Crawford Seeger Piano Music – Jenny Lin

Somewhere in the Crawford Seeger literature there ought to be an asterisk noting how little time she actually had. A handful of astonishingly productive years in the 1920s and early ‘30s, then the folk-song transcriptions, the Lomax collaborations, the raising of children who would themselves reshape American music — Pete, Mike, Peggy — and precious little time left over for the concert hall. She died in 1953, not yet sixty, having written barely a dozen works anyone plays. Jenny Lin’s new disc of the complete piano music makes the case, gently but firmly, that every one of those years mattered.

I’ve carried a fondness for this composer since a scratchy old Nonesuch LP decades back paired her 1931 String Quartet with quartets by George Perle and Milton Babbitt. Heady company, and she more than held her own in it. That quartet remains one of the great overlooked achievements of American modernism, its slow movement built from a shifting mass of dynamics rather than pitches, an idea Elliott Carter would later claim credit for reinventing. But the piano music tells the origin story, and Lin — whose Chinoiserie disc for BIS a few seasons back proved her a pianist unafraid of unfashionable repertoire — lays it out with real narrative sense.

Start at the beginning, which here means 1922. “Little Waltz” is exactly what it says: three-quarter time, unpretentious, a child’s first steps in composition dressed in salon clothes. Nothing to trouble anyone. “Little Lullaby” tinkles with a faint music-box glaze, and “Jumping the Rope (Playtime)” — one of two undated miniatures that must come from roughly the same year — bounces along with real wit, the kind of piece a young teacher writes for a young pupil and secretly enjoys more than she should. “Mrs. Crow and Miss Wren Go for a Walk” gets from Lin an interpretation of unfussy charm. She doesn’t oversell the whimsy, doesn’t wink at the listener, and the piece is funnier for it.

Then, astonishingly, one year later: the Piano Sonata of 1923, six minutes that open with a fortissimo octave gesture like a fist coming down on the keyboard lid. Where did that come from? The Romantic inheritance is still audible — there’s a whiff of Scriabin’s harmonic restlessness, maybe a little Ornstein in the granite of the chords — but the temperament driving it is already recognizably her own. Lin plays it straight, refusing the interpretive sentimentality that a lesser pianist might reach for reflexively. The piece is stronger, more structurally taut, for her restraint.

The Theme and Variations from the same year is the disc’s small miracle. Seven minutes, and Lin simply melts into it. There’s an unbuttoned quality here, Crawford Seeger allowing herself to be genuinely, almost defiantly tuneful, before the later austerity closes in. You hear a composer who could have written charming salon variations for a living and chose not to.

By 1924 the confidence is unmistakable. The Five Canons rush by — the longest under a minute and a half, the shortest twenty-six seconds. Mere flickers, but each one perfectly poised, no note wasted. Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, from the same year, earns its title better than “variations” would: the opening variation is spiky, almost brittle, and then without warning Crawford Seeger opens into warm, unexpected harmonic pools, a generosity that catches you off guard every time.

And then the real leap: the Preludes, composed in two waves, 1924–25 and 1927–28, plus the Piano Study in Mixed Accents, where she essentially invents her own rhythmic language, bar lines bending under irregular accent patterns years before Bartók’s Bulgarian rhythms became fashionable currency in American new-music circles. The Five Preludes open in unmistakably Schoenbergian territory — not pastiche, but a serious engagement with the free atonal language coming out of Vienna, filtered through an ear that had grown up on Chicago modernism and Henry Cowell’s ultra-modernist circle. The second prelude in particular has a jittery, impulsive quality, ideas tumbling over each other before they’ve fully stated themselves. You sense a composer thinking faster than her hand can notate.

Dissent, briefly: some listeners will want more granite in these performances, more of the astringency that, say, Rodney Lister or the pianists on the old CRI survey brought to this repertoire. Lin’s tone is rounder, her rubato more forgiving. I don’t mind it. Given how few advocates this music has, a persuasive account beats a severe one.

No other single disc maps this composer’s piano output with such completeness or such sympathy. Essential.