Pastoral Landscapes
September 9, 2026
Back to the Seegers: in 1950, Ruth Crawford Seeger published forty-three Animal Folk Songs for Children. From these, her daughter Peggy chose twenty-two to record for Smithsonian Folkways Records. In 1992, Ruth’s son Mike recorded the whole set. Violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen has taken them still further as inspiration for a new set of pieces, Short While to Be Here, about which he writes the following:
In writing this piece, I was very much inspired by the example of Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of America’s most forward-looking composers of the early part of the 20th century. Then her life took a turn in Depression-era America as she and her husband, Charles Seeger, began a deep investigation of American folk music alongside the Lomax brothers during the FDR years. She treated folk music with the respect and attention that Bela Bartók had exhibited in a somewhat parallel fashion in Europe, and as an educator, became deeply committed to teaching folk songs to children. She published several collections of American folk songs for children, including the Animal Folk Songs for Children. She also raised four children of her own during that challenging time, several of whom became icons of the folk-revival movement in the generation to come (stepson Pete Seeger, and her own children Peggy and Mike Seeger). For around 20 years, her personal compositional voice was silent, but in 1952, she wrote one last modernist composition, a wind quintet, before falling ill and eventually succumbing to cancer. I like to imagine what would have happened if she had lived longer and had attempted to further integrate her life’s work—her love of folk music alongside her formalist/composerly voice. So, this piece, representing earth in our Four Elements project, is very much an homage to Ruth (nicknamed “Dio” by her children) as well as a joyous celebration of our home planet. This, of course, includes all animals and children past and present who’ve been here or will be here a short while and then gone for a long time....
To summarize the contributions of the Seeger family, and what should happen here, today, one might quote Mike Seeger’s description of what he sought: ‘Music from the Vine’, which springs up naturally from the land and its people.
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Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is of course also interwoven with the idea of landscape, but its ways are varied, subtle, and many-layered. Its gentle cast and explicit movement-titles disguise an extraordinarily powerful mix of musical techniques and thoughts. The titles are printed in the program, and they are clear enough. But the second movement contains more words in the middle of the music: there is a cadenza for winds in which the calls of the nightingale (Nachtigall), quail (Wachtel), and cuckoo (Kukuk) are specifically named, as though the score is their forest. In a funny sort of way, it’s not just a cadenza for winds, but for the birds themselves, whose calls are integrated with many motives and ornaments throughout. Rather than describing natural sounds, the symphony seems to be built from them, using the forces they have within them: birds, rivers, storms, and, last but not least, the people themselves—dancing, singing, and listening.
–Tim Summers
In writing this piece, I was very much inspired by the example of Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of America’s most forward-looking composers of the early part of the 20th century. Then her life took a turn in Depression-era America as she and her husband, Charles Seeger, began a deep investigation of American folk music alongside the Lomax brothers during the FDR years. She treated folk music with the respect and attention that Bela Bartók had exhibited in a somewhat parallel fashion in Europe, and as an educator, became deeply committed to teaching folk songs to children. She published several collections of American folk songs for children, including the Animal Folk Songs for Children. She also raised four children of her own during that challenging time, several of whom became icons of the folk-revival movement in the generation to come (stepson Pete Seeger, and her own children Peggy and Mike Seeger). For around 20 years, her personal compositional voice was silent, but in 1952, she wrote one last modernist composition, a wind quintet, before falling ill and eventually succumbing to cancer. I like to imagine what would have happened if she had lived longer and had attempted to further integrate her life’s work—her love of folk music alongside her formalist/composerly voice. So, this piece, representing earth in our Four Elements project, is very much an homage to Ruth (nicknamed “Dio” by her children) as well as a joyous celebration of our home planet. This, of course, includes all animals and children past and present who’ve been here or will be here a short while and then gone for a long time....
To summarize the contributions of the Seeger family, and what should happen here, today, one might quote Mike Seeger’s description of what he sought: ‘Music from the Vine’, which springs up naturally from the land and its people.
--
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is of course also interwoven with the idea of landscape, but its ways are varied, subtle, and many-layered. Its gentle cast and explicit movement-titles disguise an extraordinarily powerful mix of musical techniques and thoughts. The titles are printed in the program, and they are clear enough. But the second movement contains more words in the middle of the music: there is a cadenza for winds in which the calls of the nightingale (Nachtigall), quail (Wachtel), and cuckoo (Kukuk) are specifically named, as though the score is their forest. In a funny sort of way, it’s not just a cadenza for winds, but for the birds themselves, whose calls are integrated with many motives and ornaments throughout. Rather than describing natural sounds, the symphony seems to be built from them, using the forces they have within them: birds, rivers, storms, and, last but not least, the people themselves—dancing, singing, and listening.
–Tim Summers