The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Ruth Crawford Seeger had a brief life (1901-1953) and an even briefer career as a composer. After her String Quartet of 1931, she gave up composing to concentrate on folk music studies. She wrote only brief pieces for piano, and they make a difficult listening program. As soon as you become adjusted to the comfortable idiom of her early little pieces, you are plunged into music in a more advanced style. These too are little pieces, including a bold Sonata that lasts less than six minutes and a fascinating series of 11 Preludes. This disc is a fine presentation. Jenny Lin never shies away from dissonance or aggressiveness, while playing in a musicianly manner with particularly beautiful tonal qualities. Narrator Timothy Jones is clear and dignified in the text of the delightful "The Adventures of Tom Thumb," but the recording is seriously defective, underbalancing the voice so that you need to read the booklet to understand what he is saying. Overall, this is a fascinating byway in the history of American music, highly recommended to the adventurous listener. --Leslie Gerber

Tracks:

Little Waltz
Little Lullaby
Jumping The Rope (Playtime)
Caprice
Whirligig
Mr. Crow and Miss Wren Go for a Walk-A little study in short trills
Sonata
Theme and Variations
Five Canons: I
Five Canons: II
Five Canons: III
Five Canons: IV
Five Canons: V
Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, Ending with a Fugue
Five Preludes: Prelude No. 1
Five Preludes: Prelude No. 2
Five Preludes: Prelude No. 3
Five Preludes: Prelude No. 4
Five Preludes: Prelude No. 5
Four Preludes: Prelude No. 6
Four Preludes: Prelude No. 7
Four Preludes: Prelude No. 8
Four Preludes: Prelude No. 9
Piano Study in Mixed Accents: Version 1: ff sempre al fine
Piano Study in Mixed Accents: Version 2: pp crescendo poco a poco
Piano Study in Mixed Accents: Version 3: ff diminuendo poco a poco
We Dance Together
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: Tom Sets Out
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: Tom's First Adventure: Chased By the Angry
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: Tom's Second Adventure: Stealing the King's
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: tom's Third Adventure: Sleeping in a
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: Tom Meets the Mouse: They Gallop Home
The Adventures of Tom Thumb: Tom Recounts his Adventures

Amazon.com

Ruth Crawford Seeger had a brief life (1901-1953) and an even briefer career as a composer. After her String Quartet of 1931, she gave up composing to concentrate on folk music studies. She wrote only brief pieces for piano, and they make a difficult listening program. As soon as you become adjusted to the comfortable idiom of her early little pieces, you are plunged into music in a more advanced style. These too are little pieces, including a bold Sonata that lasts less than six minutes and a fascinating series of 11 Preludes. This disc is a fine presentation. Jenny Lin never shies away from dissonance or aggressiveness, while playing in a musicianly manner with particularly beautiful tonal qualities. Narrator Timothy Jones is clear and dignified in the text of the delightful "The Adventures of Tom Thumb," but the recording is seriously defective, underbalancing the voice so that you need to read the booklet to understand what he is saying. Overall, this is a fascinating byway in the history of American music, highly recommended to the adventurous listener. --Leslie Gerber

Average customer rating:

Shades of grey
excellent, but Amazon's listing is wrong
Outstanding performances

Cowell: Quartet Romantic

Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Duets | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music

Quintets | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music

Trios | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music

Percussion | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Classical | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

Henry Cowell: Persian Set

ASIN: B0000063CB
Release Date: 1998-04-28

Tracks:

Wind Quintet
Quartet Romantic
Seven Paragraphs
Suite No. II
String Trio
The Abongo

Customer Reviews:

Shades of grey.......2007-05-26

This New World CD collates the partial contents of two LPs. NW 285 was published in 1978 and had Ruth Crawford's Three Songs in addition to the Wind Quintet of Wallingford Riegger, Cowell's Quartet Romantic and John Becker's "The Abongo". NW 319 was released in 1984 and, other than Cowell's Paragraphs, Crawford's Suite No. 2 and Lou Harrison's Trio (played by an ensemble credited back then as the "New Music Consort", but not anymore on the CD reissue), also had Cowell's Pulse for Percussion Sextet and Cage's Third Construction for Percussion Quartet.

All these composers are somehow linked to one another. Wallingford Riegger and John J. Becker are the two less reputed members of the group know in the 1920s as the "American Five", along with Ives, Ruggles and Cowell. Cowell met Ruth Crawford in the early 1920s. In 1929, already an accomplished modernist composer, she began study with the famous composer and theorist Charles Seeger, father of the concept of "dissonant counterpoint" (they eventually married in 1932) - with whom Cowell; self-taught in composition in his youth, had taken music lessons in the mid-1910s. Harrison in turn was a student of Cowell in the early 1930s and, as Cowell's most famous other student John Cage, he was very much influenced by the research and experimentation in sound and rhythms of his teacher.

These composers share not only these personal ties but also a broad common compositional outlook. Other than Harrison, they are among the early generation of American experimentalists active in the 1920s, introducers of the Schoenbergian twelve-tone system (Riegger), adept at dissonant counterpoint (Becker, Crawford, Cowell), experimentators in sound and rhythm (Cowell again, Harrison). In the short pieces represented here (at 17 minutes Cowell's Quartet Romantic is the longest, but otherwise they range from 4:50 to 9:40), they are also featured in an austere, stern, serious, unseductive compositional face, painting their musical canvass with various shades of grey.

Cowell's Quartet Romantic for two flutes, viola and cello (1915-17) is the most experimental piece of the lot, a "demonstration of theoretical principles" as the liner notes aptly put it, an essay in non-binary time signatures and independent, atonal part writing, so much so that Cowell considered the piece "humanly impossible to play" - at least without the help of some new electronic resources that existed neither at the time of composition nor even at the time of publication (1964). But in 1978, the use of headphones, click-tracks and a painstaking process of repetition resulted in this recording.

To my ears the result sounds remarkably faithful to the concept: independently flowing, atonal melodic lines of greyish contour, a busy line here over a more appeased one there, the whole sounding pretty arbitrary and uningratiating. Lots of work for a disappointing result - as often with experiments, error is a necessary outcome of trial. Cowell's Seven Paragraphs for string trio date from 1925 and are couched again in a stern, severe dissonantly contrapuntal language, reminiscent of the Schoenberg-influenced German expressionists like Krenek. The movements are not cued.

Riegger wrote throughout his compositional career in a variety of styles, from Romantic and Impressionist to twelve-tone. His Wind Quintet from 1952 is a perky, atonal little fantasy (6:30) full of canonic figures and a Janacek or Stravinsky-like rhythmic vigor. Not substantial, but pleasant. A good introduction to Riegger is the CRI CD of his works: Riegger: Symphony No3, Romanza, Dance Rhythms, Music for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Music for Brass Choir, Movement for Two Trumpets Trombone and Piano, Nonet for Brass.

For reasons unexplained Ruth Crawford's Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano from 1929 remained unpublished and this was its first recording. It is echt-Crawford, severe, atonal, brooding in mood and at times rising to the massive unison climax, rhythmically robust in the 3rd movement (4:53), contrapuntally elaborate. She is at her best I find in the slightly zany whimsicality of the 2nd movement (3:00). The movements are not cued.

Lou Harrison's brief (4:45) String Trio in one movement shares all those stylistic traits with Cowell's Paragraphs and Crawford's Suite - the atonality, the contrapuntal activity, the brooding and almost depressed mood - except for the occasional outbursts that give at least some feeling of contrast to the compositions of his predecessors.

Becker's "The Abongo" is stylistically the "odd-piece out" in this collection. Composed in 1933 and subtitled "A Primitive Dance", it is a percussion work much in the wake of the highly influential "Ionisation" of Edgar Varèse (1931). But its rhythmic squareness, while producing considerable adrenalin, and its call for hand claps then gruff shouts from the performers, sound embarassingly like a naïve and vaguely condescendant Western cliché of African music at the times of the West's discovery of and infatuation for "Art Nègre". A good introduction to Becker - a composer in desperate need of a (re)discovery - is on The Louisville Orchestra-First Edition Encores, with his 3rd Symphony "Symphonia Brevis".

excellent, but Amazon's listing is wrong.......2005-11-24

Other reviewer is correct -- this is superb music -- but Amazon has the wrong Crawford Seeger piece listed: on the CD is the Suite for piano and strings, a much more substantial piece than the Diaphonic Suite listed. The Cowell is a particularly interesting composition (free atonal imitation, nearly 20 minutes long).

Outstanding performances.......2003-10-27

For many of these pieces, this represents the only recording available. But there is much more of a reason why this album should receive accolades: the performances are stunningly good. Most of the musicians are familiar names, members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Speculum Musicae (the latter a contemporary music ensemble founded by Don Palma, bassist and co-founder of Orpheus, an ensemble largely made up of Orpheus personnel). Moreover, this represents some of the best music being written in America in the middle part of the 20th Century. This recording would round out any collection.

Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe

Average customer rating:

A mixed bag but an opportunity for fine discoveries

Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe

Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

David Tudor: Rainforest; Gordon Mumma: 4 Mographs, 2 Sections from Gestures II
Jennifer Higdon: Piano Trio; Voices; Impressions

ASIN: B000GTLFLS
Release Date: 2006-08-01

Tracks:

Henry Cowell: Sonata for Violin and Piano (for Joseph Szigeti) (1945):Hymn 1:49
Henry Cowell: Sonata for Violin and Piano (for Joseph Szigeti) (1945):In Fuguing Style 4:10
Henry Cowell: Sonata for Violin and Piano (for Joseph Szigeti) (1945):Ballad 3:01
Henry Cowell: Sonata for Violin and Piano (for Joseph Szigeti) (1945):Jig 2:40
Henry Cowell: Sonata for Violin and Piano (for Joseph Szigeti) (1945):Finale 5:41
Stefan Wolpe: Second Piece for Violin Alone (1966) 3:20
George Antheil: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1923) 7:56(for Ezra Pound)
Johanna Beyer: Suite for Violin and Piano (1937):I.2:46
Johanna Beyer: Suite for Violin and Piano (1937):II.1:26
Johanna Beyer: Suite for Violin and Piano (1937):III.2:08
Charles Dodge: Etude IV for Violin and Tape (for Baird) 3:48
Charles Dodge: Etude II for Violin and Tape (for Baird) 4:15
David Mahler: Maxfields Reel for unaccompanied violin (1983) 8:06
Larry Polansky: Movement in E major for John Cage (1975, rev. 1996) violin and piano 5:55
Ruth P. Crawford: Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1923) 2:43

Customer Reviews:

A mixed bag but an opportunity for fine discoveries.......2007-03-17

Despite the annotator's efforts to draw some ties between the composers presented on this disc, there is hardly any stylistic relation between their respective pieces, whose dates of composition span over seventy years. Ruth Crawford's Nocturne from 1923 (an apprentice work) is a short (2:40) and unsubstantial piece of salon music. George Antheil's 2nd violin and piano sonata from the same year belongs to another class. With its companion the 1st sonata, it was commissioned by Ezra Pound for his mistress Olgar Runge, apparently a consummate violinist in her own right. Though Antheil, in his 1945 autobiography "Bad Boy of Music" (Bad Boy of Music (Paperback)) is rather dismissive about them, calling them "great empty chic", I find them daring, provocative, innovative and fun. The short (8'), one-movement 2nd is evocative of Ives in its mock use of popular American melodies and take-offs of tunes from the Grand Opera or the Vaudeville, its demented ragtimes. Of it Antheil wrote that the violin music represented the banal music of the past and present, and the piano the music of the future. It's not so simple, as the mockingly brutal onslaughts of piano pounding, so typical of Antheil's provocative style of those years, do manage to drag along the violin with them - a case of the bad boy corrupting the innocent maiden, maybe. The sonata ends with a simple, wistful, folk-like violin melody accompanied by drum - a reminiscene on Antheil's recent trip to Tunisia, and maybe a faint memory of the final pages of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. Abe and Harvey play the sonata acceptably (there are some spots of sour intonation from Abe, Harvey tends to over-pedall and thus rob the piano part of its desired crispness especially in the barbaric clusters of the section before last at 6:03, and Abe lacks sensuousness in the mesmerizing final "tunisian" page at 6:43, where two drums substitute for the piano), but it is more conveniently found, and better played, on a Montaigne CD with Antheil's Violin and Piano Sonatas 1 & 4 (George Antheil: Violin Sonatas 1, 2 & 4, see my review).

Henry Cowell's Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945) is a pastoral, relaxed work exuding a strong "prairie-style" atmosphere in the manner of Copland's most "American" pieces, but without the Brooklyner's unique personality. His four years at the San Quentin State Prison on charge of bisexuality had turned the ultra-modernist composer of the twenties into a conservative. The sonata is easy listening, but so much so that to me it sounds just trite. There is, though, in the finale at 3:58, a highly original moment with prepared piano, where the earlier, experimental Cowell shows his nose. It lasts 30 seconds.

On the face of her Suite for violin and piano from 1937, Leipzig-born Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) seems to be a highly interesting and original composer voice. A student of Cowell and Ruth Crawford from the time she moved to New York in 1924, she uses the technique of dissonant counterpoint invented by Crawford's husband, composer Charles Seeger. The Suite is austere and desperately vehement and sounds like Shostakovitch's violin and viola sonatas and even like the music of Shostakovitch's radical pupil, the maverick Galina Ustvolskaya.

Among the more recent compositions, the choice of two from Charles Dodge's set of Four Etudes for Violin and Tape (1994) is the one I enjoyed most. In Etude IV The violin melody is quite simple - a series of upward and downward arpeggios, really - but it comes over eerie and fascinating computer-generated sounds - wind through pipes and electronic chime-like sounds. The violin is more agitated in Etude II, with many gestures that belong to the traditional panoply of violin virtuosity (tremolos, scales, harmonics) but ends with a long phrase of intense lyricism. I rarely find the blending of traditional instruments and computer sounds convincing, but Dodge's music conjures a haunting and very personal sound-world, intensely lyrical at times, to make one regret that Miwako Abe didn't choose to record the complete set.

David Mahler's "Maxfield's Reel" (1983) is also quite fascinating with its obsessive repetition of first simple then increasingly complex melodic cells. The piece is constructed in imitation of the tape compositions (with splicing and looping effects) of Richard Maxfield (1927-69), a pioneer of electronic music.

Stefan Wolpe's "Second Piece for Violin Alone" (1966) is stark and un-seductive, and fortunately short (3 and ½ minutes) and Larry Polansky's 6-minute "Movement for John Cage" (1975 revised 1996), written in homage to Cage's 1947 "Nocturne" for violin and piano, is a stern quasi nocturne for violin and piano, with a short, more aggressive, dance-like passage at the end, of no great distinctive character.

Despite my reservations in Antheil, Miwako Abe - a Japanese woman violinist established in Australia - plays with fine tone and the duet she forms with Australian-born Michael Kieran Harvey seems well on top of the music. As usual with this label, the thorough and informative notes, with selected bibliography and discography, add much to the disc's value.

Average customer rating:

Voices from Elysium

Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

Ruth Crawford: 9 Preludes, Johanna Beyer: Dissonant Counterpoint, Gebrauchs-Musik
The World of Ruth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger: Violin Sonata; Piano Pieces; Two Ricercari; Sandburg Songs

ASIN: B00000AGK9
Release Date: 1998-09-29

Tracks: