One can imagine Charles Ives whole-heartedly approving of Ruth Crawford Seeger's Three Songs, written during and after her 1930 - 1931 trip to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. They go well with his famous outburst during a middle of a concert of music by his friend Carl Ruggles, where he stood up and berated some people who were noisily protesting the music: "Stand up and use your ears like a man and listen to this good, strong music!".

Crawford Seeger (she married folk song expert and teacher Charles Seeger in 1931) had become what she called a "warrior of the avant-garde," and she was among the most radical musical voices of the time. She had her own approach to the total chromatic scale, which included a non-Schoenbergian type of serialism. She also shared with Charles Ives a fascination with the transcendental and visionary streak in American literature: Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman; her close friend, the poet Carl Sandburg, was her own particular addition to that list.

The Three Songs are all to Sandburg texts. The opening song is "Rat Riddles," where piano and oboe skirl around each other, the rat sounding particularly restless and increasing in its motion. Crawford Seeger's darting, impetuous melodic line (the listener is never sure just when or in what direction the next note will go) is almost constant throughout the piece. It only ceases in the next to last verse, where the rat is setting forth its riddles to an observing human.

The second song, "Prayers of Steel," uses one of Schoenberg's muscular hymns to the broad-shouldered builders of the modern city. Percussion keeps up constant patterns of pounding, imitating the constant yet changing overlappings of rhythmic patterns emerging from a site using structural steel. The declamatory voice part moves at its own pace, and so, separately, do the harmonies. The music is tightly organized by serial patterns, perhaps a kind of portrayal of the constantly repeated shapes and angles that have to be used in such a construction project.

The third song, "In Tall Grass," is a strong picture of American prairie-land. It is a more gentle and visionary piece that makes its point without any "Western" quotations in the music.

These Three Songs are among the most impressive of all short American song cycles. They make a strong and accessible impression despite their avant-garde idiom.

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