“The Startling Modernity of Her Style”

“There was a feeling, right or wrong—that isn't the question, it was a question of taste—that if we begin performing works which presented very definitely you might say—if you want to say it—the end of an era but not the beginning of what we felt was our era, there was always a fear of sliding back.” These are the words of Claire Reis reminiscing about the League of Composers and the necessity for modern works to reflect the spirit of the times, a view that was widely shared among her colleagues. Edgard Varèse, for example, saw the challenge for many modernists of the 1920s and 1930s as the pursuit of “new mechanical mediums which will lend themselves to every expression of thought and keep up with thought.” Thus a work of modern art must in some ways express a contemporary feeling of living in novel times, deriving not from the past but from the present environment.

From the time of her first compositions, Ruth Crawford's works were placed firmly in the category of “music of our era.” She was, as the Musical Leader observed in 1929, “widely known for the startling modernity of her style.” When the Pan-American Association of Composers was formed in 1928, the Los Angeles Times reported on the event, noting that “Ruth Crawford is estimated by the modernists of America as the greatest woman composer of the day.” In 1949 the composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote of her String Quartet 1931 that it was “thoroughly absorbing. It is in every way a distinguished, a noble piece of work. It is also a daring one and completely successful.” More recently, Wilfrid Mellers's inspired account of the quartet concludes: