From 1935, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger concerned herself primarily with folk song collecting, developing new methods of primary music education, and raising her large family. The demands of these multi-level responsibilities took their toll on Crawford Seeger's inventiveness, and a mostly unbroken void creeps into her worklist from its peak in 1934 to a single, final concert work written nearly 20 years later.

In 1951, at the urging of her friend Esther Williamson Ballou, Crawford Seeger joined the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors. Shortly afterward, the NAACC announced a competition for a new chamber work. Crawford Seeger set aside a large number of assignments in order to allow herself six weeks to produce a new work by the deadline. The result was the Suite for Wind Quintet, which won the competition. "I believe I'm going to work again—more" Crawford Seeger wrote to friends Carl and Charlotte Ruggles. "If I live to be 99 as my grandfather did, I will have 48 more years."

The Suite for Wind Quintet is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon, and is cast in three short movements totaling about ten minutes. This suite is lively, buoyant, conversational music with plenty of busy, yet idiomatic, writing for the winds. The work starts off in Crawford Seeger's familiar, ostinato-based mode and winds up in a playful, very loose application of twelve-tone techniques. It ends quite abruptly, as if a pleasant conversation with an interesting person were terminated suddenly.

The Suite for Wind Quintet sounds throughout like a fine singer who is regaining her voice after a long period of disuse, not the valedictory statement of one who is to sing no more. However, the latter was the case with Ruth Crawford Seeger; diagnosed with cancer in 1953, she died within the year.

© All Music Guide