Ruth Crawford Seeger: Prelude No. 9

I wrote these programme notes for Christ Church Music Weekend, May 2016.

Ruth Crawford Seeger was born in Ohio in 1901 to the family of a Methodist minister, and studied piano with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn and composition with Adolf Weidig at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago from 1921. Subsequent study with Djane Lavoie Herz sparked her formative interest in the music of Alexander Scriabin, after which intensive work and an obsessive passion for the inner workings of Western classical music enabled her to cultivate a “sympathetic and imaginative understanding of ultra-modern problems in tonality, rhythm, melody and form.” As one reviewer wrote: “here again was found a sensitive, imaginative, and poetic composer.”

Nevertheless, the ninth prelude was written during a time of seeming depression for Crawford. Few performances of her music took place in 1928-29, and her distance from professional performance was such that at a performance for Weidig's advanced pupils, three of her earlier preludes (the eighth and ninth still unfinished) had to be performed by a fellow student. Her biographer Judith Tick perceives this time to be something of a “compositional vacuum” for Crawford, filled with “introspections about artistic process and craft” and grief for her recently deceased mother, who had been her “strongest musical supporter.”

In spite of this view, the very existence of the ninth prelude—not to mention its intricacy—calls the existence of this “vacuum” into question. Lasting just over four minutes, its form is a simple A B A, and yet its range of emotion, timbres, and harmonies is striking. Musicologist David Nicholls writes that “the use of extremes of register—initially in the ostinato bass, later in the high chords of the middle section” create a “remarkably eerie sound-world” suggesting the influence of Béla Bartók, an influence that would become important in her later String Quartet and Three Songs. Analyst Joseph N. Straus hears the long, close bass tones of the opening with the more rapidly moving and spaced-out high treble notes “conveying a sense of an ethereal, other-worldly airy spirit, moving down toward a distant earth, rumbling far below, then returning to its original height.” While this could be attributed to a Taoist programme which Crawford has hinted at for the piece, an equally likely influence could be her deep interest in theosophy, sparked again by Herz.

Recurring intervals of major sevenths and compound semitones articulates the motion of the upper voices in Prelude No. 9. By dividing her pitch-space not into octaves, but the semitones either side of the octave, Crawford poses an elegant challenge to traditional counterpoint. She brings these dissonances to a strikingly sweet closure at the end of the piece by inverting pairs of pitches around major third axes, switching them over as the “airy” high notes descend to meet the extended bass C#-D# chord which we have been hearing since the beginning. The piece culminates in a Bb-C held in the right hand's middle register, essentially creating against the bass two compound minor thirds, a tone apart. In reconciling the whole-tone distance between the compound semitone and major seventh so fundamental to her counterpoint throughout the piece, Crawford finds a new “consonance” in her rejection of tradition's “perfect” octave.

Ruth Crawford Seeger was, as Straus writes, “a pivotal figure in American avant-garde music,” and had a profound effect on the work of such composers as Henry Cowell and Edgard Varèse—to name but two, and her later contributions to the folk revival notwithstanding. Nevertheless, her music remains sadly under-performed in the British concert circuit, and is yet to receive the analytical attention that it deserves. Nevertheless, just a few minutes' careful listening, with or without a closer look at her scores, immediately reveals her music's potential to be found engaging, ingenious, and beautiful.