CHAPTER 13 | A MUSICAL REVOLUTIONARY: RUTH CRAWFORD SEEGER 313
which was affi liated with the American Communist Party, Charles described
himself and Ruth as “very loyal fringe members of the Communist front.”
The political climate of the Great Depression gave urgency to radical ideals
of collective action and militancy. Now, in retrospect, the advocacy groups for
modernist music in the 1920s seemed effete and self-regarding. W hat was the
point of writing music simply for oneself and a tiny group of like-minded devo-
tees? Instead the question became, how can modernism be put into the service
of the revolutionary struggle?
For Ruth Crawford Seeger, one attempt to answer that question resulted in a
pair of songs for voice and piano she called Tw o R i c e rc a r i , borrowing an antique
term for music that relies on intricate counterpoint—dissonant counterpoint, in
her case. Written in 1932, both songs are settings of poems by H. T. Tsiang, a Chi-
nese dissident. The fi rst, “Sacco, Vanzetti,” refers to two Italian American anar-
chists who were executed for murder in 1927 after
a notoriously politicized trial; Ben Shahn completed
his famous painting The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti in
the same year that Crawford wrote her song. The sec-
ond, “Chinaman, Laundryman” (LG 13.1), sets a poem
that fi rst appeared in the communist newspaper the
Daily Worker in 1928 and was reprinted the next year in
Tsiang ’s Poems of the Chinese Revolution.
Both poems are examples of a period genre called
“worker’s recitation,” fi lled with exclamations and
exhortations directed both to the listener and to char-
acters within the poem’s narrative. Tsiang’s poems are
somewhat heav y-handed, but Crawford’s music tran-
scends their limitations.
“Chinaman, Laundryman” is in the voice of an
immigrant Chinese laundry worker who is exploited
by his capitalist boss. Some of its themes—longing for
a relative back home, recognition that working condi-
tions may be equally exploitative here as in the home
country—resonate with debates that recur through the
long history of immigrant labor in the United States.
While drawing on the reality that many Chinese Amer-
icans in those years worked in the laundry trade, the
poem counters the period’s stereotypic portrayal of
Chinese men as feminized—suited only for “women’s
work”—and thus inferior to masculine white males. At
the same time, a poem in which an oppressed worker
raises not hammer and sickle but wash brush and iron
could have had a special appeal for Crawford, one of
the few women striving to create modernist music.
Crawford’s setting of “Chinaman, Laundryman”
explores a musical terrain opened up by the concept
of dissonant counterpoint. It comprises two melodic
lines, one sung by the voice and the other played in
octaves by the piano. The vocal line is in duple meter,
the piano in a faster triple meter; the two meters andK Ben Shahn, The Passion
of Sacco and Vanzetti
(1932). Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York.172028_13_305-331_r3_ko.indd 313 23/01/13 8:39 PM