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

by Judith Tick

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195065093
• ISBN13: 9780195065091
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

a musical revolutionary from many perspectives

Judith Tick does an indispensable service here in writing the first full-length biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger. And it is a damn shame that Seeger was takened in 1951 an early age for someone with a consummate gift for composition. Tick traverses her entire life down to the walks from one library to another to concerts in Chicago, along Michigan Avenue. Infrequently we never read about Seeger's radicalism, her days, as most artists with the Labour Movement in the United States throughout the early part of this century. Tick makes us believe Seeger's understanding of this,not only in writing politically progressive music, music which identifies with the exploited, but how these experiences in facing these dark times informed her more abstract music. Tick gives a great narrative on these pre-McCarthy Era times,placing Seeger's work in a context,in fact so much so that her creativity suffered under too much involvement.