Charles Seeger leaves a Slow Dance for Thursday

The Seeger family is known by the whole country as including the great Pete Seeger but also includes two important figures in modern American classical music: Ruth Crawford Seeger (one of America's greatest female composers) and her husband Charles, a noted musicologist and formulator of theories of dissonant counterpoint.  There is some historical ire directed at him, as he was responsible for stopping Ruth's ultra-modernist composition career in favor of collecting folk songs, but I didn't start this article to pick a fight with a dead man.  He also composed, but only left behind a handful of works which are hard to find.  The good news is I found one, in a very unlikely place.

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Slow Dance was first published in the 1946 supplement to the Boletín Latino-Americano de Música, an artifact of an earlier age when America took serious steps to unite with Central and South America in the classical realm.  You'll notice a 1976 copyright at the bottom, and that's because I came across this in Soundings, a New Music periodical from the 70's that featured Seeger in one of their issues.  I'm not sure when exactly it was written.  The only other pieces of his I've seen are two pieces for solo voice, The Letter and Psalm 137, both of which are wonderful and demonstrate the dissonant counterpoint he helped develop.  This piece seems to be free from that language, instead opting for an emphatic, layered quartal/quintal language.  The piano creates a rhythmic juxtaposition via sets of four eighth notes that are accented in a three-note loop, off-setting the rhythm and turning a three-bar phrase into a 12/8 measure.  The violin part is in 18/8 on top of 12/8, or rather 6/8 on top of 2/4, making for constant rhythmic complexity with little effort.  Though I've never had the privilege of playing this with a violinist I've made due with singing the part while playing the piano, and I can attest that this piece is gorgeous.  I smell a concert with this on the program with Gardner Read's 6 Intimate Moods, Ruth Crawford Seeger's Violin Sonata, Johanna Beyer's Suite for Violin and Piano, and maybe Ives?  Can a violinist get in cahoots with me so we can plan this?  Or at least do a YouTube performance of this one beautiful piece?

~PNK