June 8, 2010
This fall, AHCM will begin to work on its NEA-funded March 2010 community music initiative, Music, Poetry and American Identity, a project highlighting the music of early modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and the poetry of Carl Sandburg that inspired her. You can read more about the project on our homepage, but here AHCM’s Artistic Director Rachel Goodwin shares some of her thoughts on Crawford, an enduring inspiration.
“Ever since I first discovered the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger and in 1992 began the journey of programming and performing her chamber music with AHCM, I have felt a profound connection to Crawford’s musical voice. Often considered the most important American female composer of the 20th century, her music is at once startlingly original, searingly complex, spiritually deep, and in its essence the simultaneous voices of an American and of a woman.
Self-described as a “straddler of two worlds,” Crawford had an important second musical career as a folk music specialist. She was also a devoted wife and the mother of the five folksong-revivalist Seegers, including the renowned Pete Seeger, her stepson. AHCM is honored to have won an American Masterpieces Chamber Music grant that will highlight the work of this unique and still under-performed composer. Crawford’s work reflects yet another important strand in the story of what it means to be an American.”
