The Rest Is Noise Series: Music for All: Music in FDR’s America. Alex Ross

revolutionary composer … beloved of all the masses of every country.” As chairman of the International Music Bureau of the Com-intern, Eisler visited America twice in 1935, lecturing in New York at the New School for Social Research and at Town Hall. The latter appearance shook up the local composers, Copland and Blitzstein included. Eisler informed them that modern composers had become nothing more than luxury tools of the capitalist system—“dealers in narcotics”—and that if they wished to break out of their prison they would have to fulfill a new social function. They were told to abandon purely instrumental music for more “useful” forms—workers’ songs, workers’ choruses, socially critical theater pieces. In another lecture Eisler stated bluntly that “the modern composer must change from a parasite into a fighter.”

      Charles Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford, two exemplary leftist composers, so feared the sin of formalism that they nearly barred themselves from composing altogether. Seeger, who came from old New Eng land stock, began as an Ivesian modernist, formulating a method of “dissonant counterpoint” that spread widely among the ultra-modern composers. His best disciple was Crawford, a young Chicago-based composer, who began studying with him in late 1929 and fell in love with him not long after. This earnest, self-deprecating woman went on to write some of the most fabulously byzantine music of her time. In String Quartet 1931, orderings of pitch, rhythm, durations, and dynamics anticipate avant-garde music of the post–World War II era; in Chant 3, a women’s chorus is divided into twelve parts, each assigned a separate chromatic note and shifting through a variety of polyrhythms. Even as she indulged in these experiments, Crawford gave strong narrative shape to her material. The slow movement of the Quartet unfurls as a continuous wave of sound, its complexities concealed behind a softly shimmering exterior.

      Ruth and Charles were married in 1932, and around the same time they fell under the influence of Communist ideology. Charles helped to found a new organization called the Composers’ Collective, wrote a column for the Daily Worker, and penned a song titled “Lenin! Who’s That Guy.” Most important, he undertook to collect American folk songs in league with the father-son team of John and Alan Lomax, who were in the process of recording traditional music in the South and West.

      Judith Tick’s biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger movingly records the stages by which this gifted composer gave up her urge to create. She worked for a while on a second quartet, which was to have blended modern techniques with folk sources in a “combination of simplicity and complexity,” but it never materialized. Her confidence sapped by her husband’s neolithic belief that “women can’t compose symphonies,” she devoted herself instead to meticulous folk-song transcriptions. Her work appeared in two Lomax anthologies, Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA, which became bibles of the postwar folk-song revival (one of whose leaders was her stepson Pete). Only after the war did she regain interest in composition, completing in 1952 a Suite for Wind Quintet. But cancer claimed her the following year. Thus ended the career of one of the few major women composers of the early twentieth century.

      Copland had been leaning leftward since his days playing piano at the Finnish Socialist Union. On European trips in 1927 and 1929 he encountered Mahagonny Songspiel and The Threepenny Opera, and fell to thinking about how a composer could combine social critique with mass appeal. Later, in 1930 and 1931, he attended the first meetings of Harold Clurman’s Group Theatre in New York, which included among its regular collaborators such theater notables as Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Elia Kazan. Copland, who had been Clurman’s roommate back in the Paris days, became a stalwart of the Group Theatre, finding space for meetings, identifying potential donors, and offering financial support from his own almost empty pockets.

      There was a Communist cell within the Group Theatre, but most members understood the project in largely aesthetic terms, as a corrective to the intellectual flight from society. Odets, who made his breakthrough with the pro-union play Waiting for Lefty in 1935, was obsessed with the figure of Beethoven, who represented for him not only the triumph of genius but also the tragedy of isolation. “[Beethoven] was the first great individualist in art,” Odets wrote. “Today we are locked in a death grip with our individualities and coming back to a social thing again. Call it Communism, call it Group Theatre, call it the life of farms, but artists are coming back to the truth of root things, fundamentals again.”