Charles seeger, the quintessential nineteenth-century New England gentleman, was born in Mexico City on December 14, 1886. He spent some of his formative years in Mexico, in the shadow of a blatantly imperialistic North America with decided ideas about Latin America and any other civilization that sought to challenge its supremacy. Mexico and the relationship between North and South America remained a critical factor throughout Seeger’s life, both culturally and intellectually. But this affinity was always carefully balanced by Anglo-Saxon traditions, for Seeger was a product of New England society, family structure, and values.

Boston, the home of many ancestors,...

Seeger spent the summer after graduation with his family in Mexico, then left for Europe in the autumn of 1908. Seeger was ready to be impressed by Europe, influenced by what he had read and heard. Shortly after reaching Europe he decided that Europeans knew how to live and that Americans did not, especially in cities.

As a composer, Seeger preferred French compositional styles and techniques, but since conducting was his immediate goal, and because Germany was a center for conducting activity, he chose to go there, specifically to the opera in Cologne. His first stop was Munich, a bohemian...

In october 1918, Charles and Constance sublet their house and departed for the East with their two young sons. They stayed at Seeger’s parents’ antebellum estate, “Fairlee,” in Patterson, New York, fifty miles north of the city. There they set about building a fourteen-foot automobile trailer—of Charlie’s own design—in which they planned to live on their return trip to California the following year.

Charles was physically and emotionally spent. His opposition to the war and his increasing concern about the plight of the workers had brought him into conflict with society in general. A more personal afflication was...

Seeger’s interests were shifting from writing and publishing his ideas on composition—many of which appear in the unpublished treatise sometimes called “Tradition and Experiment” — to teaching composition. One of his most brilliant students was Ruth Crawford, who in 1932 became Seeger’s second wife.¹

Ruth Porter Crawford, born on July 3, 1901, in East Liverpool, Ohio, was the daughter of Clara Alletta Graves, a teacher, and Clark Crawford, a Methodist minister. As a minister’s daughter, Ruth moved frequently with her family, living in Akron, St. Louis, Muncie and Bluffton, Indiana, and Jacksonville, Florida, where her father died when she was...

In november 1935, Charles Seeger’s career took a dramatic turn when he accepted an appointment in the newly created federal Resettlement Administration (RA). In the spring of that year, President Roosevelt had appointed Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economics professor, to head a federal program to combat rural poverty and especially to address the problems of displaced farmers. Seeger was recommended for a role in the RA by the painter Charles Pollock (Jackson Pollock’s brother), a student of Thomas Hart Benton, who recognized in Seeger a sympathy with the RA’s progressive ideas.

The New Deal had established myriad agencies to revitalize...

Seeger’s “Pan American” years were a period of great achievement and activity. Seeger deepened his involvement in music education—a lifelong concern—and in international organizations. Cultural relations linking Western Hemisphere nations increased after 1939, because communications between the United States and Europe were greatly reduced. Instead, there developed a lively exchange of students, professors, artists, composers, printed music, discs, and radio broadcasts among the twenty-one American republics.

To organize hemispheric communications more formally, in 1939 the U.S. State Department, through its Division of Cultural Relations, set up conferences on inter-American relations in four areas: philosophy and letters, education, fine...

Seeger’s departure from his position at the OAS in 1953, at the age of sixty-six, did not mean a withdrawal from active life. More than a quarter century of accomplishment lay ahead for this polymath; in his later years Seeger refined and produced some of his most seminal work. Concentrating his creative energies on ethnomusicology, in the last decades of his life Seeger revitalized his name and stature in the field of academic music, not only by work in this newer field but also in other areas of music scholarship and technology.

Washington and the nation had been living in...

Seeger’s career and life had many facets and touched many people. By the time he had reached eighty, he had attained a new respectability. Friends and family marked his reaching that milestone with a bouquet of greetings that served to mark his accomplishments to date. As Harold Spivacke wrote,

An enumeration of your accomplishments could never do justice to your real contribution to the musical life of our country. I could write “Happy birthday” to the inventor of the melograph and let it go at that. If I were more articulate I could precede that with pages of specifics, including...