Ruth Crawford Seegeraus modern

Ruth Crawford Seeger (* 3 July 1901 in East Liverpool, Ohio; † 18 November 1953 in Chevy Chase, Maryland) was a US composer.

Life

Ruth Crawford first attended the School of Musical Art in Jacksonville (Florida) and studied piano with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn and composition with John Palmer and Adolf Weidig at the American Conservatory in Chicago (Illinois) from 1920. She finished her piano studies with Djane Lavoie Herz, a student of Scriabin, who introduced her to some of the leading “ultramodernists”. This group of American composers aspired to a completely new, experimental musical language and rejected the classical European tradition. Henry Cowell in particular, as well as the mystical-theosophical circle around Dane Rudhyar, influenced the young composer.

From 1925 to 1929 Crawford taught piano at the Elmhurst College of Music in Chicago and settled in New York City in 1929 to continue her composition studies with the musicologist and composer Charles Seeger, Cowell’s teacher. From 1930 to 1931 she stayed in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Budapest and Paris as a Guggenheim Fellow, meeting the leading European composers. In 1931 she married her teacher Charles Seeger.

After 1933, her creative work came to an almost complete standstill. Together with her husband, she now devoted herself to collecting, arranging and researching American folk songs and to educating children. It was only shortly before her death from cancer in 1953 that she turned to composition again. Her style remained unchanged modern; her mostly quite short works are atonal, dissonant and perfectly structured. Many of her innovations were only taken up again by later composers.

Crawford-Seeger is the stepmother of the well-known folk singer Pete Seeger. Her own four children (e.g. Peggy Seeger), are also dedicated to folk music.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Crawford_Seeger