Crawford Seeger reviews
Bengt Forsberg performs Neglected Works for Piano by Kaprálová, Beach, Carwithen, Aulin, Almén, Bacewicz, Tailleferre and Crawford Seeger
It is an accurate title, but ‘neglected works for piano’ gives little clue as to the breadth and imagination of this beautifully played CD. The well-paced programme features seven composers (all women), whose music makes, as Bengt Forsberg says in his sensible foreword, ‘purely a collection of good and interesting music’.
Ruth Crawford Seeger/Charles Seeger
This is a revelatory collection. Though Ruth Crawford’s masterpiece, the String Quartet, has long been available on disc to anyone diligent enough to seek it out, the other works are hardly known at all. Born in 1901, she established herself on the radical wing of American music in the Twenties – alongside Cowell, Ives and Ruggles – with a string of remarkable small-scale pieces. However, after her marriage to Charles Seeger in 1931, she became a prime mover in the folk music revival, only returning to writing concert works just before her death in 1953.
Crawford Seeger
At last it seems Ruth Crawford Seeger is receiving the attention her small but momentous output deserves. For a few years around the turn of the Thirties she was writing music as radical as any by an American of her generation. After 1935 she turned away from composition to join her husband Charles Seeger in his assiduous collection and documentation of folk music (though her meeting with Seeger had given shape and purpose to her modernist instincts in the first place) and only took it up again just before her death in 1953.