Member of Seeger family

(b Mexico City, Dec 14, 1886; d Bridgewater, CT, Feb 7, 1979). American musicologist, composer, conductor, critic and musical philosopher. His initial interest was in composition and conducting, and he joined numerous young American composers in Europe in the years immediately following his graduation from Harvard (1908). He spent a season (1910–11) as a conductor at the Cologne Opera before returning to the USA as a composer and chairman of the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley (1912–19), where he gave the first American courses in musicology in 1916. Several of his compositions were destroyed in the Berkeley fire (1923). Subsequently he was a lecturer and instructor at the Institute of Musical Art, New York (1921–33), the forerunner of the Juilliard School, and lecturer at the New School for Social Research (1931–5), where, with Henry Cowell, he taught the first courses in ethnomusicology given in the USA (1931). Concurrently he was active in the organization and development of the Composers Collective and other programmes devoted to the growth and dissemination of American composition. One of his outstanding students, Ruth Crawford, later became his second wife. His own compositions written at this time include a number of songs, with piano or orchestral accompaniment, as well as many instrumental works. He also worked as a music critic for several American newspapers and journals, including the Daily Worker, for which he wrote under the pseudonym Carl Sand.

In 1935 Seeger moved to Washington, DC, where he served as music technical adviser in Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration (1935–7), deputy director of the Federal Music Project of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (1937–41), and chief of the music division of the Pan-American Union (1941–53). Under his energetic and far-sighted supervision, much fieldwork was done in North and Latin America, followed by many publications and recordings. He returned to university teaching, as research musicologist at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles (1960–70), and lecturer at various New England universities, including Brown, Harvard and Yale. He was a founder (and chairman, 1930–34) of the New York Musicological Society, reorganized with his help in 1934 as the American Musicological Society (of which he was president in 1945–6), as well as the American Society for Comparative Musicology (president, 1935), the Society for Ethnomusicology (president, 1960–61; honorary president from 1972), the International Society for Music Educators, the College Music Society and the International Music Council; he was also vice-president of the Gesellschaft für Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (1934–6).

Seeger concentrated on general ethnomusicology and its theory, in which he had considerable influence as a largely prescriptive and philosophical writer. He pointed out that the evaluation of all music in terms of Western art music is a cultural anachronism, and emphasized that in much non-Western music the performer, rather than a ‘composer’, is the main creator or re-creator. In his ‘Preface to the Critique of Music’ (1963) he criticized the habit of assessing both art and folk music by way of value judgments in the absence of an objective descriptive method, and in ‘The Music Process’ (1966) he approached the fundamental difficulty of describing music through the distorting medium of speech. The same essay set out his strictures on classifying peoples according to social strata, and on the limitations of the expression ‘national music’. In the 1930s he became interested in the development of machines for music analysis, and he considered the value of automatic music writing (using ‘Seeger melographs’) as an aid to the objective perception and understanding of unfamiliar music. His lifelong interest in American folk music has been continued in his children’s work; he recorded and, with his second wife, Ruth Crawford, transcribed and edited American folksongs, and with Ruth, and John and Alan Lomax he produced a major study of American folk music, Folk Song: USA (New York, 1947/R, 2/1975).

The freshness of Seeger’s thinking, his constant concern for the balance between society and the individual, and the extent and variety of his work have made an outstanding impact on both American and international attitudes to music and its place in society.