The Seegers
Instrumentation: video
Duration: 4:40
Written in: 2019
Category: Video
The Seegers is a collage of music and speech samples from a family whose history feels very close to home for me. Originally from Oberlin, Ohio, I earned degrees in music composition and I now work as a freelance composer in Stuttgart, Germany. This echoes Ruth Crawford’s life, who was born in East Liverpool, Ohio and went on to live in Berlin, Germany on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930. I also grew up playing bluegrass violin/fiddle with my aunt and uncle, who taught me many of the songs that Mike Seeger has recorded.
Like the Seeger family, I am interested in both popular and “art music,” to borrow Charles Seeger’s term for it in his lecture at UCLA in 1966. In this video, Ruth Crawford’s modernist compositions are heard simultaneously with the folk music of Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, and Elizabeth Cotten, whose musical talent was discovered by the Seeger family while she worked for them as a housekeeper, and who I include as an honorary member. The fact that Ruth Crawford’s music is featured just as much as Pete Seeger’s in this video is certainly not a realistic portrayal of the amount of attention their respective styles of music receive. It also not meant to suggest that they were the two most dominant forces in their family.
An experiment of this video is the conglomeration of the Seeger family’s distinctive musical styles in order to see how they would sound together. As I worked on this project, I often wondered what Pete, Mike, and Peggy thought of their stepmother’s/mother’s music. My own uncle calls what I do “long-hair music” (apparently he had something like Beethoven’s flowy hair in mind when he came up with that).
The video also conveys a sense of the political leanings of the Seegers. One can find political messages in the music of Ruth Crawford, Pete, and Peggy; in the works selected here, they sing about themes such as communism, class struggle, and women’s rights. The excerpt towards the end, “Chinaman, go back to China” is ironic in that the message behind it is critical of xenophonia. Ruth Crawford set a text by a Chinese American named H. T. Tsiang, who wrote about the unfair treatment of Chinese laundry workers in the United States. Ruth Crawford seemed to have Asian culture on the brain at the time as she also invented a pseudo-Asian language that served as the text for Three Chants. This text appears in the first half of the video.
While the focus of the video is the Seeger family, my fingerprints are also present. The more layers of material in a collage there are, the more that something new is created. This also means that the identity of the source material is obscured. Often I avoided this by keeping a low number of layers, mostly two to three at time. However, there are moments of denser layering and some changes to the source material, like the loops or microtonal shading.