I first saw the name of Ruth Crawford Seeger on the blue and orange cover of a CRI record while browsing in a store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California in 1970. I immediately bought this curiosity, for I had never encountered music by a female composer, never mind an American women, on a classical record before. My teachers in college and graduate school had filed my ears with preclassic symphonies and medieval motets; orthodox musicologists studies the European past. It would be years before I could hear the dissonant harmonies of Ruth Crawford's Preludes for Piano with aesthetic empathy.

Like so many other young women in those awakening years, I began to investigate women's history in my field. I wrote an article about "sexual aesthetics," and a letter in 1971 to Ruth Crawford's husband, Charles Seeger, for information about two obscure pieces whose titles sounded "political;" three years later he answered me that Sacco, Vanzetti and Chinaman, Laundryman were "extraordinary declamations" and not in print.

To his friends he wrote, "have you seen notices of Ruth's music?" She would be very pleased at their "renaissance." Slowly works like the String Quartet 1931 and the Three Sandburg Songs won acclaim from modern audiences and critics. Simultaneously, this obscure American modernist became a symbol of light and dark--for at the same time that the process of recognition started in earnest, so did questions about unfulfilled promise and silence.

I began this project obliquely, not with the intention of writing a biography but with the goal of publishing music still in manuscript. In 1982 I went to Washington D.C. for the first performance in over fifty years of the Sonata for Violin and Piano. Apparently, there was no autograph among the composer's estate; at that time I did not suspect the significance of this omission. A score given as a gift had been lost and then found again by Ruth Crawford's pupil and friend, the distinguished composer, Vivian Fine; she had heard its performance in Chicago in 1928. Now she and Ida Kavafian were playing it in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress. Fierce dissonances and passionate themes swept through the hall. At a post-concert reception in a living room the size of a soccer field, Vivian Fine stood taking animatedly, to a slight long-haired man, whose boyish dress and speech resonated with a country twang. I thus met Crawford's son, Mike Seeger, with whom I had exchanged one letter, and was immediately swept up into the vortex of their dialogue; they discussed many questions that were on my mind: "Why did Ruth stop composing? Was there room in the house for two points of view?" Did she "waste her time" on folksong? Each knew little of the other's world.

The next day I hunted up unpublished manuscripts as I had planned and read diaries as I had not. At twenty-six years old, Crawford wrote, "One can draw a kind of rhythmic or dynamic pleasure from the very smallest things." A piece of scrap paper "rustling across the sidewalk created a perfect scherzo of rhythmic variety and subtlety." As composers are wont to do, she experienced the world through sound. Her earnest transcendentalism touched me. The "voice" --that abstract concept that allows us to translate musical expression into human content--became a person.

I rifled through scapheaps of papers, delightedly discovering a proper bit of documentary musicological evidence--a scruffy note on which Ruth Crawford Seeger had scrawled some corrections for the score of the String Quartet 1931. In the margin of this document she had scrawled a list of reminders about household chores in code, the proverbial "laundry list" for biographical zealots.

"What does that have to do with her music?" a musician friend scowled at me. She had been harassed out of a conducting class at a noted conservatory and, futilely denying the direction of her considerable natural gifts, was trying to become a singer, that most feminine of musical careers. Perhaps as a kind of reparatory act for her won history, she reasserted the formalist creed of autonomous art, reproaching me for any hint of collusion with those persecuting agents that made gender relevant to a musician's success. Yet for me that list of daily trivialities opened a window into a world where a composer was not historicized either through augmentation or diminution as a figure engaged in epic struggle, a male archetype. This composer was my kind of heroine--a modern women who I could understand as well as admire--someone who was living with messiness and grey patches of confusion and responsibility that afforded some relief from the starkness of dichotomies. The juxtaposition of the two concerns, one the creative self and the other, the relational, embodied the fundamental forces that are so unwisely seen as rivals when in fact they are twins--work and love.

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