Ensemble Modern III

The youthful Ruth Crawford studied piano and composition at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, as a result of which no lesser figure than the composer Henry Cowell arranged for his former teacher Charles Seeger to accept her as a pupil in 1929. That same year the would-be composer became the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship to spend a year in Europe, where she met established greats such as Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Josef Matthias Hauer, Arthur Honegger, Albert Roussel and Nadia Boulanger. After she returned to the USA, Ruth Crawford married Charles Seeger, with whom she transcribed thousands of recordings in the Library of Congress’s archive of folk songs. While her early works had been influenced by neo-Romanticism and impressionism, after she began studying with Seeger, she adopted his composing methods using the rules of “dissonant counterpoint.” These turn the traditional rules of counterpoint upside down, with consonances being continued as dissonances and the concept of dissonance being applied to changes of metre and time.  From this period onward, Crawford Seeger also worked with serial techniques, tone clusters, spoken voices, rhythms that were independent from voices, sounds groups that were spatially separated from each other and various other experimental practices. On the third and final day of concerts devoted to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s overall ouevre, the Ensemble Modern presents the broad spectrum of the composer’s chamber music works, to be played in sequence by a variety of different chamber ensembles spread around the hall.