Susan DaVita:
Good evening and welcome to the Library of Congress, the Coolidge Auditorium.  I'm Susan DaVita, the Chief of the Music Division, and I'm really pleased to see a nice turnout for this first in a series of lectures which is co-sponsored by the Music Division of the Library of Congress and the American Musicological Society.  We anticipate presenting two lectures a year, and I'd like to express our deepest appreciation for this partnership with AMS, and I look forward with great pleasure to many outstanding lectures.  One of the side benefits of this is that we will be podcasting this, or filming this lecture so that it will be able to be podcast in the future.  And therefore, other people will be able to have the benefit of it.  

These lectures will feature AMS members who have used the Music Division's collections to conduct new and exciting research.  Not only does the work they produced further scholarship, but it also serves as a beacon to the national and international scholarly community indicating the riches found in our unique holdings.  It is also our hope that these lectures will inspire students to visit the Music Division.  Our as yet untapped collections promise dissertation and book topics for years to come.  

Our speaker this evening, Professor Judith Tick of Northeastern University, will share with us work she completed using our Seeger Collection.  Thank you so much, Judith, for helping us launch this promising effort.  We couldn't imagine a better person to start us off with the success.  Thank you very much.  

The Library of Congress has a warm relationship with the Seeger family, represented tonight by Mike Seeger.  Mike, do you want to raise your hand or say hello? 

[ applause ]

We'll be hearing more about the compositions of Ruth Crawford Seeger in just a few moments, but first I would like to introduce Professor Charles Atkinson, President of the American Musicological Society.

[ applause ]

Charles Atkinson:
Thank you very much.  I am truly delighted to be able to be here for the inaugural lecture in the new series that is being co-sponsored by our society and the Music Division of the Library of Congress.  It's a truly exciting event for all of us.  There are many, many reasons why we in the society were so pleased to be able to co-sponsor the series, but two of the reasons really stood out in my mind as preeminent.  The first, one that we share with our colleagues here in the Music Division, of focusing attention, really spotlighting the riches of the collection here in the Music Division.  It's really quite a remarkable collection of material, accessible both to us as scholars and to the general public.  

I'm sure that most of you know that many of the great American composers have deposited their manuscripts, their scores, and other materials here in the Library of Congress.  People such as John Philips Sousa or Aaron Copland or Richard Rodgers or Ruth Crawford Seeger, about whom we'll hear more this evening.  That group of people is truly remarkable, but what you may not realize is that the Library of Congress also holds the original manuscripts of some of the great masterpieces of European composers as well.  

If you'll think back to the opening scene of "Amadeus," the scene at the archbishop's residence in Salzburg, there is a reception going on.  The music that's playing has a beautiful oboe solo just soaring over the rest of the ensemble, a marvelous way to start the movie.  That particular piece was Mozart's Grand Partita for 13 wind instruments.  Mozart's autographed manuscript for that piece resides right here in the Library of Congress.  I think you can get some idea as to why we feel that the Library of Congress and its collection is not only a national treasure but also an international treasurer, and we are especially pleased that we can raise and call attention to this collection by means of this series.  

But for us in musicology there's yet another reason that I think is important.  Namely, that it gives us a chance to share the excitement of what we do, of the research that we do with a larger public.  Our society has as its goal the advancement of research in the various fields of music as a branch of scholarship and learning, and a great deal of wonderful research is going on and has gone on here in the Music Division of the Library of Congress.  We -- pardon me -- we want certainly to focus on this research and you as an audience are going to be able to hear the fruits of those researches, beginning tonight with the lecture that Judith Tick is going to give us on Ruth Crawford Seeger and then in subsequent lectures in this series and I can assure you it's going to be a real treat.  

The people whose idea this series actually was were two of our members, namely Carol Oja of Harvard University and Dee Galvo [ spelled phonetically ] of the Library of Congress, and I want to take this opportunity to thank both of them profoundly for having a wonderful idea and then for seeing it through to fruition.  Thank you very much, both of you.  

It's now my great pleasure to introduce to you Carol Oja, who will then introduce our speaker for this evening.  Carol. 

[ applause ]

Carol Oja:
Welcome to you all.  This brand new series is about historic documents and the scholars who interpret them, about the serendipitous sparks creativity ignited by working with archival materials.  Tonight's speaker, Judith Tick, exemplifies the very best of that scholarship.  A pioneering champion of women's history within musicology, she is Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and she has published a string of prize-winning books and articles about American musicians.  With the instincts of an investigative reporter and the flair of a gifted prose stylist, Professor Tick makes archival research sing, probing the soul of the history she writes.  In a way, she specializes in outsider studies, exploring figures who turn out to be at the core of things once they've received proper attention.  

Tick's book about Ruth Crawford Seeger represented just such an achievement.  It was the first full-scale biography of an American female composer and it was rooted in the collection of Crawford Seeger's papers housed here at the Library of Congress.  In fact, Ruth Seeger and her husband Charles were longtime Washingtonians.  He held a string of government appointments beginning in the mid-1930s and she simultaneously embarked on multiple musical missions, including a collaboration with John and Alan Lomax at this library's archive of American folk song.  

So Professor Tick's lecture tonight is not only based in a major collection at this library, but it focuses on a figure who played an important role in local history, the matriarch of one of the first families of American music.  The title of her talk is "Ruth Crawford Seeger, Modernist Composer in the Folk Revival: Biography as Music History."  So please join me in welcoming Professor Judith Tick. 

[ applause ] 

Female Speaker:
Thank you so much.  It's such a pleasure to be here at a Library that I regard as a kind of home.  My lecture begins a series in which musicologists who have based their scholarship and collections held by the Library of Congress talk about their projects and their subjects in ways that reveal the dreams and drama of documents.  Yes, dreams and yes, drama.  These words are not usually associated with libraries, but if I replace the academic word "document" with the vernacular word "stuff," then it's much easier for me to explain why I use this phrase.  

Think of the clutter in your own spaces.  After all, in today's American marketplace there are storage sites on which sit anonymous trailers, spaces for people to store stuff.  We patronize the Container Store, a Web site whose mission statement includes references to "an archival drawer, and a dream drawer."  This from a store that sells containers to put old thank you notes in or letters you should be answering but haven't, or your children's crayon drawings from grade two and they're now having children of their own.  

So it is with the Music Division of the Library of Congress.  It's filled with American stuff.  Just as your clutter captures the memories of your individual lives, this powerful Library of Congress holds the musical memories of our culture.  I bring this up because one of my most powerful recollections of becoming a Seeger Scholar is sitting at a wooden table for four in the old building of the Music Division probably over 25 years ago and watching a cart piled high with gray boxes being wheeled toward my numbered seat.  I expected to find unpublished scores of music.  After all that's what I was there for.  Ruth Crawford, which is how I thought of her primarily at that time, had about 15 works and I knew most of them had not been published and I was curious.  I also needed to get tenure.

[ laughter ]

Ruth's husband Charles had died in 1979, and shortly afterward his children had given this material to the library.  I did not anticipate what I found inside:  Thank you notes, Christmas cards, letters to and from famous musicians, of course, and also manuscripts of unfinished books, grant applications, all kinds of things.  A manuscript page from her famous piece, "The String Quartet," with a laundry list on one side upside down.  

So, at the time I celebrated and reeled.  Didn't these people throw anything out?  In fact, a few years later when Ruth's second daughter Barbara gave me her mother's high school scrapbook, from Duval High School in Jacksonville, Florida -- and you see on the far left a picture of Ruth Crawford graduating from Duval High School -- I found an 87 year old wad of chewing gum.  So, I realized that the Seegers and the Crawfords did not throw anything out, and I am very grateful.  

Mike Seeger also has memories of reading room child experiences in the Library of Congress and even today Mike said he was going to bring, and I know he did, lots of materials, seven more boxes of Seeger material, including 1,000 manuscripts for various drafts of a mega anthology called 1,001 Folk Songs and a collection of love letters.  Now I remember reading those letters at two o'clock in the morning in one of the unheated spare bedrooms in Mike's very cold house in Virginia, watching rose petals fall out of onionskin pages and being overwhelmed.  

I quoted many of those remarkable letters in my biography and now they're here for others to read.  There were acerbic comments about music.  There were confessions.  There were avowals of love, alternating with poignant declarations of independence.  Perhaps some day those letters will be edited and published and annotated, perhaps.  But even though undoubtedly my own many errors in citing and in dating will then be exposed, I do await that day, and who knows, perhaps one of you here will take on that mission.  

Now let me turn from this self-indulgent reflection on stuff to make this point about the stuff of memory and memories of stuff.  Memory is not history.  And in fact, there is no such thing as oral history, there's oral testimony.  Documents have to be turned into history through interpretation and context, so I see my speech today as an example of multitasking, at the same time that I present the storyline of Ruth Crawford Seeger.  As I developed it from the material, and from years of collaborations of many sorts with the family, I will also make some points about questioning the making of the story and trying to approximate a kind of intellectual counterpoint, standing back from the telling and looking at the teller of the tale so that we look at history as a work in progress in and of itself.  

Now, Carol Oja has given you some sense of the outline of this short life Ruth Crawford lived, Ruth Crawford Seeger lived from 1901 to 1953, and let me stop a minute to just pause on my trip over the name.  Ruth Crawford was the name that she wrote most of her compositions under because they were written before she married her mentor, muse, teacher, lover Charles Seeger in 1932, and then she became known as Ruth Crawford Seeger, sometimes Ruth Crawford-Seeger.  In the family, I think Pete Seeger, her stepson, calls her Ruth.  Mike and Peggy Ann Arbor and Penny -- Penny is no longer alive.  The three children called her Deo, which was a kind of child's corruption of Charlie Seeger's drawling out Deah, Dear, Deah in his New England accent.  

So it's Deo and Charlie and Ruth and Charlie and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger; you could go on and on with the permutations of a name because this composer is a woman for whom a name takes on special resonance at different stages in her life.  As a matter of fact, if you go outside, it was just pointed out to me that on the manuscript of "Rissolty Rossolty" there's a little typed note on the left that says if this document is going to be reproduced or in any way attributed it should be Ruth Crawford-Seeger because I think she changed that and used that name in the early '50s for a while.  

So, one of the themes from the biography is what you might call the "astonishing juxtapositions" that are contained in Ruth Crawford Seeger's life.  And Pete Seeger used that phrase talking to me about something else that had very little to do with Ruth Crawford Seeger.  I think he was talking about an art exhibit in L.A. that he had just gone to and out of the blue he said to me, "Ruth would have like the astonishing juxtapositions there."  So of course I wrote that down immediately.  And, when the book was blurbed by Archie Green a wonderful folklorist, he said, "Her life is a metaphor for American polarities.  Music, avant garde on the one hand as Crawford, and Seeger for the folk music."  

Her family role:  Was it created, creative or constricted?  Why did she stop composing after really reaching her peak in her early 30s?  Folk revivalism:  Was she producing authentic material or what was her relationship to popularizing the material?  To which I would also add female composer, accepted as a composer and or marginalized as a "woman composer."  

Now we care about her today more generally because of the quality of her work, the quality and the message in her music, both in her vocal arrangements which are so meticulous and deceptively elegant, and in her original composition, thorny and challenging.  I think for the next generation of scholars after me, which included Joe Strauss and now Nancy Row [ spelled phonetically ], who may even be in this room, Ruth Crawford is among central figures in American modernism, or the American avant garde, she stands between Charles Ives whom she admired and new, and Elliott Carter, whom she did not know but admires her greatly.  

Now Ives, of course, is a well-known name.  Elliott Carter is one of those unknown famous people, which means within the community of music scholars and new music performers.  And really many people in both Europe and America, he's greatly admired.  And, in a way, Crawford is like that.  It's a special role that people fill in our culture and we would be so much the poorer without them.  

So, I've decided to bring the voice of the composer directly into the room now, with some musical examples, and I will talk to you about these examples before hand, but I will use them as a kind of peg for -- a news peg, a new word I just learned yesterday from a music journalist -- a news peg on which to hang some discussion.  

So the first piece we're going to hear is called "Little Waltz" and it was written in 1922.  It has been unpublished ever since Crawford wrote it, and I'm sure she would, I don't know, I think she would be delighted to have it published but maybe not because I did know she burned some of her early works when she turned 32.  But in any case it was recorded just a few years ago by Jenny Lin, a very young, brilliant pianist, and I think for me it represents one of the paradoxes of Crawford's legacies, and that is in our lifetime her original music is far more known than it ever was in her lifetime.  

Now "Little Waltz" is just a piece that she wrote when she was entering the American Conservatory in Chicago.  She was going there to become a woman pianist with her own studio, to go back home and live with her mother and be a big deal in Jacksonville, Florida.  She discovered that she was a composer, and this is the piece that shows you that she was absolutely steeped in the classical, the romantic idiom of the day which was the lingua franca for classical music.  It sounds like romantic music, a little bit like Schumann, a little bit of the harmonies the Gershwin come in there.  It's not a complicated piece, but it has some character and it has some personality.  Okay.  

[ music ]

One would never predict the path that she took from that piece but you do see the craft after only one year of contribution studies, the talent, the absolute sense of at-homeness with a romantic idiom.  

Now, it's such a pleasure to even hear that as just a launching pad from which to explore the other two works you're going to hear now.  

The next piece belongs to the middle picture that you saw before.  I think I'll go back there.  The picture in the middle is of Ruth Crawford when she was about 28 years old.  She's bobbed her hair, which was a big step for her.  She had already gotten a master's degree from the conservatory and she had moved beyond its walls to discover her own voice through a sense of spare, lean dissonance.  She was naturally attracted to idioms that were unusual and evocative of space.  

Her friend and the father of her piano students, Carl Sandburg, the poet from Chicago, was a tremendous inspiration to her, partly because even though he wasn't an explicit transcendentalist.  There's a kind of gloss of American reverence for nature that comes through and also an American reverence for the ordinary that comes through Sandburg's poetry.  She wrote about seven songs and they were all to Sandburg's text with the exception of a few political polemics that she wrote in the 1930s being a crazy Communist as she once called herself in a joke.  

In any case I'm going to show you the text here.  Oops.  Here we go.  "White Moon," it's called.  And if you look at the text, it has wonderful words in it like flimmering and alliteration, "glimmers against gnarled shadows, all silver to slow twisted shadows."  And also it has the point of view of a woman waiting for a lover, perhaps, in her bedroom at night.  I find that this is one of the few works that Crawford wrote that has a kind of erotic tone to it.  And, in a way, it's night music, which was such a favorite genre for early modern composers to "capture the nocturnes of the night" to use a Crawford phrase.  

The two words, obviously, light and dark are avoided by the poet Carl Sandburg and so he left a place for music, and that's exactly what the piano part supplies.  She captures the imagistic treatment of moonbeams and stars through a filigree of a chain of sevenths.  In the first section it lights up the voice.  In the second section the piano shades the vocal line.  Is this a song with melody or a song that imitates the ebb and flow of poetry like baroque modity?  So often the voice stands alone, especially in its beautiful leap at the word "tonight."  We sense loneliness, not just aloneness.  We sense the composer standing at the window and suddenly the restrained sensuality of the piano suggests a deeper eroticism, evoking the mystery of an Edward Hopper bedroom.

[ music ]

	White moon comes in on a baby face.  
	The shafts across her bed are flimmering.  
	Out on the land white moon shines, 
	shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows of silver 
	to slow twisted shadows falling 
	across the long road that runs from the house.  
	Keep a little of your beauty and some of your shimmering silver 
	for her by the window tonight.  
	Where you come in, white moon. 

That's such a beautiful performance because Upshaw knows how to work the middle ground between an operatic tone and almost a vernacular tone and it's perfect for this poem.  

Now let me pause here to make a point about working with the documents.  As you can see, this was published for the first time in 1990.  I found these five songs, and I found references to them, particularly "White Moon," in programs and in diaries that Ruth Crawford left.  I remember her writing, "I never knew the moon and stars could come inside me so," when she was at McDowell Colony in New Hampshire, when she wrote this work.  

So, the point is that here's another, here's another role for the scholar.  We don't just look at the documents, interpret the documents and write books.  Musicologists are more collaborative people that that.  I looked at this music.  I saw the corrections that Charles Seeger made.  Following in the footsteps of almost every other musicologist I know I got rid of them because one follows the composer's intentions.  I looked around for a publisher, and Peters, a venerable publisher, was immediately happy to publish them and then we needed performers.  And so you get it out in the world and then the performers have to take over and there were some small performances of some amateur singers or semiprofessional singers.  And then Jandi Katani [ spelled phonetically ] took this up in the late 1980s and then finally Dawn Upshaw took it up just recently and she named her whole CD after "White Moon."  

So I'm bringing this up because musicology is a collaborative enterprise and it starts, it involves so many people and the performers play a particularly important role, especially in the music.  When you work in American music you realize that.  You almost take on the role of the composer in looking for performers or in hoping performers will give this music a new life.  

I just want to make one other point about this song and that it's filled with dissonance, but it's pretty subtle.  It's really not in your face dissonance, and I will come back to this point because the kind of piece that this comes out of a philosophical period, a very mysterious period in Crawford's life when harmony and in fact dissonance was supposed to embody a kind of universal transcendentalist harmony, not masculinity, not femininity but a kind of philosophical approach to musical unity.  

Okay.  Now we're moving on to the next to last original piece we'll hear, and I'll flip my precious little power point that I've just learned how to use, more or less, and get to the next piece that's called "Piano Study in Mixed Accents," and it comes from Crawford's sort of second style period as we now think of it but probably won't in the future.  Crawford moved to New York to study with Charles Seeger who at that time was not working for any government agency.  He was a modernist theorist, and he had a whole compendium of methods by which he wanted to encourage composers to write the most radical kind of dissonant counterpoint and to take dissonance and expand it into all kinds of parameters.  We know that Schoenberg was working this way with melody, but Seeger was theorizing how you could keep some tonal center and yet somehow expand the purview of dissonance.  

So this piece lasts about one minute, but there have been whole articles written about it, chapters in books and all kinds of fascinating new music theory.  I will not attempt to even summarize all of that.  I just want to, I'm going to actually, I am going to attempt that but I'm not going to explicate diagrams; however, I will show you the elaborate diagrams after I just talk about it and you hear it.  

In the first level description the piece is basically a palindrome for melody and rhythm.  That's to say it goes forward and backwards and pivots in the middle.  So it runs forward.  It reaches a pivotal phrase and then it proceeds to run backwards.  

Now in the second level of description, the melody is organized into phrase groups of mostly six or five or three or two notes and the melody pattern runs backward about after midpoint more or less, but the rhythm pattern which runs backward starts later that the melody so they're out of sync.  It's kind of two patterns sort of gridded on top of another and one is moved over.  

Third level description:  The dynamics also project a kind of symmetry and retrograde and organized progress.  Fourth level description:  There are two levels of mixed accents, one set of accents marks the note of each phrase as an upper case event.  Another set emerges as the highest note in each phrase and is italicized by its very range.  

The fifth level description:  All of these elements are coordinated and ultimately reflect a basic cell, if you will, of a half step minor third whole step, and that's the end of the descriptions except to say you can see immediately that we are dealing with a kind of DNA approach to music.  You take a DNA cell; you project it.  The piece has a strong intellectual skeleton.  

Joseph Straus in his wonderful book The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, talks about transformational projections and I love that.  I think that's an elegant way to talk about DNA running through the whole gene system.  

But now, we have to like it even though we can admire it.  We have to like it, too, and I think we are, it's an entrancing one minute or so because a sense of purpose directs its musical space.  And also I think that even though we can't hear all these level of descriptions all at once, we sense them.  We sense the expressive quality of the hammering 16th notes almost pushing against the frames of all of these limitations, of structure that have been imposed upon it.  So it's a pretty neat project.

[ music ]

A sonic design and yet an intensity that is really not unlike the intensity of "White Moon," and I think that's certainly one of the hallmarks of Crawford style.  

Now I'm going to show you, I'm going to play an example of a piece that she wrote just a few years later.

[ music ]

I'd like to invite Mike Seeger to come up on stage now and to explain this.

[ laughter ]

Mike Seeger:
What was that?

Judith Tick: 
That was an arrangement of "The Babes in the Woods" from a set of piano arrangements of American folk tunes that your mother did in 1936, and she said she wanted to make the modernist to show the affinity between folk music and modernism and so, if I were feeling a little more confident I might try "Sweet Betsy From Pike," but I think you're going to do the performing from now on.

Mike Seeger:
I've never heard that before.  

Judith Tick:
You haven't?

Mike Seeger:
No, I don't think I have.  And I just --

Judith Tick:
Well, we got it published.

Mike Seeger:
Oh, Oh.  Well, I don't think I've heard it even though it was.  I'm sorry.

Judith Tick:
That's good.  I asked Mike to come up here because the piece you're going to hear, the last example you're going to hear is "Rissolty Rossolty," and it was an arrangement, what she called an orchestral fantasia, and it has three folk tunes intertwined and they were written, the piece was written as part of a series for Alan Lomax's School of the Air on CBS Radio Network and it was a folk music show, and he had on personalities and he commissioned pieces because as he said one of the big projects was to get the fine art music and folk music united.  So, I wanted to bring Mike up here to talk a little, actually to comment on the piece and also to sing "Rissolty Rossolty" and here we go. 

Male Speaker:
When Judith mentioned to me that she was going to do this, I went back to listen to the recording that Oliver Nussen [ spelled phonetically ] arranged on Deutsche Gramophone and because as a kid I was, one of my favorite things to do was to play her composition of "Rissolty Rossolty" from the transcription that was made, I think, off the air when it was originally played in 1941 by the CBS orchestra.  But this recording, I finally realized that the melody that she was using was a harmony to the melody that we sang as a family.  On her composition she used the melody [ sings ].

And now, since I've heard it so recently I hear the kettledrum going [ sings ].

[ laughter ]

And the way that we sang it when we sang it as a family, Charlie, my father, and Deo and us kids, we'd sing it as I heard it and I think my mother did, too, on a field recording from Missouri in the '30s by Mr. Denoon [ spelled phonetically ], and he sang it [ sings ].

	I met me a wife in the month of June, 
rissolty rossolty now, now, now.  
I carried her home by the light of the moon 
rissolty rossolty, hey don dossolty 
nickelty nackelty russticle quality, 
willaby wallaby now, now, now. 

That's not the same tune.  

Judith Tick:
No, same rhythms.

Mike Seeger:
Same, yes, and I think it's a harmony.  The song is an interesting song; it goes on to say [ sings ].

	She swept the floor but once a year, 
rissolty rossolty now, now, now.  
She swore the brooms was ill too dear 
rissolty rossolty, hey don dossolty 
nickelty nackelty russticle quality, 
willaby wallaby now, now, now. 

She churned her butter in Dad's old boot, 
rissolty rossolty now, now, now.  
And for a dasher she used her foot, 
rissolty rossolty, hey don dossolty 
nickelty nackelty russticle quality, 
willaby wallaby now, now, now.  

The butter came out a grisly gray, 
rissolty rossolty now, now, now.  
The cheese took legs and ran away 
rissolty rossolty, hey don dossolty 
nickelty nackelty russticle quality, 
willaby wallaby now, now, now.  

The bread and cheese is on the shelf, 
rissolty rossolty now, now, now.  
If you want any more you can get it yourself 
rissolty rossolty, hey don dossolty 
nickelty nackelty russticle quality, 
willaby wallaby now, now, now.  

Now that's a song that kind of says, well, she didn't know very much when she got married and you know that her husband didn't, either.  But the controversy went on, and I think one of the other -- there's two other themes in this composition, Equinoctial [ spelled phonetically ], it's actually called "Phoebe," and it starts out -- Equinoctial is the man.  [ Sings ].

Equionoctial swore by the green leaves on the tree, 
that he could do more work in a day than Phoebe could do in three, 
that he could do more work in a day than she could do in three."  

So the verses go on and on through about 12 or 15 verses where she says, "Well, you'll have to figure out how to do this and how to do that and how to do this," and it goes through a bunch of things that he screws up and it ends up -- well I think there was a version of it which goes on and tells what she was able to do.  He was not able to do anything like what she did in a day.  He just kept having problems with the chickens and with the gravy and with the sewing and everything.  The chickens, yeah, the chickens.  [ Laughs ]. 

And the third theme was a fiddle tune.  "The Last Callahan" which is a fiddle tune that was made up supposedly by a man doomed to be hung and he made up the tune, played it as he was about to be hung and then, depending on the version of the story that's told, he breaks the fiddle over his knee and then the trap goes, you know, but people remember the tune [ sings ]. 

Oh, I can't remember, but it's a very notey fiddle tune.   And she put all of those in there and much more.  

[ music ]

That's the open part where you're playing that open chord on the fiddle.

Judith Tick:
Yes, yes, the open part.  Well, I wanted to give you -- I think I'll stand up and move.

[ laughter ]

[ applause ]

Well, I wanted to give you a sense of the legacy of the Seegers and what it was like to grow up with this music as part of your daily life, to remember singing these tunes and to grow up in that household where using folk songs to make your childhood work and to make your parenting work was a strategy, and the quality of the material was so extraordinary because you heard, as you've told me and Peggy said, too, what you both have called these gateways to magic field recordings, which was so rare at the time and are now out in many, many guises and downloadable all over the place.  But this was a different era.  This was 60 years ago when a lot of Americans didn't know that we had folk music, and they didn't understand the national residences of it.  

So this was pioneering, also, and this music captivated Ruth Crawford Seeger.  What a beautiful arrangement that is, and a beautiful performance.  It just soared right through the auditorium in this lush orchestration, filled with joy and humor I must say, also.  

And have to point out that she was the only woman who received this commission and all the guys including her husband who wrote about John Hardy and Aaron Copland, who wrote about John Henry picked male subjects, which is not surprising.  We tend to represent ourselves, but there she was representing a kind of encapsulated female experience in this arrangement.  

Well, moving on here.  I did want to tell you that Crawford Seeger was a very talented writer as well as a composer and when she got immersed in something she just threw herself into it, and while she was working on this book called Our Singing Country with John and Alan Lomax, she got obsessed by the challenges of writing down oral tradition.  She even wrote down speech songs, and she wrote down what people said in the field recordings and the stories about her work are legend.  And only in the last two years I think or three years was this huge treatise that she wrote for Our Singing Country called The Music of American Folk Song, edited by Mary Polanski, published.  I just want to read something that she wrote from it so you could get a sense of who she was, in this world in particular.  

The reader of this book and the listener, the reader of Our Singing Country and the reader of this book may be a city or town dweller.  He will be used to reading books and may be able to read music notation more or less well.  He may be one of those well-educated Americans who've been taught that only fine art music is music or good music and partly because he is accustomed to associating music notation only with the mannerisms of fine art music. 

She was talking about her transcriptions and what one had to do to understand them.  
	
Upon first hearing of these field recordings he will no doubt be inclined because of his greater acquaintance with fine art music, either to overlook as a little value or to smile at as quaint or even to look down upon as common, not refined or even to scorn as out of tune, i.e. within accepted fine art tunings, many of the mannerisms and subtleties of this singing.  

And then she goes on and on about this hypothetical snob.

Upon repeated hearing however, it is possible that such omissions may come to take on for him positive rather than negative value.  He may begin to see in them signs of strength rather than of weakness.  He may even discover that he likes this music with its very omissions and may find himself singing along with it.  Whether finally, he comes to define much of it in terms of epic quality is not of such import in the present discussion.  As is the probability that through this closer acquaintance with American folk singing his recreation from rotation of similar songs will undoubtedly ring truer and come more natural than before.

Spoken like a true proselytizer, scientist part, ethno musicologist part and composer part.  
Now for my concluding remarks, I'm going to move on to -- these are the diagrams from Piano Study in Mixed Accents but I'm just moving on from them and here are the details of that recording on Deutsche Gramophone which came out in 1997.  And the cover of one of Ruth Crawford Seeger's classic books of folk song arrangements, American Folk Songs for Children.  

And I'd like to make the point here before I actually do move on to a couple of other topics is that her work was really primarily as a music educator and, just as she did in her own home she created books through which parents could recreate American folk material in their own homes.  And this is nursery school or preschool material, and it's so often overlooked but if you play through the arrangements they are magical.  And here she is nursery school children, so happy.  And probably this is one of the co-op nursery schools that women started in the war and continued on.  She said she went to school with Barbara because she was not happy with the lack of backbone and the sweetness in children's music.  

Here's the Seeger family with Mike second in the top row, Peggy next to him, Toshi and their family below -- Toshi Seeger, Pete's wife and Pete Seeger in the back row and Penny Seeger, Ruth's other daughter to the right.  

Now I'd like to move on to the issue of hierarchies of gender, just to make a couple of points here.  It's running late, you've been patient, and I'll go through this rather quickly because they're not that complicated.  When I was writing this life, the issue of the extent to which Ruth Crawford Seeger's life unfolded through the hierarchies of gender was very much on my mind, and there were two issues.  One was the ordinariness of her life and how appealing it was.  Here is a profoundly important and interesting composer who had the most ordinary concerns about whether she could combine career or life, how she gets there by a man in the Depression what her relationship was to her own creativity and responsibilities within her family.  Could she have "a career or life"?  She had so many problems that parents and women in particular are still wrestling with today.  

Now when I talk about this in my classroom, my students roll their eyes.  They are so bored with this topic.  

[ laughter ]

They have heard this.  They have heard these kinds of issues raised.  They don't think they have feminist consciousnesses, but they have internalized them.  So I will not go through this, and I will not tell you how when I first came here and when I opened her diaries to the page when she wrote about whether she could have a career or life, I was thoroughly seduced.  We will pass over all of that material, because I do not want you to roll your eyes, either.

[ laughter ]

Still, the notion of exceptional versus ordinary is important, but the notion of exception as opposed to exceptional is very important.  And so we need to understand that Crawford never used the term woman composer, and I don't think she thought of herself marginalized as an outsider.  But it's pretty clear to me that other people did.  So here is Henry Cowell, [ spelled phonetically ] her mentor and dear, dear friend who talks about her as the exception.  Actually, I got the first phrase, "She was a completely natural dissonant composer," from Sidney Cowell, Henry's wife, in 1982. 

And then here is Cowell, "A young woman from Chicago has better style and more originality than any other woman composer.  One perceives that she follows the same course as men although she does not have the ambition to become masculine in her music."  Then, "Her music belongs to no group" and he talks about her richly complex use of chords which are not conventional.  So he begins with a kind of nod to all of these genderized exceptional qualities and then he just talks about her originality, which is more to the point for Cowell.  

Now, here is just a brief glimpse of the historiography of her reception.  This book was written in 1987.  It's the second edition of a book called Music in a Newfound Land.  And look at the interpretation here.  He talks about Charles Seeger and he says that he took -- that it is regrettable that in choosing art for life he took his second wife, Ruth Crawford, with him.  

Now what this does is deprive Crawford Seeger of agency.  It makes it seem that she followed Charles into the world of folk music when in fact a lot of the ideas that he developed about field recordings came through her practice and her experiences and her own writing.  So it's so hard to separate and deliver nuanced arguments without being defensive when you're struggling against this reception.  

How's this?  "For she, born in 1901 was a composer of genius who, though a woman, might have stood craggily with the grand American eccentrics who were really central:  Ives, Ruggles and Varese." 

Now here is the positive, the newer generation, and I already quoted this book about how she has an original place in American history, music history, and also within European music.  And I'm going to flip over this one.  

Now here is something from 2000.  And this is by a very eminent scholar named Richard Taruskin who actually has his expertise -- well he just wrote a 2,000-page book on the history of Western music, but his professional expertise is in Stravinsky and Russian modernism.  He's not an American music scholar per se, but he's a brilliant thinker and people really pay attention to what he says.
The program notes were eloquent about the problems Crawford Seeger had to endure in her day because of the American modern music world's misogyny.  Crawford Seeger's piece was pervasively dissonated, to take a word from the vocabulary of Charles Seeger, her husband and mentor and obedience to the norms of maverick manliness.  

It would be rash to assume that Crawford Seeger tailored her style to macho expectations unwillingly.  I remember my mother walking on air after a truck driver leaned out of his cab and shouted, "Lady you drive just like a man."

[ laughter ]

I think it's not sufficiently nuanced, to put it mildly, but more importantly it situates dissonance in a context that assumes the dissonance was supposed to be masculine, and it was supposed to be maverick when in fact the kinds of experiments that Crawford was doing with all kinds of transformational cells was actually something that would be taken up by European composers Messiaen for example, in the 1940s and certainly Carter, really developed a lot of his vocabulary, as he admits, from her.  So it's very difficult to not be defensive here, but it takes a lot of energy, and the next generation is going to have to not worry about this but to try to situate American modernism in a more complex vocabulary of interpretation.

This was just Charles Rosen taking him to task, and I think I've made enough points there because the notion of dissonance has to be really deconstructed and gender can be an explosive variable and has to be used with great care otherwise it's a smoke and mirrors application of ideas.  The idea of dissonance as masculine reduces the very essence of modernity to a crude caricature of human temperament.  

Now there's one more quote here that I think is wonderful.  This is from Morton Feldman.  "I met Ruth Crawford once when I was a kid in this vast room full of all male composers."  Morton Feldman was a major sort of minimalist composer in the '60s, '70s, sort of part of the New York school, a friend of John Cage as you can see here.  "And there was Ruth Crawford.  She was the only one sitting down.  You can see the scene, actually.  Since then I've developed a kind of upmanship.  When I go into a situation where all my colleagues are" -- Feldman was very defensive -- "I sit down.  She was my role model.  And I spent the whole evening instead of hobnobbing and making deals with this woman asking me what kind of music I wrote and everything."  

There's a lot to say here, but the larger historical point for me is that Feldman had an approach to composition that reminds me very much of Crawford sometimes, particularly in the sliding tones that Nancy Row [ spelled phonetically ] a theorist, has written about, but also in his notion of weaving and carpet modeling and carpet design as a metaphor for his composition.  And in fact I think both the music of Crawford and the music of Feldman suggest that we might look for language and metaphors to explain their expressive content through visual rather than narrative and verbal media.  If we think about the 19th century, most of the ways that tonality is explained often reads like a novel with themes functioning as characters and the tonal story is often told in terms of a plot.  

But modernism did not develop that way at least after the 1920s, solely.  It developed through the notion of design and static design and the manipulation of designs the projections of designs and imperfections woven in as Crawford does and as Turkish carpet weavers do and as Feldman does.  So what I'm saying is it's not just that the notion of dissonance as masculinity offends me personally, it's that it prevents us from thinking about other models for language that might be more fruitful.  

So that's my last of astonishing juxtapositions because the notion of Crawford sitting down and meeting Morton Feldman in this room and the two of them having so much more in common than they really understood is a wonderful image with which to leave you except for one thing.  I want to close by bringing the daughter, Peggy Seeger into the room, who really understood her mother and wrote a song about her called "Different Tunes."  Because that, like the phrase astonishing juxtapositions sums up the spirit of my talk tonight as I stand here in a Library where I've worked for over a quarter of a century, thinking about communicating the different tunes of American music in all its transatlantic complexity and all its avowals of maverick independence and rethinking, through the music that we have here, how to communicate the experience that we call our own here musically.  And here is Peggy to end my talk with just a little encapsulation of that idea.

Peggy Seeger:
[ Sings ].

My mother was exotic.  
She was like a Gypsy Queen.  
I'd pretend she wasn't mine when I was 15.  
Her voice was loud, she wore men's shoes.  
She braided up her hair.  Men would stop and stare. 
Her clothes were few and never new she was always out of style.  
She was always nagging me; she'd treat me like a child.  
Sometimes I wished I had a mother like the rest. 	
Sometimes she was so lovely that it took away my breath.

Thank you.

[ applause ]

Judith Tick:
Thank you so much.  And thank you to Mike Seeger, especially.  

So, Denise Gallo.  You did this.  We are here; we got through all of the arrangements.  And do we have time to take questions or -- Okay, fine.  But do not feel pressured to ask them.  But if you wish, we can take them.  Yes, yes, and I'll repeat the question because sometimes it's hard to hear them. 

Male Speaker:
Well, I should preface my question by saying I'm not a musicologist, but I've done some reading.  I've read a lot of jacket notes, and I seem to recall that Henry Cowell was largely self-taught, and I think it's interesting that a self-taught composer was her mentor.  Do you have any comment on that?

Judith Tick:
Well, Henry Cowell was a child prodigy that in fact gave rise to the IQ test and was tested very early by Lewis Terman because he was supposed to have a very high IQ.  So, actually, Cowell's first teacher was Charles Seeger at the University of California in Berkeley.  And Charles used to say Henry came in and he put his Opus 1,000 on the piano.

[ laughter ]

But I think that Cowell was a collaborative thinker and he and Charles and Carl Ruggles and various friends that he had in sort of composer collectives talked a lot about problems and thought about how what language, what musical language might be.  So it was self-taught, yes, and yet he wasn't.

Male Speaker:
Have you looked into the preceding generation of Charles and Ruth?  Are there musical roots farther and farther back in this amazing American musical family that you can trace from before Charles and before Ruth?

Judith Tick:
Well, let's see.  Ruth's mother was a minister's daughter who was not allowed to have piano lessons as a child, but she wanted them very badly.  And when she made enough money to buy a piano on her own, she did.  And she gave her daughter lessons starting at six.  And her father was a minister, and Ruth's father was also a minister so there was hymn singing, but I don't think there was any music, that I know of, in the background of that family.  

Mike, in your father's family, I think that your father grew up partly in Mexico but I don't think his father was a musician.  

Mike Seeger:
He played the piano.

Judith Fink:
He played piano? 

Mike Seeger:
[ Unintelligible ]. 

Judith Tick:
Okay, so he played -- what Mike said was he played the piano the way that people did in their parlors, but there wasn't a Bach family genealogy or anything like that.

Male Speaker:
[ Inaudible ].

Judith Tick:
Would you like to know what remains to be done?  "Rissolty Rossolty" has never been published.  There's one song that I know that should be exhumed and published called "Russian Lullaby."  What else?   

Male Speaker:
On that subject, how much of the collections here at the Library have been digitized to make available?

Judith Tick:
How much of the collection has been digitized?  I know it's on microfilm, and you can get it easily.  I don't think it has been digitized.  You can have a few sleepless nights about that, Betty and Denise.  

[ laughs ] 

Mike Seeger:
The manuscript before I brought it to the 1,001 Songs and Love Songs and Ballads of the United States and We Come by it Natural.  Those are three manuscripts that I've brought in today.  I think to put those collections together, they never were published, would be really, that would be something that could be done.  

Judith Tick:
That would be wonderful.

Mike Seeger:
And but I don't think it would be good to publish it in paper.  I think just making it available because it's really quite an all-encompassing project, the 1,001, that was done with Duncan Emrich who is the folk song -- head of the Folk Song Division Section. 

Judith Tick:
Not her compositions. 

Mike Seeger:
Not her compositions, no.  These are transcriptions that she made largely -- that she made in longhand as she always did.

Female Speaker:
Is there a plan for the chants to be published?  I heard there was a plan to publish it at some point but I haven't seen it.

Judith Tick: 
Her memoirs, did you say?

Female Speaker:
The three chants.  The chants for the children -- I'm sorry, the women's choir.

Judith Tick:
I don't know.

Male Speaker: 
I should also have mentioned that although I'm not a vocal enthusiast, I really enjoyed "Rissolty Rossolty" a lot.  And I wish my grandson had been sitting beside me to here it.  Is there a recording of that?

Judith Tick:
Yes, it's on -- I think I'll just flip right back to it.  Here it is.  It's on this recording called Ruth Crawford Seeger, Portrait.  Now I realize I really should have put that right up there.  Ruth Crawford Seeger, Portrait on Deutsche gramophone.  It came out in 1997.

Mike Seeger:
And it might even still be available.

Judith Tick:
I think it is and I think they'll -- yeah, I think it is.  Okay?  Well thank you again everyone it was a pleasure.  Good night.

[ applause ] 

[ end of transcript ]
LOC - 080326mus2000	18	6/2/2008