An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 13 | A MUSICAL REVOLUTIONARY: RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER 311

In this and other compositions of

the 1930s and later, Copland found

a way to merge his modernist inter-

ests with music that appealed to

conservative tastes. Four large-scale

works of the period reveal a New

World stamp by borrowing Ameri-

can folk and popular melodies. In

two ballets about the West, Billy the

Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), cowboy

and western tunes appear. A Lincoln

Portrait (1942) for orchestra, featur-

ing a narrator who speaks words of

Abraham Lincoln, quotes Stephen

Foster’s “Camptown Races” and a

New England folk song, “Spring-

fi eld Mountain.” Appalachian Spring

(1944), a ballet set in rural Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century, contains

a set of variations on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts.”

Thomson, Harris, and Copland in these years all belonged in the camp of stylis-

tic conservatism. Yet each had his own sound and approach, and each found ways

to advance his musical language in the direction of modernism without alienating

the general audience for music. The more conservative aspects of their music can

be understood as a response to the political and cultural mood of Depression-era

America. Similar political concerns, however, are also evident in one of the most

important ultramodernist composers of the 1930s: Ruth Crawford Seeger.

A MUSICAL REVOLUTIONARY:

RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER

In 1914 a thirteen-year-old girl in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote a poem in which

she imagined her future as a novelist, a poet, and a musician not only perform-

ing on “a great opera stage” but also “singing to children my own.” Though she

would produce no novels or poems as an adult, young Ruth Crawford seemed

somehow aware of her future as a composer, an author of books of musical

arrangements, and a mother and stepmother to three important musicians. Her

adolescent poem also anticipated the tug-of-war between professional and fam-

ily demands that would shape her career.

W hile studying piano and composition at the American Conservatory of

Music in Chicago during the 1920s, Crawford heard lectures and concerts by

visiting musicians Henry Cowell and Dane Rudhyar (see chapter 12), and she

began writing piano pieces inspired by Rudhyar’s mystical liberation of dis-

sonance. When some of her pieces were included on League of Composers

and Copland-Sessions programs, Crawford was drawn into the circle of New

York ultramodernists. In 1929 she moved to New York to study with Charles

Seeger, and in 1930–31 she lived in Berlin and Paris, where she met such leading

European modernists as Alban Berg and Béla Bartók. By the time she married

Aaron Copland on Composers and Audiences

in the 1930s

T

he old “special” public of the modern-music concerts [of the

1920s] had fallen away, and the conventional concert public

continued apathetic or indifferent to anything but the established

classics. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working

in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for music had grown

up around the radio and phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them

and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt it was worth the

effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible

terms.

In their own words

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