“I believe I’m going to work again — more,” she wrote. “If I live to be 99 as my grandfather did, that gives me 48 more years.”

Crawford attempted to reconcile her folk present and her dissonant past with a second quartet, but no sketches for it survive.

But the children, who called her “Dio,” had little knowledge of their mother’s former life as a beacon of American ultramodernism

the couple became closely acquainted with the father-and-son folklorists John and Alan Lomax

Crawford was less vocal politically, but again put into practice her husband’s theories in the militant songs “Sacco, Vanzetti” and “Chinaman, Laundryman,”

She acutely felt the pull between family and music, or what she once described in a letter as her “‘career vs. love and children’ battle.”

Each movement is a miniature essay, bringing to visceral musical life the ideas of dissonant counterpoint.

Crawford and Seeger, who was an unhappily married father of three when they met, fell in love

She became indispensable to his work

She was soon heralded by ultramodernists like Cowell

Crawford found her compositional voice just as modernism was emerging in American music.

traveled to Chicago to study piano after showing musical promise

“As a woman of that generation, she wrote this piece that’s so ahead of its time,” Austin Wulliman

And for the next two decades, before she died at 52 in 1953, she wrote only a handful of works.

But shortly after its completion, Crawford returned to the United States and married Seeger.

“Fear of having nothing to say musically, fear of not being able to say it, fear, fear, a whole web of it.”

“To work alone: I am convinced this is what I should do, to discover what I really want,” she decided.

the first woman to receive one