The American modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) and her string quartet have already been introduced in my series article "Best String Quartets, Part 4 (1926-1945)", so I will link to that for her biographical note. In the period 1924-32, she wrote a number of ultramodern works, of which the String Quartet is the most important. I quote from my previous article: "A masterpiece that is one of the finest avant garde works in the genre, written by Crawford in Berlin during her Guggenheim Fellowship-year. It consists of four untitled movements, lasting in total only 12 minutes - but it is just as concentrated and advanced as the music for string quartet by Anton Webern (see Best String Quartets, Part 3). The first movement is a twelve-tone study full of wide, arching intervals and haunting melodies. The second movement is canonic, the lines of music linked from one instrument to another form a chain. The third movement is a study in "dissonant dynamics" (also called "sound mass composition") in which each instrument has its own rise and fall in loudness on different held notes. The finale features a free first violin, which is contrasted with unison or doubled answers from the other strings. Crawford Seeger wrote music in which many things happen simultaneously, on every level, but she exercised strict control over all aspects of the music. This brief string quartet sounds like nothing that came before it."
Here played by the Playground Ensemble (Sarah Johnson and Anna Morris, Violins; Donald Schumacher, viola; Richard von Foerster, cello).
Part 1 & 2:
Part 3 & 4: