Composer Ruth Crawford (later Ruth Crawford Seeger) played percussion for a season in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, led by Eric de Lamarter. The experience gained through this association provided Crawford with the impetus to try her hand at orchestral scoring in Music for Small Orchestra, which is written for ten instruments: flute, clarinet, bassoon, four violins, two cellos, and piano. Completed in 1926, Music for Small Orchestra is cast in just two movements and takes about ten minutes to play. The first movement, marked "Slow, pensive," is a carefully constructed nocturne put together out of a limited range of materials. Crawford's music is built from related intervals and is not centered in a key; the resultant mood is a deft combination of dark textures contrasted with strokes of illumination. The circle of Chicago modernist artists that surrounded socialite Djane Lavoie Herz in the 1920s, which included Crawford, was preoccupied with the notion of the mystic power of repeated tones, and Crawford's use of this idea is heard to prominent effect in this movement.

In the second movement ("In roguish humor. Not fast"), Crawford constructs a scherzo mainly out of a single ostinato, giving the whole piece a mechanistic flavor. In her later work, Crawford would take more care to incorporate ostinati within the overall texture of a piece; some have had the impression that the second movement is a weak sister to the first. However, to ears more attuned to popular music than to free atonality, this piece bears a similarity to the approach of Raymond Scott in Powerhouse and to the ostinati used in industrial documentary music of the 1950s. So the movement has a certain charm, mostly in its archaic relation to music that didn't exist when Crawford composed it.

Crawford submitted the score of Music for Small Orchestra to a scholarship committee sponsored by the Institute of Musical Art, shortly to become the Julliard School, along with her Sonata for Violin and Piano. Crawford won the scholarship, but the work was never performed in her lifetime. Music for Small Orchestra was first performed at West Texas State University in 1969; the piece did not appear in print until 1993, edited by Judith Tick and Wayne Schneider.

Critic Alfred Frankenstein, a friend of Crawford's from the 1920s, remarked upon hearing Music for Small Orchestra for the first time in 1975 that this music was the result of Crawford's contact with the music of Charles Ives, made through composer Henry Cowell. While superficial similarities can be drawn between Ives' approach and Crawford's, Frankenstein's observation is in error; Crawford did not know of the music of Ives before 1929. Music for Small Orchestra actually reflects the influence of Herz, and is more directly related to the example of Scriabin and to the works of Crawford's colleague, composer Dane Rudyhar.

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