>> Emily Baumgart: Good evening, and welcome to this virtual concert from the Library of Congress Music Division. My name is Emily Baumgart. I am an archives processing technician here in the Music Division, and I wanted to tell you a bit about Ruth Crawford Seeger. She's one of the composers you're going to be hearing on tonight's program and she's someone that you might not be familiar with. Crawford Seeger was considered a modernist. This was a sort of informal group of composers from the first half of the 20th century, with other folks like Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, and her husband, Charles Seeger. This was unfortunately a time when female composers were not really well respected. Their music was seen as, you know, "too effeminate." So to have Crawford Seeger be among the ranks of these other composers really emphasizes her accomplishments and her just prowess as a composer. And one of the things that I find fascinating about her is that it seems every different work she creates has a different technique. A lot of the idea behind modernism was to experiment with different processes, different sounds, different instruments, different textures, but it seems like she tries something new every single time she composes. Her early works, since she was a pianist, are written mostly for piano. But the first sort of big break she got was in 1926 with the Sonata for Violin and Piano. This was written when she was 25 years old, and when it premiered two years later, that really got the attention of the American music scene. This is a piece that is incredibly virtuosic. You have very, very fast violin lines, the pianist just sort of going all over the place. And the counterpoint is incredibly dissonant. At times it almost seems like the two instruments are different voices in an argument, sort of opposition. So it's this great work that sort of sets the stage for her as a composer, and it also led to two big accomplishments in the next few years. In 1929, she was invited to the MacDowell Colony. And in 1930, she won the Guggenheim Fellowship for Composition, the first woman composer to do so. So she had two straight years to just do nothing but compose -- and it shows. This is her most prolific period where most of her big works were written, things like the Diaphonic Suites, the Two Ricercare, and one of my favorites, the Three Chants for Women's Chorus. This is one of my favorite works of hers. It is completely in made-up language. Crawford Seeger did that because she wanted to play with vowel sounds as texture, and she didn't want to get, you know, strapped to a text. So she just said, I'm going to make up my own text. It'll be fine -- and it was. Because she plays with these different sounds using, like I said, the lyrics almost as a texture. And the final chant, the "To a Kind God," splits the women's chorus into 14 individual parts, and at times they're all sort of like clumped together in this cluster chord. It's very dark and dissonant and angsty, and it's just a really fascinating choral sound you don't really hear again until about the 1960s. So she was, you know, 30 years or so early at this point. One of the other really important major works from this time period is the String Quartet, which you're going to hear on tonight's performance. And like I said, with each work she's trying a different technique. Here you can see that in microcosm because each of the movements also has a different technique. The first movement is this very again dissonant counterpoint, which seemed to be her general style. But on top of that, the instruments almost never attack a note at the same time. So you get almost this like pointillism in visual art -- here's the musical equivalent of that. The second movement takes this tiny little short three-note motive and expands it into an entire movement, varying the rhythm, the accents, the pitches, but everything from that little germ of a tiny three-note like maybe half-a-second motive. The third movement, what Charles Seeger referred to as a heterophony of dynamics, features this, for the most part, very, very low long tones, quiet dynamics across the ensemble. But every once in a while one of the instruments will sort of get louder and peek out of the texture and then go back. And those moments across the ensemble sort of string together into a melody across all four instruments. The fourth movement is my favorite because it is a palindrome -- and I love palindromes. So it's the same forwards and then backwards. So you'll hear sort of the first half of the work and then the second half is that same music played in reverse. While that is happening, you also get the first violin sort of in opposition to the rest of the ensemble -- the second violin, the viola, and the cello. You have the first violin at the beginning playing very, very loudly; the rest of the ensemble playing very quietly. And as the movement goes on, those dynamics flip. So, at the end of the piece, the first violin is very quiet; the rest of the ensemble is very loud. And on top of that, it's actually in additive form. So you'll hear the first violin play first one note and then two notes and then three notes and so on, and all of this is happening all at the same time. And it's not just a gimmick. You can actually hear it. You can perceive it as an audience member, and it's really fascinating to hear all of that sort of coming at you all at once. You don't need to take my word for it though that it's a great piece. Henry Cowell was one of the people who really fell in love with this work when it was premiered in 1933, to the point that when he started doing recordings of new music he said that is the first work he wanted to record. That third movement of the String Quartet is the first one that went on a record from Henry Cowell. After this very, very prolific point, she marries Charles Seeger and they have four children and she doesn't compose as much. She is still working with music though. She's doing a lot of transcribing folk tunes right here at the Library of Congress in what would later become the American Folklife Center. She was still composing during this time period, just not as much. So, in 1939, she wrote "Rissolty, Rossolty," which uses a lot of those folk tunes she was working with. And in 1952, she turns back to that more dissonant counterpoint style with the Suite for Wind Quintet. At this time period, she's writing in correspondence that she's looking forward to writing more and more compositions, but unfortunately she died the next year in 1953 so we don't know what new works she could have come up with. But if you are interested in learning more, check out the resources that we've put together, including the Seeger family finding aid, which describes music, photos, correspondence, writings and other documents from Crawford Seeger and other members of the Seeger family. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the performance.