Music Monday: Seeger: Suite for Wind Quintet

Exceptionally gifted and hard working, Seeger spent the summer of 1929 at the MacDowell Colony, and, in 1930, became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to study in Paris and Berlin. (This, at a time when critics still wrote that she could write music “like a man”, a full 48 years before Aaron Copland would opine that “the female mind doesn't like to concern itself with abstract things, and that's what music is.”, despite having worked with numerous female composers, including Seeger herself.) It was in the brief window between 1930 and 1936 that she wrote most of her best known pieces, most notably the string quartet from 1931, which is one of the first pieces in the Western musical tradition to explore integral serialism (i.e. subjecting rhythm, timbre, loudness, and even formal structures to the same techniques that regular serialism applies to pitch).

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