The mother of folk singer Peggy Seeger used to be known for one short but extraordinary quartet. But now composer Ruth Crawford Seeger – who died young in 1953 – is being recognised as something of a pioneer.
We’ve all talked about ‘one-work composers’ – meaning usually those who’ve actually written dozens of pieces but only one of them ever gets played. Dukas (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice but what else?) is still in that category for most people; so are Dohnányi and Pachelbel. But the oddest case of a one-work composer is surely Ruth Crawford Seeger, who for a long time seemed literally to have written only one work. But a very remarkable one: the piece in question is a short string quartet (about 12 minutes), written in 1931. Lots of people who are interested in twentieth-century music know it – it’s been recorded several times – and it’s often been described as a masterpiece. I had no doubt that it was from the moment I first heard it, but I could find no recordings of anything else by her, and very little information about the composer herself, save that she was born in 1901 and died in 1953. A shortish life, then, but since she lived for 22 years after writing that quartet surely she must have written something else?
The Daily Waffle 