By: Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) was an American composer closely allied with the so-called Ultramodern composers, grouped around Henry Cowell. The third movement of her Diaphonic Suite No. 1 (for solo flute or oboe) is arranged as what she called a “triple passacaglia.” The seven-note series for the piece is presented at three different structural levels: within each measure; from downbeat to downbeat of the 7/8 measures; and in the initial tones of the seven sections of the movement.
Bibliography:
Joseph Straus, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Joseph Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Ellie Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
About the Author:
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is also the author of Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (4th ed., Norton, 2016).