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

Judith Tick (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195065093 | ISBN-13: 978-0195065091 | Publication Date: September 25, 1997 | Edition: First Edition

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 on folk 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 folk music revival, issuing several important books of transcriptions and arrangements and pioneering the use of American folk songs in children's music education. Radicalized by the Depression, she spent much of the ensuing two decades working aggressively for social change with her husband and stepson, the folksinger Pete Seeger.

This engrossing new biography emphasizes the choices Crawford Seeger made in her roles as composer, activist, teacher, wife and mother. The first woman to win a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in music composition, Crawford Seeger nearly gave up writing music as the demands of family, politics, and the folk song movement intervened. It was only at the very end of her life, with cancer sapping her strength, that she returned to composing. Written with unique insight and compassion, this book offers the definitive treatment of a fascinating twentieth-century figure.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Long-awaited in some musical circles, this admiring biography of one member of an influential American family of musicians is deeper, broader, and more theoretically conceived than Matilda Gaume's Ruth Crawford Seeger: Memoirs, Memories, Music (Scarecrow, 1986) and effectively replaces it. Deriving insights from new sources and interviews and providing fresh analyses of many of Seeger's compositions, this lively but scholarly book grapples with its subject's several identities. Examining her roles as classically trained modernist composer, wife-mother-homemaker, folklorist, and music educator, Tick (American Women Composers Before 1870, Univ. of Rochester, 1995) at times applies feminist theory and late 20th-century wisdom to an early to mid-20th-century life. Recommended for those seriously interested in women's studies, classical and folk music and music education, and American studies.?Bonnie Jo Dopp, Univ. of Maryland Lib., College Park
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Tick followed where Crawford's life has taken her, and has done so brilliantly....Informed by rich resources of letters, diaries, interviews, and domestic manifestos, and enriched by her grasp of the cultural tapestry against which Crawford's life took place, Tick has written an engaging narrative....With this absorbing book, readers may become familiar with a not-so-thoroughly modern composer whose life and work should now take a central place in the continuing debate over the nature of twentieth-century modernism."--Women's Review of Books

"Elegantly written and richly textured....Essential for all libraries."--Choice

"Deriving insights from new sources and interviews and providing fresh analyses of many of Seeger's compositions, this lively but scholarly book grapples with its subject's several identities....Recommended to those seriously interested in women's studies, classical and folk music and music education, and American studies."--Library Journal

"This long-awaited book is more than a biography of a neglected American musician. It is an eloquent and subtle portrait of music and culture in twentieth-century America. It is a beautifully written, exemplary work of scholarship and biography."--Leon Botstein, President, Bard College, and Editor of The Musical Quarterly

"A wonderful book, which will be an inspiration to women musicians in many countries and languages. It will be of interest to many--not just women, and not just musicians or teachers or collectors of folk music."--Pete Seeger

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 488 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (September 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195065093
• ISBN-13: 978-0195065091
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,793,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a musical revolutionary from many perspectives, June 28, 1999

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Rachel Abbinanti ([e-mail]) (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music (Hardcover)

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.