Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music

by Judith Tick

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant American female composer in this century. Joining Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell as a key member of the 1920s musical avant-garde, she went on to study with modernist theorist and future husband Charles Seeger, writing her masterpiece, String Quartet 1931, not long after. But her legacy extends far beyond the cutting edge of modern music. Collaborating with poet Carl Sandburg on folk song arrangements in the twenties, and with the famous folk-song collectors John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s, she emerged as a central figure in the American folk music revival, issuing several important books of transcriptions and arrangements and pioneering the use of American folk songs in children's music education. Radicalized by the Depression, she spent much of the ensuing two decades working aggressively for social change with her husband and stepson, the folksinger Pete Seeger.

This engrossing new biography emphasizes the choices Crawford Seeger made in her roles as composer, activist, teacher, wife and mother. The first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in music composition, Crawford Seeger nearly gave up writing music as the demands of family, politics, and the folk song movement intervened. It was only at the very end of her life, with cancer sapping her strength, that she returned to composing. Written with unique insight and compassion, this book offers the definitive treatment of a fascinating twentieth-century figure.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger, American composer and leading figure in the the folk revival of the mid-20th century, was extremely good. Well written and well-researched, this book delves into the complexities of Crawford Seeger's life as both a woman and a musician. Tick explores her life as a composers, folksong scholar, teacher, and mother. Not only was Crawford Seeger and important and influential modernist composer up through the 1930s, she was also a leader in the rediscovery of American folk music in the 1940s and 1950s. She was especially instrumental in reorganizing elementary school music education around American folk music.
Tick also explores the tensions between and among these roles and endeavors in Crawford Seeger's life. Crawford Seeger all but ceased composing after the mid-1930s, as domestic life, teaching, and folksong scholarship took up more of her time. She only returned to it shortly before her untimely death from cancer in 1953. It's interesting that it seems that her creative life was hampered more by the expectations that she, as a woman, would carry all the responsibility for child-rearing and running a household than by negative attitudes regarding women's musical abilities.

[Wenshu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tracing back to the 19th century, one of the controversial subjects in the public debate called “woman composer subject” was repleted with comments of prejudices against women composers by men. Likewise in academia, it had been a long journey until women could receive proper music education. Sadly, such biases and double-bind sexual aesthetics still exist today. 
 
Besides the significant relevance to our present, the writing of Judith Tick holds onto a sense of gentleness, delicateness, and deliberateness that are manifested throughout the biography she wrote on one of the most important figures in music history: Ruth Crawford Seeger. It is well-researched yet mixed with a novelistic style. The present and the past are intertwined through parallelism that always intrigued the readers to want to read more. Not being historicized as a figure like other male archetypes, Judith Tick presents to us in a new way that expresses sensibility, complexity, and humanity through a variety of life events of Ruth Crawford Seeger. As readers, we witness the growth of a vivid portrait of Ruth Crawford Seeger through the interconnectedness between each detail that continuously metamorphoses over time. 
 
While confronting the harsh judgment from her teacher, Ruth reacted with fortitude; when her mother Clara Crawford persisted in asking her to go back, Ruth insisted on staying in Chicago and rejected the concept of “lady musician” through actions and a series of self-exploration; Through Djane Herz, Dane Rudhyar, Carl Sandberg, Bertha Forster, Henry Cowell, and many other people, Ruth Crawford slowly crafted her own individual artistic gesture in Chicago, the intricacies that wave into the complexities between different connections between Ruth and other women, the passing of her mother, the happenstance of Djane Herz, and the words that Stella Roberts said to her on the premier night of her piece, were illustrated by Tick beautifully with the first-hand resource from Ruth’s own writing. The beautiful summer spent in Macdowell Colony where she pondered on the dichotomy of “work” and “love”, Tick also writes it delicately. In New York, Ruth met Blanche Walton and Charles Seeger who later became her husband. In Berlin, the reclusiveness she blamed herself on while she was under the Guggenheim Fellowship; the tensions between the development of American music with European modernism; the straitened financial circumstances of the Seeger family; the bitterness and happiness in the process of rediscovering American folk songs with Lomax; Tick demonstrates every event with deliberate writing scholastically.
 
However, Ruth Crawford remains to be a mystery in music history. After getting married to Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford stopped her composition. Instead, she turned to revive vernacular American folk songs. Even though Ruth gave up her provocative career as an avant-gardist, Tick elucidates the complexities of Ruth’s decision multifacetedly. For example, Tick mentioned the “masculinity” that is ingrained in the field of music; the meaning of choosing marriage and a career, and the exploration of her own survival as a woman in a male-dominated field. According to the book review of Marcia Citron, “At a time when American music was described as having a distinguishing ‘virility’(85), how could a woman fit in? One strategy that Crawford Seeger used was to adopt the metaphor of a straddler between two worlds. Tick also provides a gender context for her subject’s choices by examining her friendships with other female composers and the social movements affecting women in general at the time.”  [1]
 
To sum up, I highly recommend this book. The deep resonation created by the writing of Judith Tick goes beyond words and goes into my heart, it is definitely an excellent read for professional musicians and scholars in the field of music. For us, not only does the book offer a detailed glimpse back to the life of one of the most significant composers Ruth Crawford Seeger but also it offers us the opportunities to ponder on what can we enhance on encouraging more voices, especially from women, and feministic approach on demanding a more inclusive environment regardless of genders through the lens of the past. As Tick stated at the end of the book: “Ruth Crawford Seeger’s profound approach to cultural mediation belongs not only just to her past, but to our present --- the effort we expend on her goals, one of the hallmarks of our own historical moment.”[2]


[1] Citron, Marcia J. Signs, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 324–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175407. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.
 
[2] Tick, Judith. 1997. Ruth Crawford Seeger : A Composer’s Search for American Music. Oxford University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.as....

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik vind dat boeken die ik voor school lees ook mogen tellen, zeker als ik ze helemaal lees en samenvat voor mijn bachelorpaper. Voor al uw vragen over RCS kan je dus vanaf nu bij mij terecht, haha