Crawford, Ruth (1901–1953)

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Crawford, Ruth (1901–1953)

American composer and pioneering folk-song archivist who was the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in composition. Name variations: Ruth Crawford Seeger or Ruth Crawford-Seeger. Born Ruth Porter Crawford on July 3, 1901, in East Liverpool, Ohio; died of cancer in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on November 18, 1953; daughter of Clara Alletta (Graves) Crawford (a teacher) and Clark Crawford (a Methodist minister); graduated American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Bachelor of Music (B.M.), 1924, Master of Music (M.M.), 1927; married Charles Louis Seeger, in 1932; children: Michael known as Mike Seeger (b. August 1933, a singer and multi-instrumentalist); Peggy Seeger (b. 1935); Barbara Seeger (b. 1937); Penelope known as Penny Seeger (b. 1943, a singer).

Began piano lessons at age six; taught piano at the School of Musical Art in Jacksonville during and after completion of high school; entered the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago (fall 1920); completed and premiered earliest musical compositions in public performance (beginning 1924); won first prize in a composition contest sponsored by Sigma Alpha Iota (1927); was in residence at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire (summer 1929); left Chicago for New York City (fall 1929); studied composition with Charles Seeger (1929–30); awarded Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1930); spent year in Europe (1930–31); returned to New York (November 1931); associated with the Composers Collective (1932–33); began collecting, transcribing, and arranging folk songs (1933); moved to Washington, D.C. area (1935); gave private piano lessons and taught music in several nursery schools (1935–53); published folk-song collections (1948–53). Awards: first prize, composition contest, Sigma Alpha Iota (1927); Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1930).

Published compositions:

Four Preludes for Piano (San Francisco: New Music Edition, 1932); Piano Study in Mixed Accents (San Francisco: New Music Edition, 1932); Three Songs for Contralto, Oboe, Piano, and Percussion (San Francisco: New Music Edition, 1933); String Quartet 1931 (Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1941); Suite for Wind Quintet (New York: Continuo Music Press, 1969); Chant (NY: Continuo Music Press, 1971); Chinaman, Laundryman, and Sacco Vanzetti (Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music, 1976); Diaphonic Suites (NY: Continuo Music Press, 1972).

Published folk-song anthologies:

American Songbag (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1927); Our Singing Country (NY: Macmillan, 1941); Coal Dust on the Fiddle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943); Folk Song U.S.A. (NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947); American Folk Songs for Children (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948); Anthology of Pennsylvania Folklore (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); Animal Folk Songs for Children (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950); Treasury of Western Folklore (NY: Crown, 1951); American Folk Songs for Christmas (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1953); Let's Build a Railroad (NY: Aladdin Books, 1954); Folklore Infantil do Santo Domingo (Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1955).

Selected discography:

Diaphonic Suite No. 3 for Two Clarinets, CPO 999111-2, "Clarinet Counterpoints" (1930); Five Songs, Cambria CD-1037 (1929); Quartet, Gramavision R4S-79440 (1931); Two Movements for Chamber Orchestra, Delos DCD-1012 (1926); Music of Ruth Crawford-Seeger, Musical Heritage Society MHC 312229X.

Widely recognized as one of the most innovative American composers of the first half of the 20th century, Ruth Crawford became an influential member of the musical avant-garde during the 1920s, and in 1930 she was the first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in composition. She was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, into a family of upper-middle-class standing both socially and economically. Her father Clark Crawford was a Methodist minister, and her mother Clara Crawford was an occasional teacher. The family moved frequently, eventually settling in Jacksonville, Florida. Beginning in the fall of 1912, a serious kidney ailment forced Clark to spend considerable time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His death occurred less than two years later, leaving Clara with sole financial responsibility for her daughter Ruth and son Carl.

Seeger, Peggy (b. 1935)

American folk singer and songwriter. Born in 1935; daughter of Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) and Charles Louis Seeger; sister of Penny Seeger (1943—); half-sister of Pete Seeger; married Ewan MacColl (died).

Peggy Seeger writes and sings folk ballads, mostly with a feminist slant, as represented by the song "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer." Many of her albums, including At the Present Moment for Rounder, were collaborations with her husband Ewan MacColl, British folk artists, or her brother and sister. With her brother Mike Seeger, she recorded the album American Folk Songs for Children for Rounder; with Mike and her sister Penny, she recorded the album American Folk Songs for Christmas, also for Rounder.

Ruth Crawford began piano lessons when about six years of age and soon exhibited unusual

musical talent. During her high school years, she took harmony lessons and wrote her first compositions (none of which survive). At the beginning of her senior year, the director of the School of Musical Art in Jacksonville offered Crawford a teaching position, which she held for three years. She also continued her own study of composition and piano.

A bequest of money, possibly from her father's family, allowed Crawford to enroll at the American Conservatory in Chicago in the fall of 1921. Though not an overly large sum, it supported her for one year. Her goal was simple: she wanted to become a concert pianist. But in 1922, muscle spasms and tension in her arms forced her to reduce the time spent practicing piano. In frustration, she wrote her mother on March 14, 1922:

I cannot practice! My left arm has gone on strike. I have kept thinking that with my letting up on practising—with the rest it would thus be getting, it would be all right. But for the past week I have done this: got in only two hours Friday, an hour Saturday, (etc.)…. I took an electric treatment Saturday, but it made me worse instead of better.

Fortunately, Crawford's affinity for harmonization exercises and composition provided much needed solace during this difficult period.

She returned to the Conservatory for a second year, this time supported by teaching piano lessons. Her muscular difficulties continued to preclude extended practice, and she instead concentrated on composition. Her assignments completed under the tutelage of Adolf Weidig earned Crawford high praise. In the two years that followed, Weidig assumed a role of increasing prominence in Crawford's education, eventually serving as her private composition instructor. Crawford later recalled her lessons in a January 29, 1933, letter to Nicolas Slonimsky:

Sprinkling sevenths and ninths plentifully and insistently, and observing or breaking the solemn rules of harmony with equal regularity, I was guided with great understanding during the next years by Adolf Weidig, … who seems to me to have had an unusual balance between necessary discipline and necessary allowance for individuality.

Upon completion of her bachelor's degree in 1924, Crawford continued on at the Conservatory, earning her master's degree in composition, summa cum laude, in 1927. Years later, in a letter to Slonimsky (January 29, 1933), she recalled other important influences she experienced as a student: "Contact in 1925 with Djane Lavoie Herz, with whom I studied piano, and with Dane Rudyar, and later with Henry Cowell, established a definite turning-point in my work." It enabled her to "see far along the way" toward which she "had been groping" with her numerous student compositions. Rudyar later rendered significant support in Crawford's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Through Herz, Crawford made the acquaintance of Henry Cowell, her first publisher, and Alfred Frankenstein, later the music and art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Frankenstein maintained a lifelong enthusiasm for avant-garde music, especially Crawford's, and also introduced Crawford to Carl Sandburg, who collaborated with Crawford in various creative projects.

Crawford spent the summer of 1929 in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire—a secluded haven for artists, writers and musicians. Supported by a grant, she worked on several song settings for the poetry of Carl Sandburg, including "Joy," "Loam," and "Sunsets." Near the end of her stay, she met the composer and author Marion Bauer (1887–1955), whose friendship and advice Crawford valued highly. She wrote in a diary entry dated August 16, 1929:

One thing I learned from this beautiful afternoon with Marion Bauer was that I had been forgetting that craftsmanship was also art. I have not been composing and have felt tense, partly because I relied on inspiration only. I was not willing to work things out…. Courage, Marion Bauer tells me—work. You have a great talent. You must go ahead.

In the fall of 1929, Crawford moved to New York City and began a year of study with the noted musicologist, composer, and teacher Charles Seeger. The compositions she completed preceding her arrival represented a synthesis of experimental procedures supported by a keen awareness of more well-established and traditional techniques. Marion Bauer noted that Crawford's music of this period was "distinctly in a cerebral stage," but her warm emotional nature was "threatening to break through." During her studies with Seeger, Crawford explored the potential of an innovative procedure known as "dissonant counterpoint." No longer lingering at a creative crossroads, she rapidly developed her own unique style that combined atonal melodies and angular rhythmic lines in delicate counterpoint. She wrote relatively few compositions while in New York, but the high quality and exquisite technical development evident in her work convinced the Guggenheim Foundation committee to select her as a recipient—the first woman ever—of a grant to study composition in Europe for a year.

While in Europe, Crawford met many renowned and influential musicians, most notably Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, Bela Bartók, Alban Berg and Nadia Boulanger . Rather than studying with these or any other well-established composers, Crawford set out on her own. She completed the celebrated String Quartet 1931, arguably the most influential composition of the first half of the 20th century. Composer and critic George Perle was among the first to observe its "marked advance in technical complexity and musical interest," which far surpassed music written some 30 years later. She also wrote the fourth and final Diaphonic Suite, which was premiered in Berlin on April 8, 1931. Wrote Edward Ansel Mowrer:

Crawford allows a viola and cello to talk simultaneously, with the effect of hearing two telephone voices at once. At the end of the second movement the two speakers begin to coalesce. Her aim, so she stated, was to achieve new effects in atonal music and her success was apparent.

In late 1931, Crawford returned to New York City and immediately faced the challenge of finding living quarters and employment. She sought piano students and found some time for composition. Her relationship with Charles Seeger, kept viable during her absence through frequent correspondence, now extended far beyond the boundaries of teacher and pupil. They were married on October 2, 1932, and the first of their four children, folk singer Michael Seeger, was born a year later.

At the instigation of Henry Cowell, Crawford and Seeger became involved, in the early 1930s, with a small group of New York musicians and intellectuals called the Composer's Collective. The organization focused on the economic hardship of the Depression and sought to give musical expression to a variety of political and social ills. Two important protest songs—"Sacco, Vanzetti" and "Chinaman, Laundryman"—completed by Crawford in 1933, reflect her association with the Collective. These were among the last pieces of art music she composed. With musical opportunities becoming increasingly scarce in New York City, Crawford and Seeger moved their family to the Washington, D.C., area.

After 1933, Crawford turned her creative energy solely to the collection and transcription of folk music, working in collaboration with Seeger, Carl Sandburg, folk archivists John and Alan Lomax, and Pete Seeger (Charles Seeger's son from his first marriage). In a letter to composer Edgard Varèse on May 29, 1948, Crawford wrote:

I am not sure whether the road I have been following the last dozen years is a main road or a detour. I have begun to feel, the past year or two, that it is the latter—a detour, but a very important one to me, during which I have descended from the stratosphere onto a solid well-traveled highway, folded my wings and breathed good friendly dust as I travelled along in and out of the thousands of fine traditional folk-tunes which I have been hearing and singing and transcribing from field recordings.

Crawford assumed a variety of roles in these projects, including music consultant, arranger, editor, or transcriber, all of which resulted in several published volumes of songs. Alan Lomax described his collaboration with Crawford in a taped interview with biographer Matilda Gaume:

It was a wonderful experience to work with her because she was tireless … she had a wonderful ear and she cared very, very, very much. And of course was the nicest woman that could possibly be imagined. You couldn't help loving her. She was like my older sister, or like my aunt, or like my best friend, and it was Our Singing Country that we worked on so long and hard together that was a testament about how good it can get if it's a folk song book.

In 1941, Crawford accepted a teaching position at the cooperative nursery school attended by her children and drew upon arrangements of folk songs for much of her teaching material. In her introductory essay for American Folk Songs for Children, Crawford summarized her philosophical, educational, and aesthetic reasons for choosing folk music:

This kind of traditional or folk music is thoroughly identified with the kind of people who made America as we know it. Some of it came … from other countries and has been little changed…. All of it has partaken of the making of America…. It belongs to our children—it is an integral part of their cultural heritage.

During the late spring or early summer of 1953, Crawford began to experience ill health, which was eventually diagnosed as cancer. An operation in the early fall temporarily relieved her symptoms and she rallied briefly. Her attempts to resume teaching and composing proved futile, however, and her condition gradually worsened. She died on November 18, 1953, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

"For all her great creative gifts and wide musical knowledge," writes Sidney Robertson Cowell, Ruth Crawford "was a sturdy personality of the utmost simplicity and naturalness. She had the widest possible sympathies, the quickest loyalty and kindness—a memorably rich and generous human being who was a most rewarding friend."

sources:

Cowell, Sidney Robertson. "Ruth Crawford Seeger, 1901–1953," in International Folk Music Journal. Vol 8, 1955, pp. 55–56.

Gaume, Matilda. "Crawford (Seeger), Ruth (Porter)," in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. 4 vols. Ed. by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie. NY: Macmillan, 1986, Vol. 1, pp. 531–532.

——. "Ruth Crawford: A Promising Young Composer in New York, 1929–30," in American Music. Spring 1987, pp. 74–84.

——. "Ruth Crawford Seeger," in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950. Ed. by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 370–388.

——. Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memoirs, Memories, Music. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986.

Karpf, Juanita. "'Pleasure in the Very Smallest Things': Trichordal Transformation in Ruth Crawford's Diaphonic Suites," in The Music Review, 1995.

——. "Tradition and Experimentation: An Analytical Study of Two Diaphonic Suites by Ruth Crawford," unpublished D.M.A. dissertation, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 1992.

Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890–1940. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Perle, George. "Atonality and the Twelve-Note System in the United States," in The Score. Vol. 27, July 1960, pp. 51–66.

"Ruth Crawford's Settings of Sandburg Poems Issued by New Music," in Musical America. May 25, 1933, p. 53.

Seeger, Ruth Crawford. American Folk Songs for Children. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948.

Wilding-White, Ray. "Remembering Ruth Crawford Seeger: An Interview with Charles and Peggy Seeger," in American Music. Vol. 6, Winter 1988, pp. 442–454.