Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) was described by fellow composer Henry Cowell as having broken the stereotype of a "woman composer," which was presumably one who wrote lightweight, conservative, sentimental music. This work is typical of Crawford's music in being nothing like that.

Crawford (who married folk song expert and teacher Charles Seeger in 1931) had been studying and working in Chicago before she wrote this music. She was determined to create music in a new dissonant style, but with little reference to the twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg. In addition, she was drawn to visionary or transcendental ideas and attempted to express these in her music. In 1930, Crawford won a Guggenheim Grant to travel and study in Europe. She wrote this composition in Berlin. She was interested in the Indian religious text, the Bhagavad Gita. When she could find no English translation, she made up her own imaginary language to create the impression of a mystical Asian text. The sound she was aiming for, and achieved brilliantly, is not the recreation of any sort of music she heard first-hand, but the attainment of a description she read about certain music possessing a "complex dissonant veil of sound." Harmonic motion in these three Chants tends to be slow. The harmonies themselves are densely packed into the range of women's voices, and sometimes involve all 12 tones of the chromatic scale sounding at once. The individual vocal lines in the piece are both polyphonic and heterophonic. This suggests nuns chanting freely rather than in chorus. The idea of heterophony was very important to Charles Seeger and was a part of the lessons in dissonant counterpoint he had already given her before she went on her European trip. The mood of the three chants is highly mysterious, striking a strangely serene and solemn mood, although with the threatening aspects of mysteries of any sort. The final chant features a soaring line for a solo soprano drawn from the chorus, and ends in a hushed statement of a chord of all notes. The second and most serene of the three chants was the only part recorded in the composer's lifetime; the first recording of the first and third chants and of the Three Chants as a whole did not occur until 1996.

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