made it the foundational basis of his analytic study, The
Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995). See
also Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
26 Tick, Ruth Crawford
Seeger, 131-32.
27 Nancy Yunhwa Rao,
“Partnership in Modern Music: Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, 1929-31,” American
Music 15/3 (Fall 1997), 374.
28 Matilda Gaume, Ruth
Crawford Seeger: Memories, Memoirs, Music (Scarecrow Press, 1986) and
Gaume, “Ruth Crawford Seeger,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art
Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (University of
Illinois Press, 1986), 370-88.
29 Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering
Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam
Gideon (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
30 David Schiff, The
Music of Elliott Carter (Eulenberg, 1983), 69.
31 Anne Shreffler, “Elliott
Carter and his America,” Sonus 14/2 (1994), 39, 49.
32 Carol J. Oja, “The USA,
1918-45,” in Modern Times: From World War I to the Present, ed. Robert
P. Morgan (Prentice Hall, 1994), 213.
33 Straus, “Ruth Crawford’s
Serialism,” unpublished speech, Cornell University, 26 October 1992.
34 Teresa Davidian, “Ruth
Crawford Seeger and John Cage: New Connections between Two American
Originals,” paper presented at the 16th annual congress of the International
Musicological Society, London, 19 August 1997; Davidian, “From Crawford to
Cage: Parallels and Transformations,” Musical Quarterly, forthcoming.
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