Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger (born Ruth Porter Crawford; July 3, 1901 – November 18, 1953) was an American composer and folk music specialist.

In 1912, the family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where Clark Crawford died of tuberculosis two years later.

After her husband's death, Clara Crawford opened a boarding house and struggled to maintain her family's middle-class lifestyle.

Ruth began writing poetry at an early age and as a teenager had aspirations to become an "authoress or poetess".

She also studied the piano beginning at age six.

In 1913, she began piano lessons with Bertha Foster, who had founded the School of Musical Art in Jacksonville in 1908.

In 1917, Ruth began to study with Madame Valborg Collett, who was a student of Agathe Backer Grøndahl and the most prestigious teacher at Foster's School of Musical Art.

After her graduation from high school in 1918, Crawford began to pursue a career as a concert pianist, continuing her studies with Collett and performing at various musical events in Jacksonville.

She also became a piano teacher at Foster's school and wrote her first compositions for her young pupils in 1918 and 1919.

Though she composed primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, Seeger turned towards studies on folk music from the late 1930s until her death.

Her music influenced later composers, particularly Elliott Carter.

Ruth Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, the second child of Clark Crawford, a Methodist minister, and Clara Crawford (née Graves).

The family moved several times during Crawford's childhood, living in Akron, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, and Muncie, Indiana.

Crawford moved to Chicago in 1921 where she enrolled at the American Conservatory of Music, initially planning to stay for a single year, long enough to earn a teaching certificate.

In Chicago, she attended symphony and opera performances for the first time as well as recitals by eminent pianists including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Arthur Rubinstein.

At the Conservatory, she studied piano with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn.

Crawford's focus at the Conservatory quickly shifted from piano performance to composition.

During her second year there, she began composition and theory studies with Adolf Weidig and wrote several early works, including a Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1923) and a set of theme and variations for piano (1923).

Clara Crawford moved to Chicago to live with her daughter in 1923.

The next year, Ruth received her bachelor's degree in music from the Conservatory and subsequently enrolled in the school's master's degree program.

In 1925, she composed “The Adventures of Tom Thumb,” an experiment which combined the spoken word with music.

While Crawford continued to study theory and composition with Weidig at the American Conservatory of Music through 1929, in 1924 she also began private piano lessons with Djane Lavoie-Herz.

Herz, one of the most prestigious piano teachers in Chicago at the time, had a profound impact on Crawford's intellectual and musical life.

Herz sparked Crawford's interest in theosophy and the music of Alexander Scriabin, and introduced her pupil to an influential community of artists and thinkers.

Through Herz, Crawford met Dane Rudhyar and Henry Cowell, composers who would both have a significant impact on Crawford's music and career.

During this time, Crawford also met the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, whose writings she eventually set to music.

Crawford spent the summer of 1929 at the MacDowell Colony on a scholarship, where she began a friendship with fellow composer Marion Bauer and began work on her Five Songs set to poems by Sandburg.

In the fall of that year, Crawford moved into the New York home of music patron Blanche Walton and began studying composition with Charles Seeger.

In 1930, she became the first female composer to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Berlin and Paris.

She inquired about a renewal of her fellowship several times over the course of the next year, but was ultimately refused a renewal.

During that time, she interviewed Emil Hertzka to discuss publishing her music, but he said "it would be particularly hard for a woman to get anything published."

Crawford subsequently travelled to Vienna and Budapest to meet composers Alban Berg and Béla Bartók to discuss her music and gain support for publication.

Though surrounded by exponents of German modernism, she chose to study and compose alone.

Seeger's ideas, communicated by letter, were crucial to the development of her style and selections.

Her music (especially String Quartet 1931) was a prominent exponent of the emerging modernist aesthetic and she became a central member of a group of American composers known as the "ultramoderns".

She and Charles Seeger married in 1932 after her subsequent trip to Paris.

At the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Amsterdam (1933), her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings represented the United States.

Crawford Seeger and her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1936 after Charles' appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration.

There Crawford Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music.

Her arrangements and interpretations of American traditional folk songs are among the most respected.