Born into a minister’s family in a small town in eastern Ohio, Ruth Crawford showed early musical talent as a pianist. She entered the American Conservatory in Chicago in 1921 but soon sought out private study with the Canadian pianist Djane Lavoie-Herz, whose Chicago studio was something of a hotbed for modernist music, and musical mysticism as well. The young Crawford eagerly imbibed both.

There she met composer Henry Cowell. He had been a student of the musicologist, composer, and new music advocate Charles Seeger (1886–1979), now living in New York. Through Cowell’s intervention, Crawford found her way there to study with Seeger. In 1931 she became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition; she used the fellowship to spend a year studying in Berlin and Paris, where she met Béla Bartók and Alban Berg.

On returning from Europe, Crawford and Seeger were married; they had four children. Crawford took her husband’s name and is often referred to as Ruth Crawford Seeger. In 1933, just as her career was taking flight, Crawford the modernist composer fell silent. She had earlier wondered whether a career in composition and raising a family were compatible; her husband seems to have thought that they were not.

Over the next two decades Crawford was not inactive in music, however. After the family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1935, she worked tirelessly in government-sponsored projects to collect, transcribe, arrange, and publish American folk music. She collaborated on Charles’s musical writings and taught music to pre-school children — and to her own children. One of her stepchildren from Charles’s first marriage was Pete Seeger (1919–2014), the most prominent advocate for American traditional music of the second half of the twentieth century.

Crawford had just returned to her own composition, producing the award-winning Suite for Wind Quintet in 1952, when she was diagnosed with cancer. She died the next year.

Chief Works: Orchestral music: Music for Small Orchestra ◼ Piano works: nine preludes; Study in Mixed Accents ◼ Vocal works: songs for voice and piano setting poems of her friend Carl Sandburg; three Chants for chorus ◼ Chamber works: String Quartet; Suite for Wind Quintet ◼ Many arrangements of folk songs for adults and children, including the collection American Folk Songs for Children, still in print.

Encore: After Prelude for Piano No. 6, listen to String Quartet, third and fourth movements, and Music for Small Orchestra, second movement.

Image credit: Kim Seeger for the family of Ruth Crawford Seeger.