Ruth Crawford, also known as Ruth Crawford Seeger, ranks as one of the earliest of American avant-garde modernists. This is all the more extraordinary because she was a woman working in a male-dominated field. She devoted less than a decade of her life, the years from about 1925 to 1933, to full-time composition, and so her musical output is relatively small. It features works for various chamber ensembles, piano music (Crawford was a skilled pianist), and songs for both solo voice and chorus.

Crawford’s music is uncompromisingly dissonant in harmony; many works are atonal in the manner of Schoenberg (see page 324). She shows a mastery of clear, transparent counterpoint and relishes the layered textures it can create. Though she would devote herself to collecting and transcribing American folk songs during the 1930s and 1940s, her own earlier music manifests little interest in incorporating this tradition; instead she looked to European modernist predecessors.