Ruth Crawford Seeger, Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger et Charles Seeger, ca 1937
Of all the works written in the 1930s, the two compositions that represent its peak were String Quartet (1931) and Three Songs (1932) for contralto, oboe, percussion and piano, with or without orchestral ostinato.
In his excellent book about experimental American music, David Nicholls explains how Crawford-Seeger manages in String Quartet to create a synthesis of previously explored techniques, bringing it from the dissonant line of Diaphonic Suites to the global organisation of the four movements in this work. Some of String Quartet's characteristics denote its spirit of exploration and formal safety: the third movement, for example, is mainly based on a four-voice canon, which is neither melodic nor rhythmic but intense; the relationships created by these dynamic variations on the melodic counterpoint between the voices are the main factor in the tension in the musical discourse. The canon is designed so that most of the time none of the four instruments plays with the same intensity at the same time. As the musicians play all the held and changing notes, the result is an incessant movement of coming and going between the various pitches and tones
of the four instruments. This type of sound discovery only has an equivalent in some music from the 1960s, when the exploration of complex instrumental textures was transformed in a stylistic process. In String Quartet's first movement, Crawford-Seeger seems to rediscover the spirit of a certain American 'tradition' stemming from Ives: the great polyphonic independence of the voices is reminiscent of the 'collisions' in Ives' worlds of harmony, melody and rhythm (and even speed). However, here it is the extension of the principles of dissonant counterpoint that creates an almost continual heterophony between the voices. This approach brings to String Quartet the discovery of organisational methods that were fairly radical for its time: for example, some successions of pitches are dissociated from their original rhythms and are reused later with rhythms that appeared in another context; or, as we saw earlier, intensities are used to control dramatic progression, as a priority on the other parameters. In the fourth movement, we hear the opposition between elements organised systematically (in sequences of numbers that increase and decrease), and the first violin's line, which unwinds more freely.
