312 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
Seeger in 1932, shortly after her return from Europe, Ruth Crawford had already
written some of the most remarkable music composed by any American.CHARLES SEEGER’S “DISSONANT COUNTERPOINT”
Although Charles Seeger wrote no signifi cant compositions, his ideas provided
an intellectual framework that aided the artistic achievements of other musi-
cians, especially Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. The
core of his compositional theory he termed dissonant counterpoint. W hereas
traditional counterpoint was concerned with combining multiple melodic lines
in such a way as to achieve maximum euphony, Seeger inverted those rules to
assure maximum dissonance—what Cowell called “shifting the center of gravity
from consonance to dissonance.” Moreover, Seeger extended the idea of disso-
nant counterpoint to other elements besides pitch. If pitches can be juxtaposed
in dissonant relationships, he asked, is it possible to do the same with rhythms,
dynamics, and timbres? The result would be music in which the various melodic
lines would interact in complete independence from one another.
The danger, of course, is that such “dissonated” music (to use Seeger’s term)
would simply fall apart, with each instrument or voice going off in its own direc-
tion. But in Crawford’s mature works, the highly dissonated musical lines para-
doxically weave together to form a strong fabric with an intricate pattern. The
analogy is Crawford’s own: she compared one of her compositions to a Persian rug.
That composition, String Quartet 1931, begun during her stay in Europe and
completed shortly before her marriage to Seeger, is Crawford’s masterpiece.
In the third movement, the four instruments—two violins, viola, and cello—
play sustained notes with unsynchronized rising and falling dynamics, draw-
ing the listener’s ear from one instrument to another, creating a melody whose
successive notes are played by different instruments. The result is what Arnold
Schoenberg called Klangfarbenmelodie (tone color melody): a melody that is a
succession of not only pitches but also timbres. Moreover, the movement extends
the traditional notion of a canon, in which a melody is stated in all the voices or
instruments one after the other (as in a round such as “Frère Jacques”). Here, it
is not the pitches of the melody that are stated in canon but the dynamics, the
rising and falling swells of sound.
Because the technical aspects of her later music are so complex, verbal
descriptions tend to make Crawford’s mature compositions sound like purely
intellectual exercises. Yet she never lost the spiritual intensity of her earlier,
Rudhyar-inspired pieces. Writing to her student Vivian Fine in 1931, Crawford
asserted, “Music must fl ow. It must be a thread unwinding, a thread from no
one knows just where. It must not be a problem in mathematics, writing music.”A PEOPLE’S MUSICIAN
Like Copland and many other musicians in the 1930s, Charles and Ruth Crawford
Seeger were drawn to leftist political causes, at least in part as a response to the
economic depression. As the folk singer Pete Seeger, a son of Charles’s from his
fi rst marriage, later recalled, “I came home from school and I found Father and
Ruth up to their ears in radical politics.” Active in the Workers Music League,String Quartet 1931172028_13_305-331_r3_ko.indd 312 23/01/13 8:39 PM