Ruth Crawford's “ultramodern” music anticipated and enabled the achievements of subsequent generations of American composers. Rejecting the forms and sonorities of traditional European art music, including its triadic basis, she created a new musical language that favored dissonant intervals, promoted the radical independence of the parts in a polyphonic texture, explored new sound combinations, and sought innovative ways of structuring rhythm and timbre. This chapter addresses one particular feature of her compositional style, namely, her precompositional strategies, or schemes. In many of her works, she decided in advance to build the piece around a specific musical idea and its repetitions. These repetitions may be either exact, or inverted, or retrograded. Because she decided on such a design in advance, they can be regarded as precompositional, and because entire movements are built around a single idea and its repetitions, they can be regarded as schemes.

Table 2.1 is a chart that lists all of Crawford's original musical compositions, from the first of the Preludes for Piano in 1924 to the Suite for Wind Quintet in 1952. The chart shows four different kinds of precompositional schemes and indicates which pieces use them. The first type of scheme is a simple ostinato, that is, a repeated statement of a musical figure. Most of Crawford's early works have at least one movement that uses an ostinato. She stopped using ostinati in 1929 (apart from a brief revival in 1952 in the Suite for Wind Quintet) and turned to other kinds of schemes. The second type of scheme involves retrograde. In pieces of this type, the first half of the piece is heard backward in the second half. She composed three movements of this kind, although small-scale instances of retrograde symmetry occur in many of her pieces. The third type of scheme involves the systematic rotation of a short musical figure—this type of scheme is used in movements from Crawford's best works, including the Three Sandburg Songs of 1930–32 and the String Quartet 1931. The fourth type of scheme includes more ad hoc kinds of arrangements, often involving partial serialization of pitch and/or rhythm. As the chart shows, virtually every piece Crawford wrote includes at least one movement based on one of these precompositional schemes.