Seeger struggled with his own attempts at composition and, though notionally supportive of her work, placed Crawford in charge of domestic duties
Is it possible that during Crawford’s time as a housewife, her compositions were published under Seeger’s name?
She became indispensable to his work, helping draft his counterpoint treatise and enacting its musical principles in her new scores by “dissonating” melodies into disjunct figures and refracting rhythms in willfully independent lines.
After becoming “indispensable” to him, would Seeger have admitted that women can write symphonies?
Though her mother wrote hoping that Crawford might become “a real lady musician, with nice manners and poise and self-confidence and pretty clothes,”
Does this mean that her mother did not support her?
she became a wife, a mother, a leftist and a folk revivalist.
Did her family not support her musical career and aspirations? Or was she overwhelmed with responsibilities and ultimately just unable to compose as much as she would have liked?
“Fear of having nothing to say musically, fear of not being able to say it, fear, fear, a whole web of it.”
Was her fear part of the reason she avoided Schoenberg?