Ruth Crawford-Seeger (1901-1953) was an American composer, and one of the major figures of the American modernist movement of the 1920s. She is also known for her study of American folk music. Crawford-Seeger was one of the main figures of the so-called “ultra-modernist” movement, an American avant-garde movement influential in the interwar period. In 1930, she was the very first woman to win the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled her to travel to Europe to further her artistic training. She was particularly interested in serialism, and her own experiments show she was rather innovative in the field, extending the use of serialism to other parameters besides pitch. This prefigured (like Webern and Messiaen) a practice which became generalised in the 1950s with total serialism. Her String Quartet (1931) in four movements ranks among her most important works.

– Frédérick Duhautpas –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]