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 the twentieth century. With Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell she was a key member of the 1920s musical avant-garde, and she was the first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in music composition. But her legacy extends far beyond the cutting edge of modern music. Collaborating with poet Carl Sandburg on fork 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 fork music revival. In addition, she became an energetic proponent of social change and devoted much of her last decades to progressive causes. This engrossing new biography emphasizes the choices Crawford Seeger made in her roles as composer, activist, teacher, wife and mother.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195137922
• ISBN13: 9780195137927
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 488 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" 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.