IS THERE SUCH AN ANIMAL?

Every now and then, a piece by Ruth Crawford Seeger will appear on a concert program, most likely at a vocal recital. The singer will be an American, and she will also be a woman — for Crawford was an American female composer, and in music, as elsewhere, people like to feel that they are helping their own. The late mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, for example, took care to offer her audiences a few Crawford songs, convinced not only that she was performing worthy music but that she was doing her bit for the cause.

Crawford, whose life spanned the first half of this century, is frequently hailed as the most important woman composer in American history. There are, of course, more exalted distinctions. Crawford, to her credit, never wished to be noted for her sex, even to the point of refusing to join women’s musical organizations. It pleased her when her work was described as ” masculine” or “virile” (which it is). Her friend and fellow composer Henry Cowell commented that her violin sonata was utterly devoid of the ” undesirable sentimentality” that “so often destroys the creative efforts of women composers.”

Judith Tick, a professor at Northeastern University who has made a specialty of women in music, has now given us a biography of Crawford — “my kind of heroine,” she confides in her preface, “a modern woman whom I understand.” Readers may well approach the book with skepticism: It is the work of an academic writer steeped in gender studies, and it concerns a largely neglected composer who, during the Stalinist era, made herself a tool of the Communist party. Yet Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music is a clear success — a finely drawn portrait of a woman in a man’s profession, an illuminating chronicle of a composer’s development, and a learned analysis of the struggle to fashion a genuinely American music.

Crawford was born in 1901 along the Ohio-West Virginia border. The daughter and granddaughter of Methodist ministers, she was reared on a flinty practicality — the kind, she later suggested, that forbade the growing of flowers, “because you couldn’t eat them.” Throughout her life, she was to feel a “straddler of two worlds,” caught between the values of her youth and the radicalism of her musical and political beliefs. On her sixth birthday, she experienced two events that remained in her memory: learning to darn socks and going to her first piano lesson. As a teenager, she was by far the most promising girl in Jacksonville, Florida (to which the family had moved), filling notebooks with remarkably mature poems and discovering the master composers.

In 1921, Crawford struck out for Chicago and the American Conservatory of Music. There, she encountered the thrilling innovations of Scriabin, Debussy, and Stravinsky. She was only an adequate pianist, but she showed a startling gift for composition, amazing her teacher, Adolf Weidig, with the freshness of her experiments: “Every time you come into my studio,” he told her, “you bring me renewed proof that there is something in you.” Crawford had a plain realization that composers belonged to a higher species than performers, an insight that does not occur to every musician. In a poem to a pianist friend, she wrote, You are the lover of the creations of God, the buds and the green things. . . . But I . . . shall myself be a god, . . . [creating] trees of sound and color.

Before long, Crawford fell in with a group of theosophists and would-be mystics, fashionably imbibing Lao Tse and the Bhagavad Gita. She exclaimed in her diary, “I curse myself for my English reserve.” She was particularly impressed by the strange composer Dane Rudhyar, who condemned harmony as “tribal” and glorified atonality as “universal.” Rudhyar favored allowing the hands to fall on the keyboard “at random,” thereby finding true composition. Crawford later admitted that, under the tutelage of this flighty guru, she “scorned counterpoint for two years.” But she was also making a name for herself, attracting the attention of more established avant-gardists such as Cowell, Leo Ornstein, and Edgard Varese. By 1926, she was on the board of the New Music Society, which was dedicated to “progressive tendencies.”

At about this time, Crawford met Carl Sandburg, the “people’s troubadour,” who sought a piano teacher for his daughters. Crawford soon became a virtual member of the family and collaborated with Sandburg on his American Songbag, a hugely successful anthology of folk music. Crawford went on to compose numerous settings of Sandburg’s poems, including the 1929 “White Moon.” She also approved of Sandburg’s social sensibility, remarking that he was “right to search among down-and-outers for underlying poetry,” being “ten times more likely to find it there than in more polite circles.”

In the summer of 1929, Crawford stayed at the MacDowell Colony (the artistic village overseen by the widow of the composer Edward MacDowell), conversing at mealtime with the likes of E. A. Robinson, Thornton Wilder, and Edward Dahlberg and contemplating her future. Her mother had died the year before, after a hideous illness, through which Crawford served as primary nurse. As early as 1923, the young composer had asked, “To whom is my duty greater — my mother or what talent I possess?” She had reproached herself unmercifully for what she considered her failings as a daughter, writing in 1927, “How much of a . . . superior, blustering, impatient-at- feminine- foibles, fount-of-knowledge man I am becoming with mother. . . . Why, a man-hating feminist author could almost write me up as a type.” Now, she agonized over whether she would be able to enjoy, as she put it, “both a ‘career’ and a life.”

Still uncertain, Crawford found her way to New York, where she had the luck to be installed in the home of Blanche Walton, a patroness of new music. Mrs. Walton’s salon was a mecca for the musically daring: “The crowd, the meeting of friends and rivals, the ice cream and prohibition wine!” the wealthy dowager wrote. “My affairs draw all the best of the composers and musicians in New York.” Among them was the musicologist and sometime composer Charles Seeger, a married man with three sons (one of them Pete Seeger, who would go on to found The Weavers and become the country’s best-known leftist folksinger). Charles was to become Crawford’s teacher, partner, and husband. In the meantime, she was applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship, hoping to travel and work in Europe. When Rudhyar recommended the female composer to the foundation, a question came back: “Is there such an animal?”

There was, and she soon set sail for Berlin. While on the continent, Crawford refined her style and conferred with advanced musical thinkers like Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Albert Roussel. The debate about what sort of music America should have was growing heated, with Cowell maintaining that jazz and its half-classical manifestations were nothing but “Negro Music seen through the eyes of Tin Pan Alley Jews.” George Gershwin and Aaron Copland had mere “pretensions of writing the authentic American music” in contrast to such “true Americans as the Anglo-Saxon Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles” (an example of the anti-Semitism to which Crawford herself was not entirely immune).

Meanwhile, Crawford and Seeger were pursuing their courtship by mail, exploring delicate issues such as whether fidelity was appropriate to an enlightened relationship. “In spite of our modern heads,” Seeger sighed, “our hearts still speak for constancy.” Crawford rejoiced that, in Seeger, she had found the “unseparateable mixture of work and love” that she had longed for — “a terribly romantic old-fashioned idea for a modern young woman to have.” When Crawford returned home, Seeger divorced his first wife, and the lovers married, after the requisite six-week residency in Nevada.

Then, back in New York, the tragedy of Crawford’s life — personal and musical — struck: She succumbed to communism, that great killer of the artistic spirit. Charles and Ruth joined the musicians’ Pierre Degeyter Club (named for the composer of the Internationale), and Crawford, who had only recently achieved a professional breakthrough with a profound string quartet, was soon writing obnoxious ditties with titles like Sacco, Vanzetti, and Chinaman, Laundryman. The slogan of the Workers Music League was “Music as a Weapon in the Class Struggle,” and the Worker Musician rallied the faithful “For proletarian music, for the defense of the Soviet Union, for a Soviet America.” Seeger, who had been an acclaimed scholar of music, contributed a regular column to the Daily Worker, declaring in one of them, “Music is propaganda — always propaganda — and of the most powerful sort.”

The writer Mike Gold proclaimed that “songs are as necessary to the fighting movement as bread,” and even Copland served up Into the Streets, May 1st! Crawford tried to maintain a little distance, mocking herself as ” Krawford the Kommunist,” but she still swallowed the line that classical music was for the elites and therefore deprived herself of what, from childhood, she had regarded as her high calling.

In 1935, Charles Seeger secured a job with a New Deal agency, training musicians for placement in the distressed communities of the South. This led to Crawford’s second career — that of folklorist. The Seegers were introduced to the archivist John Lomax and his son Alan in Washington, D.C., and the two families teamed to promote folk music as the genuine voice of America. Crawford, being the most talented of the bunch, handled the song transcriptions and arrangements, spending the 1940s producing such volumes as Our Singing Country, Folk Song U.S.A., and several collections for children.

In the meantime, she was — in her words — “composing babies,” giving birth to four, to go with her three stepchildren. Their home, for years, contained only folk instruments, and Ruth Crawford, who had once stirred a fair portion of America’s classical-music establishment, was reduced to preparing The Burl Ives-Ruth Seeger Piano Songbook.

Crawford was well aware that her original dreams had gone unfulfilled. She wrote plaintively that “we should not forget that it is also important to write music for the few.” In 1949, after a hiatus of almost two decades, she suddenly began to compose again. One of her daughters later recalled that her mother had simply sat down and started to write in a way that none of the children could recognize. Three years later, Crawford noticed an advertisement for a competition and, throwing off ideological restraints, composed a wind quintet for it. Naturally, the piece won, and Crawford, resuscitated, wrote to her friend Ruggles, “I believe I’m going to work again . . . If I live to be ninety-nine as my grandfather did, that gives me forty- eight more years.”

She had, in fact, only one more year. As she was dying, she complained, “It isn’t fair. I am just getting back to composing.” According to her stepson Pete — whose fame was then eclipsing Crawford’s — “she didn’t go gentle at all.” She had given the middle years of her life to her politics, her husband, and her family, and she was at last ready to resume the course she had charted as a girl, when, like all born composers, she had encountered the world as a place of sound.

Crawford lived fifty-two years, but composed seriously for only about ten of them. Even her most advanced pieces — her violin sonata, her string quartet, her Study in Mixed Accents for piano — seem mere preludes to more substantial work to come. She never got around to the forms — a concerto, a symphony — that she knew separated major composers from minor ones. Would she have developed into a first-tier composer? Perhaps not, but she would almost surely have attained the level of, say, Elliott Carter, an interesting atonalist with a strong American current.

Instead, she opted for a cold and stifling husband who envied his wife’s superior talents and a cold and stifling political doctrine that condemned classical composition as evil. The biographer Judith Tick does not always draw the conclusions demanded by her own evidence, but she paints a compelling picture, allowing us to understand a pioneer who might have been much, much more than an affirmative-action curiosity.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and critic of classical music for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.