Oct 9, 2018 2 min read

Although written more than 80 years ago, a new orchestration of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Sixth Piano Prelude, “Silent Scream of the Earth” will make its Pennsylvania debut with the Washington Symphony Orchestra’s “Scary Music” concert on Saturday.

In anticipation of that debut, the WSO will present “Discovering the Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger: One of the Founding Mothers of the American Avant-Garde” by Charles Zotique at Citizens Library at 2 p.m. Saturday. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Seeger (1901-1953) is frequently considered the most significant female American composer of the 20th century. Joining Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell as a key member of the 1920s musical avant-garde, she continued by writing her master-work String Quartet 1931, and became the first woman to win the Guggenheim Fellowship Foundation for music composition.

“Her legacy extends above and beyond her scores, including collaborations with poet Carl Sandburg on folk song arrangements, and with John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s,” said Zotique. “In addition to musicological scholarship, Ruth and Charles Seeger spent many decades working aggressively for social change with their son, Pete Seeger.”

Zotique, an international musical artist and educator, will talk about his process of discovering Seeger’s music and share how he came to receive permission from the Seeger Family Estate to orchestrate the Piano Preludes. He will also speak on the role of the composer in bringing an earlier composer’s music to life by orchestrating it, a process which dates back to Ravel and Mussorgsky.

For information, visit www.washsym.org.