Ruth Crawford (1901 - 1953) was one of the leading members of the American musical avant-garde (and probably its toughest and most original member after Charles Ives and before Harry Partch) until about the time she married composition teacher Charles Seeger in November 1931. Her masterpiece was the String Quartet of 1931, which had a strikingly novel Andante slow movement.

After her marriage to Seeger she moved with him in the direction of writing "proletarian music" and mainly worked in the realm of folk music research. Still, Crawford Seeger in 1938 turned back to the 1931 quartet and arranged its Andante for string orchestra.

What was especially new about that particular movement was her attempt to create a dissonant dynamic. In its texture, each of the four instruments occupies one voice in a chord. Each one has a different dynamic level, with the result that one note stands out. The the dynamics shift, so that another note stands out. From this cross-balancing of crescendos and decrescendos, as the chords themselves merge one into another, emerges a melody that is not played on any single instrument.

The purpose of writing the string orchestra version was to clarify this structure further. With a conductor taking overall charge of the interpretation and "hearing" the melody from his score, the notes do emerge more clearly. The musical mood is eerie and sad. In this version Crawford Seeger's highly original idea—perhaps the most daring and advanced for string orchestra by any composer of the time—works beautifully.

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