Series Concert I: Public/Private
September 8, 2026
An American music festival may as well begin with the Seeger family. We all know them one way or another. From the millimeter-thin print on the side of an LP cover—from children’s songs, from protest songs, from the New Lost City Ramblers or The Weavers, or from ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’, covered by The Byrds. They are present, especially Pete and Mike, in a great deal of what we consider to be American roots music. One hears less of Ruth Crawford Seeger, though many of us know of her work with her husband, musicologist Charles Seeger, and folklorist Alan Lomax, who produced the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song.
Whatever biases may lurk behind her relative obscurity, it seems likely that we hear little of her because she was an American classical composer. She studied in Europe in the most experimental circles. The 1930 ‘Diaphonic Suite’ is in this progressive vein: an attempt to invert rules of consonance and dissonance to forge an American style.
When she became a mother in 1932, Seeger more or less abandoned her composing career—but she certainly did not abandon music. Upon beginning work with Charles Seeger in 1935 at a Resettlement Administration program in Washington to teach music to those left destitute by the Depression, she inverted her view of American music: “We had been here only a couple of months when Charlie began to get his fingers on the pulse of some of this very live-and-kicking music of ‘unmusical’ America.” How strange to still be discovering that music of America could come from the people, 150 years into the American experiment.
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Back in 1813, in ‘musical’ Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony had its premiere at a charity event for soldiers injured at the Battle of Hanau (one of Napoleon’s last victories). The orchestra was an all-star cast, including Johann Nepomuk Hummel (author of today’s chamber transcription) and Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who premiered almost all of Beethoven’s string quartets, and would later give the first performance of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major.
The Seventh Symphony needs little introduction. I might best present it alongside a personal anecdote. We (the Mahler Chamber Orchestra) were once set to play the piece at the Beethovenfest in Bonn (the composer’s hometown), and the conductor—a man of colossal vanity who shall remain unnamed—pulled out a day before the performance. There was no time to replace him, so we played without. It worked better than just fine. The piece has something of the character of a popular uprising in any case, and the absence of a Napoleonic character at the front just made it more clear.
--
By 1827, Schuppanzigh was still around, but Napoleon had departed the Earth. The Congress of Vienna had placed Europe back in a tight order. Liberal-minded society, once in a Napoleonic thrall, was in retreat. Franz Schubert himself had been interrogated in 1820, and his friend Johann Senn had been imprisoned for a year, for being rude to the police. In this context, Schubert began writing epic works for small spaces, one of the greatest of which was the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major. For this, we may best present a close look at its intrinsic musical materials.
The first movement of the trio begins with a simple four-bar unison, but the conclusion it reaches is immediately questioned by the strings. An attempt to resolve the strings’ question only takes the listener back further, remaking the first bars in increasingly frustrating keys—in the end, it takes 48 bars to address the doubts of bars 5 and 6, and the Trio finds itself in B minor (across the pond, keywise) for its second theme.
The second movement has a lovely theme (which is said to have come from a Swedish folk song) accompanied by an insistent (and slightly weird) ostinato rhythm. This theme is punctuated toward its end by pairs of notes in pianissimo with chorus-like echo in the violin and piano. Strangely, this forked figure becomes the subject of the movement as much as the main theme, and what had begun quietly becomes more and more haunted and haunting as it goes on.
The third movement, a minuet, is almost completely in canon (very orderly), which allows it to danceably agree with itself and yet be somehow unresolved; the fourth movement opens as though it has found its peace with the elements of the first three, putting forth a theme that sounds as though it would usher in a friendly rondo. But its opening also bursts into a strange key when it should end, and the first thought doesn’t find its proper completion until bar 73—by which time it is clear that there is a great deal yet to come—which there is—and the haunted interiority of the second movement returns. It is as though, as John Harbison writes in his piano quartet ‘November 19, 1828’, ‘Schubert Finds Himself in a Hall of Mirrors’— which is to say, in an infinite interior. The work is famously dedicated to Niemandem außer denen, die Gefallen daran finden (‘no one, other than those who find pleasure in it’). It was also performed in Schubert’s only public concert, one year to the day after Beethoven’s death.
– Tim Summers
Whatever biases may lurk behind her relative obscurity, it seems likely that we hear little of her because she was an American classical composer. She studied in Europe in the most experimental circles. The 1930 ‘Diaphonic Suite’ is in this progressive vein: an attempt to invert rules of consonance and dissonance to forge an American style.
When she became a mother in 1932, Seeger more or less abandoned her composing career—but she certainly did not abandon music. Upon beginning work with Charles Seeger in 1935 at a Resettlement Administration program in Washington to teach music to those left destitute by the Depression, she inverted her view of American music: “We had been here only a couple of months when Charlie began to get his fingers on the pulse of some of this very live-and-kicking music of ‘unmusical’ America.” How strange to still be discovering that music of America could come from the people, 150 years into the American experiment.
--
Back in 1813, in ‘musical’ Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony had its premiere at a charity event for soldiers injured at the Battle of Hanau (one of Napoleon’s last victories). The orchestra was an all-star cast, including Johann Nepomuk Hummel (author of today’s chamber transcription) and Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who premiered almost all of Beethoven’s string quartets, and would later give the first performance of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major.
The Seventh Symphony needs little introduction. I might best present it alongside a personal anecdote. We (the Mahler Chamber Orchestra) were once set to play the piece at the Beethovenfest in Bonn (the composer’s hometown), and the conductor—a man of colossal vanity who shall remain unnamed—pulled out a day before the performance. There was no time to replace him, so we played without. It worked better than just fine. The piece has something of the character of a popular uprising in any case, and the absence of a Napoleonic character at the front just made it more clear.
--
By 1827, Schuppanzigh was still around, but Napoleon had departed the Earth. The Congress of Vienna had placed Europe back in a tight order. Liberal-minded society, once in a Napoleonic thrall, was in retreat. Franz Schubert himself had been interrogated in 1820, and his friend Johann Senn had been imprisoned for a year, for being rude to the police. In this context, Schubert began writing epic works for small spaces, one of the greatest of which was the Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major. For this, we may best present a close look at its intrinsic musical materials.
The first movement of the trio begins with a simple four-bar unison, but the conclusion it reaches is immediately questioned by the strings. An attempt to resolve the strings’ question only takes the listener back further, remaking the first bars in increasingly frustrating keys—in the end, it takes 48 bars to address the doubts of bars 5 and 6, and the Trio finds itself in B minor (across the pond, keywise) for its second theme.
The second movement has a lovely theme (which is said to have come from a Swedish folk song) accompanied by an insistent (and slightly weird) ostinato rhythm. This theme is punctuated toward its end by pairs of notes in pianissimo with chorus-like echo in the violin and piano. Strangely, this forked figure becomes the subject of the movement as much as the main theme, and what had begun quietly becomes more and more haunted and haunting as it goes on.
The third movement, a minuet, is almost completely in canon (very orderly), which allows it to danceably agree with itself and yet be somehow unresolved; the fourth movement opens as though it has found its peace with the elements of the first three, putting forth a theme that sounds as though it would usher in a friendly rondo. But its opening also bursts into a strange key when it should end, and the first thought doesn’t find its proper completion until bar 73—by which time it is clear that there is a great deal yet to come—which there is—and the haunted interiority of the second movement returns. It is as though, as John Harbison writes in his piano quartet ‘November 19, 1828’, ‘Schubert Finds Himself in a Hall of Mirrors’— which is to say, in an infinite interior. The work is famously dedicated to Niemandem außer denen, die Gefallen daran finden (‘no one, other than those who find pleasure in it’). It was also performed in Schubert’s only public concert, one year to the day after Beethoven’s death.
– Tim Summers