Heard Any Good Ruth Crawford Records Lately?

Discrimination against female composers, it would seem, has all but come to an end.

One of early music’s biggest hitmakers is Hildegard Von Bingen, medieval mistress of chant, a cult heroine despite the fact that 1998 marks her 900th birthday. Meanwhile, works by women such as Julia Wolfe, Kaija Saariaho and Lois V Vierk are actively sought by orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles and soloists everywhere.

There are enough women now writing interesting and important music that feminists are no longer forced to unearth second-tier talents, like Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann, for validation. Even a novel short-listed this year for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, Bernard MacLaverty’s “Grace Notes,” examines the emotional life of a female composer from Belfast, though unfortunately in patronizing fashion.

That said, there remains the case of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

She was one of America’s great musical talents in the first half of the century. Her music was strikingly original and inventive, and it was so recognized by her peers, even at a time when it was almost impossible for a female composer to be taken seriously. She was also well connected, having married Charles Seeger, a legendary musicologist and pioneering ethnomusicologist.

Moreover, her surname would become enduringly famous. Yes, she is one of those Seegers. She was folk singer Pete Seeger’s stepmother and the mother of folk-revivalists Mike and Peggy Seeger.

So why is it more than likely that you have never encountered her music in concert, despite such champions today as the Arditti String Quartet and the conductor Oliver Knussen? Why is that the first mainstream recording of her music was only recently made, an outstanding survey of her career led by Knussen and recorded on Deutsche Grammophon? And why is it that the American wing of DG originally decided not to issue the disc, released last month in Europe, in this country?

Those questions, it turns out, raise important issues in American music and in American society. And thanks to Judith Tick’s fascinating new biography “Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music” (Oxford University Press), we have some answers.

The daughter of Midwestern minister and a feisty proto-feminist mother, Ruth Crawford was born in 1901. It was a time when women were the chief promoters of culture in America (by 1910, 62% of all music teachers were women). Yet it was also an era when virility was considered the distinguishing character in music.

Thus Crawford’s composition teacher in Chicago, Adolph Weidig, a German emigre who supplied white handkerchiefs to his students who broke down in his demanding class, recognized and encouraged Crawford’s talent, but he also insisted that she rise above the conventional feminine behavior of false modesty.

This conflict between “feminine” and “masculine” was not resolvable. In Crawford’s case, she was torn early on between her attraction to spiritual and mystic musical influences (read “feminized”) of a composer like Scriabin and virile abstract modernism (Ives’ “a good dissonance is like a man”).

But she faced other challenges as well.

First came the balancing of art and hearth. When she married Charles Seeger in 1932, he was 14 years her senior with three children from a previous marriage (Pete, who was born in 1919, was the youngest), and she “composed,” as she called it, four babies of her own.

Political and economic considerations also played a major role in her life. As a leftist in the ‘30s, she found that the ultramodern music she had composed in the late ‘20s came to seem politically incorrect--after all, what did it do to unite the workers of the world?

During the Depression, Charles had to seek employment in Federal government projects like the WPA, for which he collected American traditional music. In 1936, Ruth and a 17-year-old Pete accompanied Charles to Bascom Lunsford’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in North Carolina. Pete heard a five-string banjo for the first time and his life was changed. And Tick says that the festival proved a conversion experience for Ruth.

From then on, she devoted herself to folk music. She made transcriptions of field recordings that were published in John Lomax’s groundbreaking “Anthology of American Folk Song.” She later published an another groundbreaking work, “American Folk Songs for Children,” which had an incalculable effect on American music education and not incidentally on the Seeger family finances.

Through it all, and not surprisingly, her composition suffered. The bulk of her music was written when she was still Ruth Crawford, in the six years before her marriage. It is a small output of generally small pieces--a violin sonata, a string quartet, some songs, piano miniatures.

The music is modernist, knotty, sometimes difficult. But it bursts with wild fantasy and color. Some of it is mystically intense, some of it jazzy and brilliantly syncopated. There is never a wasted note.

The music from the ‘30s, after her marriage, is more political and folk-inspired, and it, too, is wonderful. But there is too little of it--as a Seeger, she never quite developed a new voice. Then, in the early ‘50s, when she returned to composition--with the Suite for Wind Quintet, which initiated a reconciliation between the populist and modernist sides of her personality--it was too late. She died in 1953 of stomach cancer, the year after the suite premiered.

Charles Seeger lived long. In the ‘70s, he became a patriarchal figure of the UCLA ethnomusicology department, and died in 1979. Virgil Thomson and other champions of Ruth blamed him and their marriage for her undoing as a composer.

“He worked her too hard, and she cooked too much,” Thomson once said. But Tick’s research portrays Ruth’s story as far more interesting and complicated: Her difficult choices were her own.

With excellent timing, Knussen’s recording--which is currently available in some record stores as an import and which will be widely available in January when Deutsche Grammophon releases it in the U.S.--finally offers the evidence we have needed: This is important American music.

Indeed, the persuasiveness of the recording combined with Tick’s riveting biography forced Deutsche Grammophon’s hand, pressuring the company to make the CD available here where it is most needed.

Such, of course, is entirely in keeping with the Ruth Crawford Seeger saga. “Composing babies” instead of music, transcribing folk songs instead of continuing with her own work, made her too easy to write off as a serious composer.

But once heard, the music that she did write cannot be ignored. And--move over Hildegard--at long last, her time has come.