Ruth Crawford Seeger: Piano Music
Jenny Lin, piano; Timothy Jones, narrator
BIS CD-1310
There are composers you encounter almost by accident — a stray LP on a friend’s shelf, a concert program you almost didn’t attend — and Ruth Crawford Seeger was one of mine. An old Nonesuch pressing, her String Quartet of 1931 paired with Perle and Babbitt, and I remember thinking: who is this woman, and why doesn’t everyone know her name? The quartet is extraordinary. Ferociously individual. And the piano music collected here by Jenny Lin confirms what that quartet already announced — that Crawford Seeger was developing at a pace that left most of her contemporaries standing still.
Lin is an admirable guide through this territory.
The disc opens with the earliest pieces, and the trajectory is the whole point. “Little Waltz” (1922) is exactly what it says — charming, unpretentious, utterly harmless. “Little Lullaby” has that slightly mechanical, music-box delicacy that early Crawford Seeger favors, and “Jumping the Rope (Playtime)” is simply fun, a bright little thing that bounces along without pretension. Lin plays these with a light, clean touch — no condescension, no arch winking at the audience about how modest the material is. That restraint matters. “Mr. Crow and Miss Wren Go for a Walk” gets the same treatment: witty, pointed, and over before you’ve quite finished smiling.
Then comes the Sonata of 1923. Six minutes. Already a different composer.
The opening — those arresting fortissimo octaves — lands like a fist on the table. You sit up. Crawford Seeger’s Romantic inheritance is still audible here, the harmonic language hasn’t yet made its decisive turn, but the ambition has expanded almost overnight. Lin refuses to sentimentalize it, and that refusal is exactly right; the piece has more integrity for being played straight. She melts — there’s no other word — into the Theme and Variations that follows, seven minutes of music that ranges from genuine lyrical warmth to moments of almost willful, delightful populism. Crawford Seeger letting her hair down, briefly, before the harder work begins.
The Five Canons of 1924 are fleeting things — the longest barely ninety seconds, the shortest a mere twenty-six — but they’re pointed and precise, little demonstrations of craft worn lightly. Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, also 1924, is aptly named: this isn’t variation mastery in the academic sense but something more mercurial, the material refracted rather than developed, moving from spiky, angular writing to passages of unexpected harmonic warmth that Crawford Seeger deploys almost as a surprise weapon.
The Preludes — two groups, the Five of 1924–25 and the Four of 1927–28 — are where things get genuinely interesting. The Five open in Schoenbergian territory and stay there; the second has a kind of compositional impetuosity, ideas tumbling over themselves, while the third and fifth settle into a bleakness that feels genuinely desolate rather than merely severe. In the later group, the third prelude shows Bartók’s angular rhythmic influence unmistakably, and the ninth — slow, hypnotic, rising from the instrument’s lowest registers — has something of Debussy’s sunken cathedral about it, that particular quality of sound emerging from depth.
The Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930) is presented in three performing versions, each dynamically differentiated. Difficult piece. Genuinely difficult — the rhythmic displacement is relentless, and lesser hands turn it into a blur. Lin’s fingers are absolutely clear throughout, and her third version is, frankly, volcanic. Alan Feinberg recorded it for Argo, Reinbert de Leeuw for Deutsche Grammophon, but neither contextualizes the piece quite as Lin does here, with two preceding versions to establish the interpretive stakes.
“We Dance Together” is included, presumably for completeness — a teaching waltz, charming enough. The Adventures of Tom Thumb for narrator and piano closes the disc, with Timothy Jones delivering the text with genuine wit. Lin plays characterfully. But this is supplementary material, really; the solo works are the substance.
A remarkable composer, a remarkably well-played disc. Don’t miss it.
