Ruth Crawford Seeger – Nine Preludes (1928)

My initial impression was right:  I like these pieces much better than the Violin Sonata.  While some of them do have a wandery quality (I’m thinking of the Scriabinesque convolutions of #1), and some do contain stream-of-consciousness moments (in #2, a figure originally stated in pounding octaves is soon recast as a flowing melody hidden in a watery, Ravel-like texture), in general they’re much more stripped-down and single-minded than the earlier piece.  I keep wanting to compare them to various other sets of small, exploratory piano pieces — Bartók’s Bagatelles (1908), Messiaen’s Preludes (1929), Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952), Peter Lieberson’s Fantasy Pieces (1989) — but they’re really their own thing.

The majority of the Preludes are slow, with markings like “Grave,” “Tranquillo” and “Andante Mistico.”  When fast music does appear, it’s often in the context of slower passages, emerging in bursts of activity and then sinking back into stillness.  Unlike the Violin Sonata, which focused on motivic interconnections, these pieces are focused primarily on harmony, sonority and texture.  #5 is all about building quick, bright, fluid lines over slow, dark repeated dissonant chords.  #8, one of the fast movements, contains passages built almost entirely out of perfect fifths (presaging “Fém” from Ligeti’s second book of Etudes (1993)).  #6, the one marked “Andante Mistico,” is a study in dissonant contrapuntal lines (the term “dissonant counterpoint” was coined by Crawford Seeger’s husband, Charles Seeger), very quiet and high in register, supported by occasional rolled left-hand chords that are built by adding one “wrong” note to a triad.  At the end, this texture is reduced to just three events:  a luminous mid-register rising major sixth followed by a quiet dissonant chord at the top of the piano.  It’s a very Ivesian way to end a movement, and actually, many passages in the Preludes remind me of Ives, and also of his friend Carl Ruggles, in their dense combination of chromatic tonality, atonality and added-note chords.  It’s funny:  the harmonic elements are pretty much the same as in the Violin Sonata, but they fit together so much better here that it’s hard to believe that it’s only two years later.

Ruth Crawford Seeger – Sonata for Violin and Piano (1926)

I remember liking Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931) a lot when I studied it in college.  I’ve also taken a cursory listen to her Preludes (1928), and they sounded great.  This piece, though, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  It seems like it ought to, given Crawford Seeger’s Schoenbergian tendency to derive nearly everything in a movement from a single motif.  But what’s missing from the piece is a clear sense of large-scale form.  The harmonies are an inventive mix of Scriabin-like chromatic tonality, whole-tone structures, and modal dissonance that reminds me of early Bartók, particularly the 14 Bagatelles (1908) — but I don’t hear any directionality in the way they’re put together. The phrase structure is equally puzzling;  I guess you could call it improvisatory or stream-of-consciousness, but as we’ve established, I often have trouble with pieces like that.  Overall the piece feels like a bunch of phrases strung together rather than a coherent musical argument.

On the plus side, Crawford Seeger does experiment with notational conventions in some interesting ways.  The accidentals only apply to the notes that immediately follow them, and while I’m not a fan of that practice, I have to give her credit for doing it a good quarter-century before it became a common practice among European avant-gardists.  She also writes a number of time signatures with note values rather than numbers on the bottom, which I do think is a good idea:  7 over a dotted quarter note is a hell of a lot easier to process quickly than 21/8.  I also should say that I like the scherzo movement considerably better than the rest of the piece.  Its thinner textures and use of repetition help create more formal clarity, and I like its combination of quirky, staccato, rhythmically off-kilter piano lines and deftly tiptoeing Bartókian melodies.

One thing that might explain why the later pieces I’ve heard from Crawford Seeger were so much better constructed than this one:  she was only 25 when she wrote it.  I’ve noticed that a lot of composers grow very rapidly, both creatively and technically, between the ages of 25 and 30.  A remarkable number of composers in the 20th century wrote their “breakout” pieces somewhere during that time, including Schoenberg (Verklärte Nacht, age 25), Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, age 26), Boulez (Structures, age 27), Milhaud (Le bœuf sur le toit, age 27), Bartók (14 Bagatelles, age 27), Penderecki (Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, age 27), Stravinsky (The Firebird, age 28), Cage (first prepared piano pieces, age 28), Grisey (Périodes, age 28), Reich (It’s Gonna Rain, age 29) and Glass (first minimalist pieces, age 30).  So maybe for my next post I’ll take a closer listen to those Preludes and see what RCS was up to two years later.