13 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
    1. Will I ever write really simple music?” she wondered in a letter to Seeger

      Did she desire this, or did she feel like it was something she was supposed to do, especially considering the musical expectations of women at the time?

    2. Dio the Composer virtually did not exist in my growing up.”

      What was behind this? The stresses of life or the control exhibited in marriage over women?

    3. Seeger struggled with his own attempts at composition and, though notionally supportive of her work, placed Crawford in charge of domestic duties

      Could he have hindered his own creativity by limiting his wife’s?

    4. a kind of discordant version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

      Why must female artists and musicians always be compared to their male contemporaries? Why can’t they be described simply as they are?

    5. written for unusual pairings of instruments like oboe and cello

      Do we think these unusual pairings were made intentionally or instead were chosen because she enjoyed the sound of the instruments together?

    6. 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.

      So in some ways, she was also a teacher to him?

    7. radically discordant and uniquely American.

      Why would something radically discordant and dissonant be defined as uniquely American? How does dissonance in music translate to Americanism and patriotism... or the lack thereof?

    8. Crawford found her compositional voice just as modernism was emerging

      Do we think this is said to imply that she was one of the founders of American modernism or was inspired by modernism?

    9. As a woman of that generation,

      Why the differentiation between woman and man?

    10. Crawford’s piece within a broader traversal of the American string quartet, connecting her work to later giants like Elliott Carter and contemporary composer

      Interesting that she is considered an influence even though she has not been a major influence in the standard classical canon of music... do we think that she is not as acknowledged because of her heavy use of dissonance or because of her sex?

    11. postwar avant-garde.

      What did the events and repercussions of WWI do to create an avant-garde musical movement and how did the political and economic instability of the time change composers priorities? How did the Roaring 20s and the depression affect this as well?

    12. fear, fear, a whole web of it.”

      How do we feel that fear inspires artists? Even though it can hinder creativity, do we also believe it can help it?

    13. avoided studying with the master of 12-tone composition.

      Is this because she was afraid of getting influenced by others and wanted to define her own voice or because she had some disdain for Schoenberg? Could she possibly have avoided him out of ego?